Experimental Writing: Jaspreet Singh in Conversation

Jaspreet Singh grew up in India and Kashmir and moved to Montreal in 1990. He received his PhD in Chemical Engineering from McGill University and worked as research scientist and teacher before moving to writing full time. He has published fiction in Walrus, The Fiddlehead, Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope, and several anthologies of new writing. Seventeen Tomatoes: Tales from Kashmir, his first collection of short fiction, won the 2004 Quebec McAuslan First Book Award. The Montreal Gazette called Singh's debut a haunting fairy tale while the Calgary Herald reported that Seventeen Tomatoes captures the two sides of Kashmir brilliantly. The Globe and Mail, Canada's national newspaper, noted that Singh's stories were steeped in mournful affection for war-scarred land and its peoples. Singh recently finished writing Speak, Oppenheimer, play for Montreal's Infinite Theatre, which imagines conversations between three nuclear physicists and raises questions of nuclear proliferation and apocalypse in post 9/11 world. His new novel is titled Chef: The Book of Early Sorrows. At the time of this interview he was finishing his term as the 2006-2007 Markin-Flanagan Canadian Writer-in-Residence at the University of Calgary. He invited ARIEL into his home in Calgary's Kensington neighbourhood on May 28, 2007. We were wondering if you could speak bit about what brought you to write Seventeen Tomatoes, collection of creative fiction, after completing your doctoral work in chemical engineering. Even before I became an engineer I wanted to become writer. You see the book simply imposed itself on me. It became absolutely necessary to write it down. In Montreal I used to think lot about Kashmir: why this most beautiful part of the world was slipping into more and more violence? What was the gravitational field like at the border? There were million men posted at the India-Pakistan border in battle-ready positions, and there was fear of nuclear annihilation, and I thought there were stories that had to be told. Bertolt Brecht once asked himself: will poems be composed, will stories get written during the dark times? Of course, he answered, there will be poetry and there will be stories, but these fictions will be about the dark times. We would like to talk about your own professional trajectory from chemical engineer--a profession imbued with fact which uses language of fixed or concrete equations leaving less room for what we have come to call subjectivity--to writer--a profession that always operates within series of fluid, mutable and subjective systems of reading, writing, and analysis. Is writing your rebellion against science? Or, conversely, is writing kind of science for you? Well, to me, writing is great laboratory. One has access to unconstrained budget! I would like to differ with your characterization of science. The process of doing science doesn't eliminate subjectivity. In fact, when one is doing work in the sciences, just like in the arts, the creative processes are more or less similar. Of course one reports scientific results differently, in rigorous mathematical language. But ... it can be very nourishing for me to read scientific text when I'm working on story. It can actually stimulate me in the same way that when I used to work as scientist I would read fiction or poetry, or I would watch films which were very stimulating. I'm actually interested in what connects these disciplines. I'm not saying that they are identical--they are different--but I believe that one can certainly nourish the other. The question, in retrospect, was directed more at the material one deals with in each discipline. The tools of each profession. If you are using chemical compound that you know is comprised of certain amount of substance X and certain amount of substance Y, you know what result you will get when you add it to substance Z. In writing, the currency of certain word or language in general seems less predictable. …

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