Volunteer Maya Somogyi talks with the fall issue #228 contributor about their short story, “Crisis of Faith.”
MS: Your story’s speaker’s “crisis of faith” converges with many pivotal moments of change in her life: becoming a religious minority in Dubai, leaving her hometown, going through puberty, and struggling to find a community. I’m really interested in how the speaker’s coming-of-age informs her internal struggle with Hinduism and vice versa. How do the themes of immigration and growing up affect the speaker’s struggle with religion?
SS:
First of all, thank you for these thoughtful questions! The “faith” here is not just religious faith but also faith in your way of being in the world, the position you occupy, figuring out how and where you fit in. In this case, many aspects of the narrator are in crisis; moving away from her birth city, almost-invisibilizing of her religious faith, and of course, going through adolescence and every challenge that comes with bodily changes.
For context, any Indian, or South Asian, in the United Arab Emirates was an expat (at least until 2021 when the rules changed). My story then is not about immigration, but about being an expat who is coming of age in a liminal space like Dubai. All my characters—the protagonist, Hamza, Fati, Pri—exist in their expat-outsider status while also traversing teenage life, negotiating their physical and metaphorical exiles. Adding other struggles to that mix, such as having undiagnosed ADHD as an invisible disability, makes the protagonist feel even more alienated. This is why the protagonist seeks community, even an imagined one, where she can get it.
Read the rest of Sanchari Sur's interview and a story excerpt.
Craig Francis Power,
Far Horizons Award for Poetry winner
Far Horizons Award for Poetry judge Patrick Grace talks with the 2024 winner about his poem, “Walking My Three-Year-Old to Nanny's Place, Easter Sunday 2017.”
PG: Form and content weave together effortlessly in the poem, a symbiosis of parent and child in tune with the semi-rhyming couplets that propel the poem forward. Can you talk about your process for writing this poem? How often do structures of metre and rhyme fit into your work?
CFP:
The poem came about indeed through walking with my daughter along a river trail in St. John’s—I should say here, for my mom’s sake, that I do not think she lives in a “dump” but only that I needed a rhyme for “up”—and sprung from my mishearing or misinterpreting something Audrey was saying. A rather common occurrence when she was a toddler, but it continues with some frequency, even today.
I do a great deal of my writing while walking—it’s all right there in my head. And though I think a poem can be whatever it needs to be, I’m drawn to structure—if only to hear it break.
Read the rest of Craig Francis Power's interview and his winning poem.
Past poetry contributor Cassandra Myers talks with the