We were lucky to catch up with Eshani Surya recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Eshani, thanks for joining us today. If you could go back in time do you wish you had started your creative career sooner or later?

Though I started writing in elementary school, I’ve always considered the start of my career to be in my early twenties. Around this time, I moved from New York City to Tucson to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing. When I arrived on campus, I was sure that the culmination of my studies would be a draft of a book I’d been thinking about for a few months. But when I shared this with a professor of mine over lunch, she put down her knife carefully and I looked at me with a wry smile. When I asked her what she was thinking, she told me not to plan things out so carefully. The best art, she said, comes out of you in ways you’d never expect. I shrugged and didn’t take her too seriously.

Over the next three years I wrote a variety of projects. None of them was the novel I wanted to write, and somehow, I finished up graduate school without any novel at all. I wasn’t even sure I could write a novel.

Then, right after graduation, I was hospitalized for a week, boyfriend of one year by my side. My chronic illness had flared, but my new symptoms weren’t what I was used to. My white blood cell count was decimated. I was anemic, and needed blood transfusions. All my hair fell out, devastating me. In the end, they discovered that I didn’t have genes to process a drug I’d been given; this led to my body’s toxic response.

That experience changed my life. Though I’d been sick before, I’d never been this sick. I’d never been sick with a romantic partner by my side. I’d never had my illness so visible to everyone else. I stared at myself in the mirror, wondering about my own beauty, about if people loved me, about how to integrate this trauma into my understanding of my self. Over time, as I processed this experience, I found that my first novel had to be about these questions that I’d grown so obsessed with. Though I’d written about illness before, in that moment, I found that a real creative need opened up inside me—like the complications of my very being needed a place to go, to be seen, to be heard, and the only place it could tolerate was the pages of my debut novel. My professor had been right all those years ago. The work came out of me, and at exactly the time it needed to.

Eshani, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

As a writer, I interrogate how to share love while experiencing the complications, trauma, and radical self-acceptance of marginalization, especially in terms of disability and race. As a chronically ill Indian-American artist navigating both individual and communal relationships, this question has haunted me for much of my life and so I use my work to explore it. While I’ve published numerous short stories and essays on this topic, I am most excited for readers to experience my forthcoming novel, Ravishing (Roxane Gay Books/Grove Atlantic). The book tells the story of a brother and sister who become obsessed with an insidious beauty tech company whose product can give them new, perfect faces. The problem is, the product also makes some people very sick as they develop a life-long chronic illness.

I’m often asked why I write about such topics. Reflecting on this, my obsession with writing about love intersecting with marginalization began when I was in my early twenties. Though I was a reader and writer since the start—I was writing poems by the age of three or so with my mother—I came to the heart of my work in college, after I was first diagnosed with ulcerative colitis. At this time, I began writing exclusively about being sick. Though some of my peers were disgusted by my descriptions of illness, I persevered because writing about these topics felt important if I was going to put my truth on the page. Once I did this, I found the process empowering, and it led me to write more about my other identities too. The more I wrote, the more I discovered that inside these stories and essays I was most interested in trying to understand how we build connection with others and ourselves. Truthfully, to me, loving in all ways is both deeply enriching and deeply difficult when we are also contending with great pain, isolation, and doubt. Recognizing and exploring this duality allows us to take on the full weight of love in a way that many of us never do.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

I’ve never needed to turn away from the truth. Sometimes that truth is dark, insidious, and hurts. Sometimes that truth is wonder. But no matter what moment I’ve living in or alongside, I’d like to experience it fully.

Each time I witness things wholly—respecting all their complications, honoring the unexpected—I feel myself open up wider and wider. These wide spaces are where my writing comes from, and they contain not just me, but all the people I’ve known, all the stories I’ve heard and seen, all the communal imagination we share. Because of this I have an immense connection to the universe at large.

Most of us are seeking some kind of purpose. For me, this purpose has to do with my capacity to become interconnected with the world. As an artist, I am grateful to have so much unflinching access to the world as it is and as it could be. In turn, I write stories, both to show others what I see and to shape the world through our collective greater understanding.

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

I don’t really believe that anyone out there is a non-creative. Most people use some aspects of creativity in their lives. Think of the parents who come up with age-appropriate ways to explain complicated subjects to their children. Think about scientists who design experiments. Think about office managers who change systems and make things easier for everyone else. Think about people who doodle on the edge of a notebook page, or those who tell their friends wild and only partially honest stories, or those who sing in the shower.

Perhaps that’s what I’d like people to know. You are a creative, even if you refuse to believe it.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.eshani-surya.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/__eshani/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/__eshani
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@eshanisurya

Image Credits
For photo of me on stage: Zach Nemec