10 Questions for Meghana Mysore
“At my apartment complex’s scarf sale, I tried to give away my last boyfriend. But E was such a beautiful and soft red scarf. He smelled like pumpkin spice. A pumpkin spice–smelling scarf is too unique to give away. I didn’t want some other person enjoying the spices of my labor. So I wrapped him around my shoulders and left.”
—from Meghana Mysore’s “Hoarder,” Volume 66, Issue 1 (Spring 2025)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I remember one of the first stories I wrote in fifth grade, when I realized there was this other way, through language on the page, that I could communicate the feelings within me. The story was about a chair that is sentient and feels the weight of others’ bodies on it. I gave voice to the chair, giving her a backstory, a family, and a deep desire for connection with her fellow tables and chairs. I remember feeling happy after I wrote it, like I had made contact with the world outside of me in some way—that I had made something that someone else (really just my teacher, but still) could hold.
What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
So many! I am influenced by writers of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction and genres in between, and find that when I’m writing fiction, I want to read more poetry or hybrid work to get a feel for a different kind of language, and to let someone else’s language influence my prose. For instance, I really love reading Anne Carson for her strange and unpredictable imagery. In another vein, I love reading short stories and novels that center themes of family, culture, women’s interior lives, inheritance, mental health, intimacy, and time—a lot of things, I know. Some fiction writers whose work inspires me deeply are Yiyun Li, Susan Choi, Caryl Phillips, Akhil Sharma, Ted Chiang, Dantiel Moniz, K-Ming Chang, ZZ Packer, Lydia Davis, Chekhov, Kafka, Baldwin, Yoko Ogawa, Laura van den Berg, and there are far too many others to name. I try to read widely across time and styles, because I never quite know where I’ll find inspiration.
What other professions have you worked in?
I wanted to be a journalist for a while in college, and I have worked at a global affairs journalism nonprofit. Additionally, I’ve worked at an adult community center, as an academic tutor, as an ESL tutor, as a shelver of books in the library stacks, at a creative writing programming nonprofit, as a fact checker, as an editorial assistant, as a cat sitter (and that made me sick when I realized I’m allergic to cats), as a dream interpreter (unofficially, for family and friends), and some other things I’m probably forgetting.
What did you want to be when you were young?
I wanted to be a hairdresser. I was so enchanted by the sounds I heard while getting my hair cut—I imagined myself cutting hair and chewing gum simultaneously. I loved the idea of styling someone’s hair and hearing their stories.
What inspired you to write this piece?
The last couple years of my life have involved a lot of moving around—going to get my MFA, visiting and teaching at different places, going back and forth between the East Coast and Oregon, where I grew up, and calling my grandparents in India. I’ve collected so many different experiences and relationships, and struggled with letting go, and with figuring out what I can hold onto from each experience. I’m also a deeply feeling person—I feel sadness and joy and every emotion quite powerfully, and there’s a way that the depth of these emotions gives me access to language and to story, but also makes life a little more difficult on a daily basis. I wanted to speak to other people who might be neurodivergent or wading through really big feelings, and perhaps make them feel less alone.
Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your writing?
Growing up, my sister and I played something we termed “The Pretend Game,” where we would pretend we were Bollywood actresses that we watched on TV, and we would dance around in our backyard. There was a really big pine tree in the backyard, and we’d dance around it, pretending that the tree hollow was a trash can in a chic apartment we lived in together, and that the pine tree’s needles were bars of kulfi (ice cream). I sometimes return to this memory because it’s so filled with color, and with imagination. The Pretend Game was one of the first places I felt the power of imagination, accompanied by the bond of sisterhood.
Is there any specific music that aids you through the writing or editing process?
I like to listen to instrumental music while writing, and often this includes songs from movies I really love, like the soundtrack of Minari and An Elephant Sitting Still. Sometimes I make a playlist thinking about a specific character and who they are, and doing this moves me more deeply into their state of mind. Much like the way I like to read across a variety of genres of styles, I also try to listen to a lot of different kinds of music, so I can access many different feelings, and so on some days, not while writing, but just while living, which I think is also a part of writing, I’ll listen to The Velvet Underground and Solange and Miley Cyrus and Lucy Dacus and Angel Olsen and Blood Orange and Anoushka Shankar and Fleetwood Mac and Rihanna and Dua Lipa all in the span of a half hour.
Do you have any rituals or traditions that you do in order to write?
I always want to stay engaged with the people around me, and I think it’s hard to write when you’re distant from what is alive in the world. By that I mean that it’s important for me to spend time with my friends, to call my family, to take walks and notice the sounds of the birds or the movement of the leaves on the trees, to feel my friends’ suffering and their joy, or feel it as closely as I can, to know the ways that I’m not just an individual operating in the world, but that I’m part of a community, that I’m part of something like Mary Oliver’s “family of things.”
Who typically gets the first read of your work?
I have a literary agent and she is a great reader of my work, and I also have a few friends from college and my MFA program who are wonderful readers of my work and just beautiful, perceptive and intelligent readers and people in general. Most of the time, though, I hold onto my work for a little while, sharing it just with myself, and, maybe, with all the past versions of me.
If you could work in another art form what would it be?
I’m so moved by music, and I’ve been around talented musicians and I’m always kind of jealous. I feel like something about music is just very primal, and it transcends written or spoken language. Music can cut across divisions and all the ways that we’re separate and move an entire room of people. So, I’d love to make music of some kind, to get to speak with people in this other way.
MEGHANA MYSORE, from Portland, Oregon, is an Indian American writer. A 2022–2023 Steinbeck Fellow, her poems, stories, and essays have appeared in The Yale Review, Boston Review, Apogee, Michigan Quarterly Review, Roxane Gay’s The Audacity, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s The Margins, and more. Selected for the 2024 Wigleaf Top 50 Very Short Fictions, her writing has also been recognized by Tin House, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Black Lawrence Press, The de Groot Foundation, and more. She is working on a novel and short story collection exploring grief, loss, longing, South Asian womanhood, and transformations.
