Talking with Jaideep at Pebble In The Still Waters



I'm so honored to be able to visit the great blog Pebble In The Still Waters today.  I talk with Jaideep about a lot of things ~ I'm so thankful to him for how he works tirelessly on behalf of books. Check it out. 

Here's an excerpt:

Why is it bad luck to be born a girl on a ranch?

Western culture is a very male culture. A lot of women I know, myself included, saw that phenomenon growing up and the only way they could see to have self-worth is to be a man, hence the title of the collection. A lot of women in the West wear men’s clothing and drink beer and hunt and watch football and generally be as masculine as they can be. They shun everything feminine, and they have no women friends—heaven forbid. They think of themselves as this third thing, this third gender. Not a woman definitely, and they can’t be men, so they think of themselves as genderless almost. It’s very destructive to the psyche.

Your stories can be pretty dark. Why don’t you write stories with happy endings?

My mom asks me that all the time, as do a couple of my sisters. I fear I was born with a broken funny bone. I find things funny, but they’re usually English geek kinds-of-things—Monty Python, Terry Pratchett. The things that most people find funny, I usually find incredibly sad or incredibly angry. One of the reasons why, I think, is because the basis of a lot of humor is stereotyping, reducing someone to one dimension, and my goal in writing is to find the complexity of life, to express lived reality.

Thank you so much, Jaideep!!