Featured Poet: DILRUBA AHMED

BIO:
Dilruba Ahmed’s poems have appeared in, or are forthcoming from, Blackbird, Born Magazine, Catamaran: South Asian American Writing, Crab Orchard Review, The Cream City Review, Drunken Boat, and New Orleans Review. Her work received first place for The Florida Review’s 2006 Editors’ Award. She holds B.Phil and M.A.T. degrees from the University of Pittsburgh and is currently enrolled in Warren Wilson College's M.F.A. program.



Q1: Name one collection of poetry that you wish you had written.

I just finished reading Rooms Are Never Finished by Agha Shahid Ali, an intense and beautiful collection of poems. Here are a few lines from one of my favorite poems, “By the Waters of the Sind”: “Sharpened against/ rocks, the stream, rapid-cutting the night,/ find its steel a little stained/ with the beginning light,// and the moon must rise now from behind// that one pine-topped mountain to find/ us without you.” For me, Ali’s book has been particularly instructive as a model for weaving personal events with public and historical events.

Q: Describe the place/physical location
where you write most regularly .

A: My husband and I found the desk at a garage sale shortly after finishing college and moving to the San Francisco Bay Area. The former owner sold us the first pieces of furniture that would furnish our new, empty apartment: two large leather chairs, a green folding card table, and a slim dark brown desk—all for $20!

While the other purchases have disappeared from our current home, the desk remains. It’s mainly a temporary storage space for materials related to my current projects: stacks of poetry books, books on the craft of writing and, of course, piles of paper. I love the desk itself but usually I take over the dining table for writing purposes. From the dining room, I face a view of the brightly lit living room and trees framed by windows. I spread my writing materials across the table surface into a river of books, papers, pens, highlighters, and notepads. I’m a big fan of sticky notes, so narrow strips of yellow or blue paper poke out from all of these materials.

I shelve books on craft behind me, and collections of poetry to my left. Poetry collections are the only books I alphabetize. Typically the wall to my left bears a few sticky notes with favorite lines of poetry or quotes on writing. Currently, I’ve posted a fortune from a fortune cookie declaring, You are a lover of words, someday you should write a book.

For years, I only wrote first drafts in spiral notebooks with pens. Periodically, I would review my scribblings, sometimes attempting to index them with more sticky notes—this time bearing enigmatic titles such as “dwelling-helped-harmed” or “serious children.” Eventually some of this raw material would appear in later, typed drafts. I now type many of my first drafts directly into my laptop.


Q3: What South Asian themes are you interested in exploring in your work?

I’m often obsessed with themes of cultural hybridity and forging new cultural identities. When I first began writing in earnest in college, the few South Asian titles on bookshelves at that time tended to focus on false dichotomies: West versus East, freedom versus limitation, good versus bad. So my early writing efforts attempted to respond to and defy such overly-simplified categories. Thankfully, times have changed! Now dozens of South Asian and South Asian American writers have brought new voices and more complex representations of cultural experiences into literary conversations.