It’s not easy to get into a different headspace for fiction, novelist Shanthi Sekaran acknowledges: “You have to descend in a way to a certain place. And if you’re getting pulled out of that by your kids yelling in the hallway or whatever, then it’s hard to progress.” Sekaran goes through times when she transcribes poetry or plays the ukulele before writing. “Singing and playing, they lift my spirits always.… It’s like a separation from the rest of my life to just play a song.”
This article appears in Issue 25 of Alta Journal.
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Her husband, who had collected salvaged wood for years, began building her office in their Berkeley garden in 2020 because she had a new job writing for the television series New Amsterdam, work that continued for three seasons. During the pandemic, the medical drama required her to be on Zoom for six hours a day while the couple’s children were home. The two hired woodworkers to finish the garden office last year as Sekaran completed her fourth book, the middle-grade novel Boomi’s Boombox, about a girl who time-travels to 1986 and finds her dad in England.
In the office is a poster for the novel, which Sekaran made to explain to young readers some modes of 1980s fashion as well as the virulent racism that South Asians experienced in Britain during what she called that era’s “confluence of labor movements, unemployment, and a recent influx of immigration from South Asia.” She explained that the atmosphere was also created when the anti-immigrant group National Front gained traction.
Now at work on a new novel, Sekaran writes in the office if it’s warm enough, but she also writes in various locations in the house with a cat named Frog—after the children’s book series Frog and Toad—on her lap. While in her social life she’s more of a watcher and listener, writing a book requires a different mindset. She explains, “When you write a book, you have to be the storyteller. You have to be the center of your own little universe.… You also have to be brave. And mean and cruel sometimes and truthful.”•
Anita Felicelli is Alta Journal ’s books editor and the author of How We Know Our Time Travelers, Chimerica, and Love Songs for a Lost Continent.
