Hi Senaa, thanks so much for taking the time to chat with Well Read Women, and congratulations on the publication of your short story collection, The Age of Calamities. What is your creative process when it comes to writing? Do you follow any writing rules or rituals?
Thank you so much for having me! I always make lots of notes before starting a short story, because it helps me find the contours of the world and the peculiarities of the characters. Otherwise I’m in an empty room, staring at nothing.
I love reading poetry before I start writing for the day. It limbers up my brain and makes me pay attention to the musicality of sentences. For these stories especially, I thought a lot about the language of each story and how it informed the tone. I find that a story’s voice opens the door into its worldview.
The Age of Calamities is a genre-defying, mind-bending collection of absurdist, funny, and speculative short stories. What first sparked the idea for this book?
The initial spark was the idea of taking historical figures out of their well-known environments and putting them into unusual situations. But I was also interested in the larger-than-life quality of many historical figures. I wanted to play on the idea of what they represented in the cultural consciousness, if that makes sense, amplifying or undermining these well-known traits.
I’ve always been drawn to formalist constraints: stories told in second person, in list form, as an audio transcript, etc. And when I started thinking about this collection, I realised I could use those types of constraints to ask how stories and histories were told, who was doing the telling, and what pieces were omitted.
The different stories take readers on a wild, fun journey, and each individual tale feels unique. Did any of the stories start out as something longer, or were they always meant to be short stories?
Every story in the collection began life as a short story, but each one started out in a much more compact shape. They grew and shrank throughout the revision process. At one point, “Inside the House of the Historian” was almost a quarter of a novel. I’d grow enamoured with certain details, then realise they were unbalancing the story. In “The Wolves,” an entire storyline with the narrator’s father was removed.
I had to hold each piece up to the light, ask myself what it was doing, and how it was contributing to the story’s function and structure. I had to prune away lots of boring bits, too!
The cast of the stories features famous, iconic historical figures. Can you tell us a little bit about the research you did for the collection?
It varied for each story. Often I’d do lots and lots of research, only to use a teaspoonful of it on the page. I read extensively about Genghis Khan’s life in preparation for “The Wolves,” as well as the Mongols’ military campaigns in Asia and Europe. But the book I drew on most was a slim 10th century text about the history of Bukhara.
For “The Napoleons Are Multiplying,” I found James Woodforde’s “Diary of a Country Parson” to be invaluable. I read about Julius Caesar’s life, but what I referenced most was the Shakespeare text, knowing I was playing on an idea of Julius Caesar.
Sometimes the research wasn’t intentional. A couple years before I started “Our Lady of Resplendent Misfortune,” I read about the rise of the eugenics in the early twentieth century in Siddartha Mukherjee’s “The Gene: An Intimate History,” and those details found their way into the story.
Is there a particular historical figure or period that you’ve always had a keen interest in?
I think of myself as a dilettante of history. I love to dabble and I enjoy nothing more than a deep rabbit-hole to fall down. As a child, I was captivated by the unsolved mysteries of the past, like Amelia Earhart’s disappearance. I was briefly interested in the space race and the Brontë family, and I’ve periodically explored the history of the Mughals.
One of the joys of this collection was sinking deeper into various points of history, even if most of those details didn’t make it to the page.
If you could choose one of the historical figures in the collection to have a coffee with, who would it be and why?
I’m very conscious that the characters in the story aren’t genuine reproductions of their historical counterparts, but more generalised representations. That said, Nellie Bly was so inquisitive about the world around her, and her experiences as a journalist were so singular, I’d be delighted to have coffee with her real-life or heavily fictionalised self.
Are there any moments, specific stories, or themes you hope readers enjoy unpacking together after reading the collection?
When I started writing this collection, I was thinking about survival, of the existential dread of enduring difficult times, of the banality of survival and the small joys within it, of how people make meaning and assert control over a larger narrative when they are just one of its tiny moving pieces. And I was interested in how stories are told, who is telling them and why, and how that relates to history. I hope some of these things are worth exploring for readers, too.
At Well Read Women, we’d love to know if there are any female writers who have inspired or influenced you both as a reader and writer?
For this collection in particular, I returned frequently to the short stories of Angela Carter, Sofia Samatar, and Kelly Link. I love reading writers who are doing strange and confounding things, like Olga Ravn in The Employees or Emil Ferris in the graphic novel My Favourite Thing is Monsters Vol. 1, or Helen Oyeyemi in What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, or Mariana Enriquez in almost anything.
If you had to recommend one book everyone should read at least once in their lifetime, what would it be and why?
You know, I love trying to connect a reader with a book I think they’ll love, but I also deeply believe there isn’t one single book for everyone. That’s one of the peculiar, magical things about reading. There’s probably a perfect book for everyone and that book is inevitably going to seem unremarkable to someone else. But I do think every avid reader should try out a book of poetry, just once in their lives, to see what they think.
Lastly, where can readers find you on social media?
Unfortunately, I’m not on social media! I do have a website (senaa-ahmad.com) and a newsletter which is mostly updates with a few book recommendations thrown in.