Sindya Bhanoo remembers her family getting the Moscow-Pullman Daily News and Spokane’s Spokesman Review at their Pullman home when she was young, but a career in writing didn’t occur to her then.
“I never put together that there was a real person going out and interviewing people and writing these stories,” Bhanoo said. “It didn’t even present itself as a possibility.”
It wasn’t until she was in college that she realized she wanted to write. Now, the career journalist and O. Henry Prize winner’s debut fiction book is earning praise for its moving depictions of the lives of immigrants and their families.
“Seeking Fortune Elsewhere” (hardcover, $26), published earlier this month by New York-based Catapult and available at Bookpeople in Moscow and And Books Too in Clarkston, comprises eight individual stories, each of which can stand alone but that complement one another as a complete work of fiction.
Two of the stories, “Buddymoon” and “A Life in America,” are set in Pullman, where Bhanoo lived from fifth grade to her sophomore year of high school while her father was a business professor at the University of Idaho.
“I hope that the stories I write about the Palouse kind of celebrate the richness of the area,” she said, remembering it as beautiful and also culturally diverse, because of the UI and Washington State University. “The Indian community there is small, but also very active. It’s a very warm community that I grew up in. We had friends from all over the world in this tiny little town.”
Bhanoo hasn’t been back to Pullman since 2015, “but the memories from my childhood are very vivid.”
She said she hopes her writing can help make this part of the country more known.
“It’s visually such a stunning place, with the hills,” she said. “It’s kind of jaw-dropping, and people don't know about it.”
Place plays a significant role in Bhanoo’s stories, as characters grapple with the distances separating them and the differences between their communities, from India to the U.S. and rural towns versus big cities.
“My family in India also lived in small towns,” she said. “It’s a way of life that I’m very tuned into.”
Her connection to her extended family’s life in India helped plant the seed for her writing.
“That sort of love for storytelling goes way back,” she said.
Visiting family in India when she was young, in the ’80s and ’90s when India “was a really different place and very different” from her home in the U.S., provided the foundation for her later writing.
“I think my interest in being a storyteller comes from that — bringing one person's story to another person,” she said.
Bhanoo, who now resides in Austin, Texas, has a graduate degree in journalism from Berkeley, and much of her career has been spent as a reporter, including for the New York Times and Washington Post.
She has covered technology, health, science, the environment and, most recently, education, when the pandemic pulled her back into reporting, and she spent the last year writing about issues facing public schoolchildren in Texas.
“The act of writing fiction is not so different from reporting,” she said. “I think I’m using the same process of going into the imagined world and watching people and observing them and … eventually asking them questions.”
“Interviewing” her fictional characters as she writes yields truths that make her stories real for the reader.
“We can get into the heads of other people and experience life as they do,” she said. “That process is incredibly time-consuming and involves going back into that imagined world — sometimes over years.
“I think we never really know what another person is experiencing, what their life is actually like, what they’re thinking or why they may be doing certain things the way they are. It’s just impossible to know. But I think through fiction we can get close to that.”
She said she “had some seeds for the stories in the book,” and when her daughter, now 10, was born, Bhanoo realized if she didn’t write these stories down “it would be like they never existed.”
“That idea of writing something down so it’s on the record comes from journalism,” she said. “So it can be there in 50 years or 100 years — or more. I had that in mind, and that became very clear for me when she was born.”
A critical step toward making that move into fiction became a reality came when Bhanoo was accepted into the Master of Fine Arts program at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin, where she subsequently has taught since her graduation in 2019.
The three-year program allowed her to focus on developing the stories that became “Seeking Fortune Elsewhere.”
She described her path toward becoming a published author as a traditional one.
“I have an agent who pitched to editors,” she said. “The book was rejected 17 times before there were editors who bid on it.”
Her advice to aspiring writers is informed by that experience, namely to keep working on their art and not get discouraged.
“It’s an incredibly tough market,” she said. “You have to stick with it.”
She also shared thoughts about the writing process, including being cautious about sharing early drafts.
“I think you can show it too early to someone,” she said. “(There’s) a danger they may steer you in the direction they are interested, and not the direction you are. I think fiction is only successful if we are following our instincts.”
Stone (she/her) can be reached at mstone@inland360.com.
