Soon after I wrote this entry about a link to a website that was all about India, I received an email from a lovely woman named Nina McConigley, a writer and Wyoming native who has been working as an intern at Tara Publishing in Chennai, India for almost a year now.  India has been on my travel radar for quite some time now, and our email conversations caused me to seriously consider a spur of the moment detour from London to Chennai next week (by the time this entry is posted, I will actually be in the middle of my London trip.)  I decided to come back down to earth and wait until I can plan a more detailed (and longer) trip, but in the meantime I am savoring every delicious tidbit Nina has been willing to share with me about her travels, her writing, Tara Publishing, and life in India.

Her interview was a bit more relaxed and done over many days and emails, as I found myself asking her a slew of questions right off the bat, not even really considering them part of any official "interview".  Before I knew it, I realized I had my interview!

Here is how things got started, in this excerpt from Nina's first email to me:
My name is Nina, and I work at Tara Publishing in Chennai, India . We are a small independent publishing house in India -- we focus on children's books, visual arts titles, and have a small fiction/non-fiction list, and many of our books are handmade.

I grew up in Wyoming -- but my mother is Indian, my father Irish. I completed my MFA in Creative Writing two years ago, and am finishing my own book about East Indians in Wyoming. I have always wanted to live in India. I only came to India twice before moving here. Growing up, my Indian grandparents had died and most of my mom's immediate family is now in the states. So, we went to Ireland instead.  When I finished my MFA, I moved home to Wyoming to work on my book. I thought that just picking up and moving to India was a little nuts but then I saw one of Tara's books, I wrote them...and the rest is history. I am an intern here, and my internship will be over in April. I'll come back to Wyoming then.
 
Being here in India for the past year has been one of the most wonderful and hard experiences of my life.  It has changed my writing and my book, it has changed the way I look at the world. It has changed the way I see life and death. It's really changed, well, everything. I am a little scared to go back to Wyoming -- where everything is so orderly, and everyone is just in their houses. I say this with such a torn heart, as I love being in Wyoming in ways I can't express -- the mountains, they sky...but it is sometimes so hard to be the only brown face in a crowd. Living here has been the first time I have not been in the minority in my life -- and yet, I am actually very far removed from people as I am essentially American. The streets are so alive here. Every weekend, I take a bus to visit my family and I pass by all sorts of funny sights.  I am humbled every day.
 

What is the weather like this time of year in Chennai?
South India is almost always hot. I was just in Delhi for a week and it was freezing in comparison. Most days are in the 80's and 90's -- and we are now moving into summer, which means many days around 100. Coming from Wyoming, it was very strange for me to experience such warm humid weather all year round. But it was the monsoons that really threw me off. I had never seen that kind of rain. I live with two other North Americans -- and our house flooded three times. By the second time, all we could do was laugh (and move furniture). You can't just tell the rain to stop. But there were moments standing in water in my bedroom that I thought, "What am I doing here?" Here in India, a very common expression is, "What to do?" I think to live here, to some degree, it becomes your mantra. What to do. If you got frustrated by power outages, no internet, things like that...it would make you crazy. So, I love the very go with the flow attitudes of everyone around me.
 
What is a typical day for you?
 A typical day is usually waking up and making breakfast at home. My one roommate does yoga in the early morning, so she usually makes breakfast for the house. We all walk to work together, stopping on the way at a juice stand. There are fresh juice stands everywhere. This morning I got a fresh watermelon juice for 12 rupees -- which is less than 30 cents. We are greeted at work by the office dog -- a stray that seems to just live at Tara (and we feed him, which doesn't help!). I think one thing I have found about being at Tara is there is no typical day. One day, we have Gond tribal artists in showing us their work and collaborating with Tara on books, other days, we'll sit and talk about possible ideas for books, some days I spend sending out copies of our books for reviews or organizing exhibits of our artwork, other times we are out in schools in Chennai doing art education outreach. We get a lot of visitors stopping by from librarians in the US, people from Oxfam, writers...Some people want to check out our books, others want to see our press and check out how the handmade books are made -- as we make books using silkscreening, letterpress and offset printing.
 
I have learned the hard way about being a small independent press and how much harder it is (with almost no publicity budget), to get the word out about Tara. But luckily, once people see our books, they usually fall in love. Since Tara is a collective of writers and artists, the office is always lively and full of conversation. I am so happy that I work for a place that brings a voice to people that perhaps would never be in the mainstream. Most all of our illustrators are not "illustrators" per se -- but tribal and folk artists, cinema billboard artist, textile printers -- we use all sorts of untraditional things as illustrations.
 
Through Tara, I am writing a book on teaching children Gond art. I used to teach, but my own writing has always been fiction or as a journalist. But I love art, so I feel like in some ways, I get to marry my interests. Tara is so flexible. After doing some art education workshops, I was interested in how you could teach Gond art to little kids. Gita Wolf, our publisher, said "Why don't you write a book on it?"  So, I am. I never would get to just say and do something like that in a bigger publishing house -- especially as an intern!
 
After work I try to work on my own book and take a yoga class. I had never studied yoga till coming to India. I don't speak Tamil, so sometimes my attempts at yoga are a bit of a comedy of errors. My life here is quiet. I don't miss the things I thought I would -- TV, internet, a car. It's actually allowed me to work a lot on my own writing.

How did you find Tara Publishing?
I saw one of Tara's books, it was The London Jungle Book. I thought it was such an interesting book -- a mix of art, travelogue, and since it written from the perspective of a man from a small Indian village and his take on London, I found it really different from other travel books I had seen (I also loved the art!). So, I got on Tara's website, and saw that they took interns. At the time I was doing my MFA in Texas, so I wrote to them and kept in touch over the years. But, by the time I finished my MFA, I was 30, and thought maybe I was a little old to be "interning" anywhere. So, I moved home to Wyoming instead to work on my own book, which I had started in my MFA.
 
I love that you traveled around the world...where did you go?  Were you on your own the entire time?  
I was home in Wyoming for less than a year, then decided to travel. So I bought an around the world ticket. They are great, as long as you are going in one continuous direction. My mother is originally from Chennai, India, my father grew up in Ireland -- so one good thing about having a multi-national family, is that I can travel and visit family. I bought an around the world ticket, and went to England, Ireland, and France, then jumped to India, where I stayed for two months, then went to Thailand, then to Australia. My grandmother actually lived in Australia, so I went to be with her as she had not been well. As it turned out, she was really unwell, so I stayed three months with her and was with her when she died.
 
The experience of being with her made me rethink what I wanted to do with my life. I knew I wanted to finish my own book, but also knew I wanted to be back in India. Being in India made me feel happy in a way almost no other place has. I would have loved to come to India just to travel, but I really wanted to live and work here -- and experience day to day life. I hadn't grown up traveling to India (prior to moving here, I had only been here twice) as my Indian grandparents had passed away before I was born. I got in touch with Tara again and applied for the internship. I was worried  about being older (as most of Tara's interns are just out of college) but that was all in my head. I am learning more and more to just go out and do things that fill you creatively, even if some people are puzzled by your path.
 
I was alone on and off when traveling. My mother traveled with me some, and almost everywhere I went, I met friends or family. This year of being in India has been a lot more of being alone in India. Which is so nice. I love my Indian family very much, but they don't quite know what to make of someone who is 32 and not married (their attempts to marry me off are a whole other story...) So, they are very protective. My aunt still can't understand why I take public busses in India and not a taxi. It is some times a down side being a woman in India alone. Sometimes, it can be frustrating when traveling on trains and buses, when getting service when eating out. But that said, I feel very safe in the South traveling around.

What has your experience in India been compared to what you thought it might be before you moved there?
In many ways, my prior trips had taught me to have no expectations -- I think when coming to a place like India, which can be very easily exoticized and romanticized, you really have to come with a very open heart and mind. For me, in a bit of a cliché, I hoped I would discover my roots and figure out all sorts of questions from the universe. In that way, I have realized that moving to a new place doesn't automatically make things clear for yourself, in many ways, you can feel more muddled. But you also do learn all sorts of things about yourself when you are stripped of the comforts (or sometimes crutches) you rely on back home.

The ease of the West is something that I never thought about till I came here. It's a given that power works, that you can, for the most part, drink water out of your tap, that when you go to the grocery store you can get what you want. I think I took all of that for granted. Living in a city of 7 million from a town in Wyoming, all of my experiences here have been so far removed from what I have known. I also thought I would pick up Tamil very easily, which, well, isn't quite as easy as I thought...

My idea of India has only become more complex. In that I realize that you can live here for years and years, and only scratch the surface of this country. I feel like I really only know my little pocket of Chennai. When I was in Delhi recently or in Bangalore, they are so different from Chennai. Every city here has such its own feels and rhythms. So, I feel like I have just started a relationship with India, and will continue to come back again and again.

Share an experience where you said to yourself, "YES, this is why I wanted to live in India!"...an experience when you knew you made the right decision to take that leap.
I think it was Vinayaka Chaturthi, or the Ganesha Festival. I have always like Ganesha. Out of all the Indian gods, he seems really jolly. He is the remover of obstacles, and the god of beginnings. During this festival, all these make-shift shops spring up on the roads. They sell mud Ganeshas, which at the end of the festival, are submerged into the sea (or water). At temples, elaborate light sculptures (think Christmas lights as art) tower over rooftops. I got up early on the morning of the first day of the festival. I took a walk to the temple near my house. People were buying their mud Ganeshas to take home and decorate. My landlord had been making all sorts of sweets to present to her Ganesha. The sweet shops had special foods. As I walked around, I just felt part of something much bigger than me. India's culture is so old, so beautiful, and to watch certain rituals makes me feel, well, for lack of a better word, connected. Also, since Ganesha is the god of beginnings, it all felt very auspicious to me.

But, I have to admit, I also felt pretty happy when I finally could get an auto rickshaw and bargain in broken Tamil. I knew my mom would be proud!

What have you learned about yourself while living in India on your own over the past year?
To let go of control. To not worry about time. To laugh. To also be more aggressive – with so many people competing for space, I’ve had to learn to push my way through a crowd. Also, I grew up with a lot of open space around me, so India challenges my notions of space and silence. I’ve learned that I can quite happily move through an Indian street with its maze of people, cows, auto rickshaws, scooters, cars, bullock carts.
 
Do a brain dump of adjectives describing India...
Friendly, dynamic, loud, scented, hot, humid, colorful, joyful, green

When will we be able to order the book you are working on?
The Gond art book will be published in early 2009. I hope my own fiction book will come out soon after that…

Thank you Nina for an extraordinary interview and for sharing so much of your incredible journey!  I can't wait to see where you go next...