TFA meet yesterday

Sampurna Chattarji and Samhita Arni read out extracts from – wait, let’s start over.

Sampurna Chattarji read out poems from her latest collections, Absent Muses. I have bought said collection, and liked large portions of it, and so I link you here:

Samhita Arni, who has an impressive writerly resume, read out an excerpt from a single short story, neither the beginning nor the end.

If you don’t see what my problem with this is, you probably don’t have the same problem, and wouldn’t even if I told you.

I like TFA, and Samhita Arni seemed to have oodles and oodles of fun reading her excerpt, and it seems likely she gave us exactly what she wanted to give us. So I am not complaining. What I shall do instead is pretend to redress the balance.

This is Samhita Arni’s website.

This is Samhita Arni’s blog.

I was not really thrilled with the discussion that followed, since it was not as rooted in the readings as I would have liked. I shall do a little research before the next TFA meet, and see if I can read the writers’ work before I get there, so I can ask them questions based in the text, as opposed to general questions about identities, labels, and the writer’s life, none of which I am more than mildly interested in, because in some ways they feel irrelevant or redundant.

But! Now I have two shiny new authors to stalk. Ill winds etc.