By River Mitchell
@rivermitchell27
Growing up in the small town of Cross Lanes, W. Va., and living in Boston since 2003 and teaching in the Boston Public School system, Neema Avashia has experienced many different facets of life that have shaped her into the writer she is today.
Feeling like an outcast growing up in a predominantly caucasian community as an Indian woman, dealing with her cousin’s suicide and having a neighboor in Boston who was a severe alcoholic are all topics she wrote about in her book, “Another Appalachia, Growing up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place.” This book is a culmination of short stories, outlining her life story.
On Thursday afternoon, Avashia did a small meet and greet inside the Weiser Hall conference room, and read a couple of her short stories to a group of students and faculty inside Dodge A/B later that evening, which was followed by an engaging Q + A.
“I’m super excited [to be at Springfield College],” Avashia said. “I’m a huge basketball fan [and] I have been since I was little. I got to sit with Naismith outside and get my picture taken with the peach basket.”
Fittingly, the first story Avashia read aloud was “Be Like Wilt,” where she wrote about being the only brown kid on a team of white boys. Just like how Wilt Chamberlain used the two-handed underhand toss at the free-throw line, referred to as “The granny-style” shot, Avashia’s coach suggested she used this technique when taking shots.
Many shots were falling short of the net, but she was finally able to triumph with the new technique, sending the gym at the Cross Lanes Methodist Church into a frenzy. This gave Avashia a sense of belonging which she hadn’t previously felt.
Associate Professor of English Justine Dymond is on the William Simpson Fine Arts Series committee, and is tasked with organizing a guest speaker for each semester. She chose Avashia to come to Springfield College, as often she’ll have students in her creative writing classes read pieces of writing from the guest speakers.
“She gave a reading on zoom that I attended,” Dymond said. “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this would really be wonderful to teach.’ The topic, given the recent presidential election, it’s also very topical in that regard. Not only do I appreciate the different forms and structures she employs, but I really appreciate how in-depth her reflections about her life go.”
The Q+A took place just after her second story of the evening, “Present-Life Hair,” where she wrote about her challenging relationship with her own hair and her parent’s effort to control how it looked to protect her from standing out. The Q + A covered many topics, with Avashia talking about how it took until 2016 to even begin the story, using the time to develop the meaning in these situations.
“Some of the experiences I wrote about in the book are from elementary school, and I didn’t write about them or make sense of them until 30 years later,” Avashia said. “When you’re writing Non-Fiction, there’s this idea of the situation and the story.”
“The situation is me describing what happened, but the story is all of the stuff about why it matters and why it’s important,” Avashia added. “It is really easy to write [about] the situation. The story [and] the why behind it, requires a lot of processing time in your head. Often, you are way past the event before you’ve got all the analysis in your head to actually get it down on the page.”
The audience answered questions for another 20 or so minutes, with many of Dymond’s students engaging with Avashia.
“I enjoyed her reading tremendously, but the Q + A I thought was just as rich,” Dymond said. “She’s really good at answering questions, too. She’s very generous in revealing a lot about herself, which I imagine is something that came from having to write about so many intimate, private things.”