Interview with Shinie Antony and A.T. Boyle, Author of "ExObjects"

Frontlist: The book features a diverse range of objects—rings, letters, clothing, and even sounds. How did you and the contributing authors choose which objects to write about?

Alison: exObjects is the coming together of two forces: a gaping hole resulting from personal loss, and the gift of unseen objects or objects seen in a fresh light when someone or something important is lost.

The starting point for exObjects was the proximity of my parents’ deaths during the Covid years. What emerged from the holes in my life was not only the surprise and joy of discovering a few personal possessions I hadn’t seen before but a growing sense that objects associated with someone or something we love provide a pathway to healing, through hope.

Out of those early days of grief sprang a strong motivation to bridge some gaps in knowing who my parents were, which, through social mores, personalities, and preferences, I was unable to access while they lived. 

My journey was fuelled by a sense of inquiry about a handful of surprise objects that had been hidden in plain sight and were now unearthed because they were dead. My parents didn’t need them anymore, but what use were they to me? The hand-made icing sugar dove from their wedding cake, the classical Diana brooch which, only when holding it in my hand I recognized in a photo I had looked at many times. This photo with the brooch pinned at her neck was published by The Guardian newspaper alongside the obituary I wrote:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/feb/10/jean-boyle-obituary

Contributing author Belinda Rushjansen chose a brass candleholder because it had passed down from her grandmother to her mother, then to her after her mother’s death. Belinda perceives this object as ‘an active link to generations past, giving a sense of place in the present.’ In her English cottage, she lights a candle when evening approaches, and now her grandchildren can enjoy lighting it. This family ritual fosters connections with the next generation and enables her, as a writer, to reach back and enjoy all over again some comforting emotions of the past.

Frontlist: Objects often outlive relationships, yet they hold onto emotions. Do you think people should preserve such objects, or do they hinder emotional healing?

Alison: As I write in the exObjects book Introduction: ‘Some objects accumulate importance over the years, but an object discovered will not always result in a wish to keep it, and these stories throw up challenges that will hopefully push readers towards puzzlements of their own.’ This comment was prompted by my editorial role on two stories where authors decide to dispose of a significant object. Even though an excellent case is made for this conclusion, their decisions took my breath away. Whether to hold to or let go of objects is a personal choice based on the amount of happy or negative feelings associated with keeping this object around.

When someone dies there’s usually at least a handful of printed photographs left behind. These photographs render objects inside scenes, making photographs a way to access the past and work out what still resonates in the present. These are elements it that might be worth talking to the next generation about, the future repositories of our own lives.

Now that digital reproduction is so cheap, is there a need to keep the albums and the gelatine prints? Is preserving an object lock stock and barrel necessary for channeling our most precious memories?

For that cake decoration, 70 years old and in pristine condition, I wasn’t solely interested in the object, but what its mode of preservation told me about the importance of this object to my parents (who threw away plenty of other objects during our many years of life together). For a writer, finding an object that has been preserved but not mentioned is gold dust, because it prompts us to ask questions about unknown aspects of the people we loved, where we knew some but not everything about them. In other words, the objects collected in this book incited curiosity not only in the writers who encountered them in some detail in the act of telling their stories but also from the eventual readers of their exObjects story.

Frontlist: This book blends memoir, emotional healing, and art studies. How do you see the intersection of personal storytelling and artistic expression in healing from past relationships?

Alison: I remember clearly that first Zoom book planning meeting about how the exObjects concept could grow into a longer work by bringing in other experienced writers. Although each contributor needed to address some kind of loss, and experience a mix of emotions such as personal sadness, anger, and regret through their engagement with such emotions, no contribution was going to be simply a grief memoir. The other nine authors were chosen because they were able to rise above a sense of personal loss to what is universally lost in this or that incident or moment they wanted to convey.

The possibility of including visual art alongside the story text was an important, and more unusual, aspect of creating this book. From being very young I had the urge to make and nurture art. When our teacher asked us to make a picture of the insides of a machine I didn’t do a small painting but instead cut out huge cardboard pieces from cereal packets and boxes from the corner shop and set my cogs at certain angles so that, if a cardboard switch could have been pulled on the side, the machine would whirr. Later I integrated visual art and writing in university study and worked in publishing, commissioning illustrators and writers at the same time. Although an exObject can be intangible, for example, a lost hope, making our ideas tangible through the telling of stories and photographic presentations of our object is an essential component of this book.

Belinda Rushjansen is a professional visual artist who has more recently come to writing. She uses a sporting analogy to capture individual endeavor and joint endeavor on a sports field is: ‘The object has its story memory roots in the past, but is creating a story with you as it continues on in your life. Our present actions are affected by our memories, but this is a continuous story – one thing relating to another, passing on the baton from event to event.’

Frontlist: ExObjects reflect on memory and time through objects. How does nostalgia shape our emotional attachment to physical things?

Alison: Our impulse is to reach for comforting things when we’re sad. In the word ‘nostalgia’ lies the prospect of finding warmth if we reach for it. Sometimes the thing or person that will bring us the greatest comfort can’t be reached because of the time that’s passed or because the person or environment is gone. This is the ‘ex’ in ‘exObjects’. But the human mind is powerful, and the intention present in ‘nostalgia’, the act of reaching out and reaching back, itself shapes our emotional attachments and helps us on the road to healing and happiness.

If we give them proper attention, objects can become the nexus – the meeting point – of many connections in, and with, our past. Like the synapses in our brain which fire and make connections and bring meaning, when we experience loss, rather than allowing ourselves to stay frozen like a rabbit in the headlights we can choose to leapfrog from one lily pad to the next looking for answers. In this way, we’re more likely to arrive at a calmness, a sense of the cohesive whole. Being able to glimpse the person we were before we experienced a loss (this person is an ex object in themselves at that point) can act as a beacon when we’re immersed in the miasma of grief. 

Frontlist: You mention that ExObjects invites us to let our imaginations loose. Can objects serve as a starting point for storytelling and self-reflection, rather than just being remnants of the past?

Alison: Two years before the exObjects book came out in India, the first wave of stories I commissioned were published in magazine format on the Artificial Silk website (https://artificialsilk.org/index.php/your-exobjects-2022/)

These early stories are shorter and mostly written by emerging writers who wanted to address a sense of loss. An exception was Shinie Antony, who I invited to contribute partly because of her adeptness at using humor to bring lightness even to the account of loss following the death of her much-loved father.

From this web magazine base, I was keen to develop the imaginative potential of exObjects, to explore how possible it was to tap into the powerful emotional resonances that are part and parcel of that sometimes hallucinogenic lost-in-grief state. The wedding cake decoration I found in a wardrobe is undoubtedly a remnant from the 1950s, but in the Peace story, I imagine us cradling ‘the dove in overlapping palms’ and my mother, her presence palpable in that room, though she is gone, is keeping me company sitting on the edge of the bed. The dove, our open palms, and the incident has a shared dynamic in my present. The  bird object serves as the nexus of many emotions. This is a joyous and unexpected encounter when I thought we might not communicate so closely again. The approach relies on a leap of the imagination, but I also hope that it lands true for the reader, because my intention was to be faithful to who she was, who we were together or at least might have been that day, a day when physically we could not have been further apart. After writing about it, the object she saved for all those years is no longer a remnant of the past, as I will not let her be a remnant of the past.

Several book contributors refer to the ‘magical’. Esteemed writer Shashi Deshpande regrets losing some family furniture not because it was elegant and unique but because it was ‘associated with the magical days of my childhood.’ [page 16]. The young writer Devasiachan Benny writes that a new concrete home exchanged from a weathered teak one in Kerala ‘cannot take away my feelings of burning and pain’. [page 30]. But when he holds the iron key to that lost home, the old ‘stream full of glittering orange-striped fishes begins to ripple’ [page 31]. 

The other young writer in the book Sauma Afreen relates the effect of light pollution on wildlife communications by telling us about the abundance of fireflies in her childhood: ‘We decided that minuscule lightbulbs were fitted inside their bodies, and when the light dimmed every few seconds, their power supply was breaking. One of our most trusted theories was that fireflies ate part of the flickering street lamp near the post office.’

Frontlist: Alison, you’ve worked extensively in children’s publishing and literary editing. Did your editorial experience influence how you structured this book and its narratives?

Alison: Just as I like to learn from others, mentoring brings me pleasure. It can be hard work and time-consuming too. I first worked as an editor and was first published as a writer in my early twenties, creating books with integrated text and images, sometimes working with audio and film animation or acted content. Getting a start can be hard. Over the years I’ve worked in big and small companies and as a freelance editor and publisher, and each time the challenge and the joy is to bring in the production with aplomb. We can only do this by drawing on the expertise of others, and accepting that not everything will work brilliantly the first time.

So I believe it’s important to give first-time opportunities to talented emerging artists at the same time as recognizing the beauty and impact of the stories more experienced writers can pull off. In steering the exObjects book, Shinie and I navigated the different cultures, backgrounds, sensibilities, tastes and styles of ourselves and the nine contributors. The joint endeavour I hope comes across in the open invitation for readers to find a place for their own sensibilities between the covers. 

Frontlist: After reading ExObjects, what is one reflection or practice you hope readers adopt in their own lives regarding their relationship with objects and memories?

Alison: Belinda RushJansen hopes that readers will practice self-reflection because a reflective life can bring ‘awareness as a well as kindness to yourself and others.’ She believes that ‘physical objects help focus healing memories by being present, yet warmed by the bittersweet past.’

I hope that readers will appreciate the wit and self-deprecating humour in each sequence, which helps to deliver a personal story with universal resonance. Readers who are curious enough to look closely at their own objects may understand their power to bring solace and a sense of belonging. I hope that people who interact with the stories will arrive at a strong sense that although life brings challenges and though we honour the past and the people and places that made us, we should try to find happiness in the present. Easier said than done sometimes, but using our imagination is one way to free ourselves and welcome in a happier and more hopeful vibe. If we add to that our creative skills, whatever they are, yet more barriers may be overcome, even if only in a fleeting set of moments. Hope can build, and particular objects can play a lead role in the drama and revelations of loss and grief. 

Frontlist: The book features a diverse range of objects—rings, letters, clothing, and even sounds. How did you and the contributing authors choose which objects to write about?

Shinie: The objects came from the authors themselves. The objects are deeply personal to the writer, connecting them to someone or something and their own emotions. For Jerry Pinto, it was a lost soft toy and the tracking down of its present whereabouts in a fit of brilliant fictionalizing. For Jaishree Misra, it was the love letters her late parents wrote to 

each other, which, as you can imagine, would have evoked such bittersweet memories and wonderment. For Shashi Deshpande and Belinda Rush Jansen, there were family heirlooms, and for Vikram Sampath, it was his late mother’s room itself. Other writers spoke of a key to a house that’s torn down and fireflies in a granny’s house. In my own case, I zeroed in on the easy chair my late father brought from his own grandfather’s house, becoming a kind of personalization of him.  

Frontlist: Objects often outlive relationships, yet they hold onto emotions. Do you think people should preserve such objects, or do they hinder emotional healing?

Shinie: These objects come in at first with a raw and elemental sense of grief, of infinite sadness, but somewhere transform themselves into objects of healing. They are the painful reminders, then the crutch, and then a sweet stinging sensation. They bring peace ultimately, as they are symbols of continuity and the eternal circle of life. 

Frontlist: This book blends memoir, emotional healing, and art studies. How do you see the intersection of personal storytelling and artistic expression in healing from past relationships?

Shinie: There is no prescribed format of writing anything, and this is especially true when it comes to tackling grief and the prosaic recording of it. Each contributor is a writer and has his/her own style of expressing what they feel. And this multiplicity of articulation has been the beauty of the book. It is so many voices conveying their tumult and ultimate peace in such different words. 

Frontlist: ExObjects reflect on memory and time through objects. How does nostalgia shape our emotional attachment to physical things?

Shinie: In life while one is living it there seem to be no full stops, only ellipses. It is difficult to sit up and say that’s that then, let me put pen to paper and record precisely what it is. Through memories of conversations and incidents, a person or situation that is no longer with us comes alive only in the way we remember it, in the way only we can remember it. Nostalgia is the mind’s sweet spot. Of coping and moving on.

Frontlist: You mention that ExObjects invites us to let our imaginations loose. Can objects serve as a starting point for storytelling and self-reflection, rather than just being remnants of the past?

Shinie: Oh yes, definitely. It is a beautiful starting point to muse and ponder, perchance to write. 

Frontlist: Shinie, you have curated multiple anthologies exploring deep human emotions. How was working on ExObjects different from your previous projects?

Shinie: This book was so entirely based on a fixed topic, that of mourning but also of surviving that mourning, and turning that mourning into a superpower. In the end, it is only us who can remember, it is only us who make that person or object go on, and continue in the physical realm. Alison and I were very clear right from the start that it is going to be a book of happiness. These people, who saddened us by suddenly being mortal, are still with us and always will be -- joyously, quietly, and flamboyantly. Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri of Om Books came in seamlessly as the editor, letting Alison and me bring that spirit through.  

In every sense, this is very different from the other anthologies I put together! Firstly, this is co-edited, and then the almost spiritual quality of the topic. 

Post a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Your Name

Your Email

Your Website

Leave a Reply

Captcha

Post Comment

0 comments

Sorry! No comment found for this post.