Neema Avashia Skylar Bensheimer (bio) In truth, I've always felt uneasy in my relationship to the word 'Appalachian'... do you not count if you are Brown, Indian, the child of immigrants who moved to a place out of necessity again thirty years later, when work disappeared?= Neema Avashia writes in Another Appalchia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place, her debut essay collection. [End Page 58] Published in March by West Virginia University Press, the book explores the economic decline in her West Virginia hometown, the struggles to represent her intersecting identities, and the significant relationships that shaped her as a child in Appalachia. Avashia's work has been published The Bitter Southerner, The Kenyon Review Online, Still: The Journal, and other magazines. Avashia spoke with writer and Appalachian Review student assistant Skylar Bensheimer to discuss her new essay collection. ________ SKYLAR BENSHEIMER: I wanted to start with the opening essay, "Directions to a Vanishing Place." It feels like a natural way to start the collection, especially with the second person and the directives. Did you know you wanted to begin the collection with that essay? NEEMA AVASHIA: Yes, largely because it was the first essay I wrote in the collection. It was the first essay to be published, the first essay that set the direction for what I was going to do. For readers who are unfamiliar, I felt like I needed to ground them in the place, and I felt like there wasn't another way to do that besides taking them there. If I start with this idea of directions and I locate you in the place, then with everything that comes after, there's less burden to establish place. It still has to happen to some extent, but it's less of a need in other essays if I do a good job in that first essay. SB: In the opening pages, you listed when and where each essay had been published before, and they were all published in the last couple of years. It's also a relatively short book, but you still cover a lot of subjects and touch [End Page 59] Click for larger view View full resolution Neema Avashia [End Page 60] on a lot of topics. What was the process like when you were compiling these essays? Were there cuts that you had to make? NA: It was actually the opposite. It wasn't so much cutting as it was figuring out if there was enough there for a collection. I have a mentor, Geeta Kothari, who's a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, and she said, "You need 50,000 words. You can't do anything with this until you have at least 50,000 words." So, there were some ways where I thought, Okay. I'm going to see if I have enough things to say that can get me to 50,000 words and that can feel like a complete collection. It wasn't so much cutting as it was writing to a goal or writing to a place where I felt like I had a complete collection. SB: One of the through-lines that really interested me in the book was this theme of isolation, whether that is being a minority in a conservative, mostly white area, the move from rural West Virginia to Boston, where you describe neighbors not really knowing each other, or when you write about the pandemic. Would you characterize those experiences as isolating, or do you think of them in a different way? NA: I think "isolating" is the right word for them. It's taken me a long time to understand, but when you're somebody whose identity is so intersectional, it can be really hard to find places where you don't feel isolated because even if one or two parts of you are represented, the thing that starts to surface for you is the thing that's not represented. That becomes the thing I'm most aware of. There are not a lot of places where queerness, Appalachian-ness, and Indian-ness are held together, and because of that you can end up in disconnects...