This is Melissa Ford Lockin, Rosalie Petrouske, Susan Serafin-Jess, editors for the Washington Square Review. Washington Square On-Air showcases the poetry and fiction of the latest edition of LCC's literary journal, The Washington Square Review, read by the poets, authors, and editors themselves. Expect the unexpected as our contributors express experience and fantasy with humor, imagination, poetic license, irony, and passion. If you love language at its most original, please join us in our audio Town Square to celebrate a community of writers spanning from around the world to Lansing.

Hi, this is Melissa Ford Lucken, one of the editors with the Washington Square Review, and today I'm here with Saurabh Anand, who's one of our authors. The piece I Miss you, Minnesota, we're really happy to accept and include in our journal. And the first thing I'm wondering is if you could tell me a little bit about the piece. What was going on in your life at the time that you wrote it?

Thank you, Melissa, for your question. So when I was reading this piece, I was in Georgia, and I had to take a temporary refuge in Georgia because everything shut down because of Pandemic. So I was visiting my family down south. I was visiting them during my spring break because at that time I was a master's student and I just had two pairs of jeans and shirt with me in a suitcase, in a very tiny suitcase. And I was glad that I didn't forget my laptop charger because as a grad student, that's really necessary to have that. But long story short, I was under the refuge because of the pandemic. And that time it prompted me to kind of write about my story of being stuck in Georgia due to Pandemic.

Did you start writing it right away? Did it sit in your mind for a while? How did that happen?

It's a good question because I did not realize it, but I did start writing about it while I was there. But I never thought that it would come out as a story story. In the past, I've used writing as my way to heal. So every time I am feeling a little bit of, yeah, you know, if I'm a little bit down or if I need a little bit of motivation, I usually resort to writing and try to communicate my feelings through writing. So, yeah, most of the pieces, at least that one might read in my story, were the products of that time when things were actually going south. It's weird to say that things were going south and I was in south too. So for the publication, I did work it further and kind of refine it.

Were there any pieces that you cut out?

Yeah, I think I did cut out some of the pieces, some of the reflections. And those reflections included a little bit, like, the kind of reactions I got from my family when I was stuck, because they didn't know what's going on. And they didn't know at that time what was going on. Where I'm gonna stay, how I'm gonna stay. I was a master's student at Minnesota State then in a very small town, Mankato, and there were, like, a lot of negotiations happening because I used to teach English composition there too. So a lot of negotiations were going on. How instructors will come back, or did instructors need to be in station to kind of help other students out or what's. What's happening if they are also traveling, since everything happened during our spring break. So, yeah, a lot of negotiations, departmental negotiations were going on. A lot of reactions I was getting from my parents. So, yeah, I just thought those could be part of some other stories that I plan to write maybe for WSR in later future.

That sounds good. That would be great. So you and I talked a little bit about being an international student, and you're a very traveling student, so you were kind of doubly stranded, in a way. Talk a little bit about what that's like to be an international student and how that makes things more complicated.

It's quite a learning experience, I must say, Melissa, because a lot of times there's a lot of stereotypes about international student community. And one of the reasons I even chose to write this story, and more than story, shared this story with the world through Washington Square Review, was that I wanted to communicate with domestic population of the US Just to let them know that there are different audiences or international student term is an umbrella term. And underneath that, there could different people with different kind of issues and opportunities or constraints an international student might have. So, for example, a very, very generic stereotype about international students is that they are usually rich and hence they can afford to study in America. But that may not be true for many, many, many international students, which include me too. I grew up in India, and for very long time I. I was working. But still coming to US and earn my higher education degree was not even a dream. Like, it was something that I could not even dream without funding. So I was very grateful when my former graduate school, which is Minnesota State, Mankato Department of English, offered me a graduate assistantship through which I could have tuition revision and get stipend to sort of in the lieu of teaching a course was one lifetime opportunity for me Having said that, there are also other sense of challenges international community go through. There's a different sense of precarity they bring on table. Yes, we do bring a lot of diversity, a lot of thought provoking different kind of diversity we do bring on table. But when things started to go south or the kind of contribution do we bring on table, it often go unnoticed even though it is in creative writing or it is majorly true for creative writing media or scholarly conversation. So I was very, very happy that Washington Square Review does not come into that category. And I was very, very happy to see that my story was accepted and WSR board found value in my story and they could connect with me so that they gave me an opportunity to share it with the world. So yeah, there's different kind of precarity. For example, we cannot work during summer, or even if we could, our host institution has to be the only employer. So a lot of time I would speak to my friends and they would say, hey Starbucks. Or this nearby coffee shop is hiring. And I would say hey, cool. But I'm on a student visa. It's non immigrant F1 visa. I cannot or I couldn't work when I was on student visa then because that's going to be a different ball game altogether. And I have to go through different kind of immigration processes to get it reviewed. And there's a lot of scrutiny and whatnot. So those are the things that put international students on limit in many ways that a lot of other student audiences don't go through essentially. Also we cannot ignore the fact that when I wrote this story, us as a nation was going through one of the biggest social turmoil, be it Black Lives Matters or hate crime against Asian American community. So as international students sometimes we it limit ourselves to kind of be vocal publicly because we cannot go out to kind of protest like most of the domestic people out there, because if we get arrested for some reason even we would be subjected to deportation. And that would bring the entire purpose of coming to the US and earning our degree down. So there's like all different kind of precarity. So we tend to support in other ways that doesn't really, you know, that cannot bound us to or subject us to deportation. But we do it in other ways. One of the things that I did at that point was writing a poem and listeners can read that poem for at the International Journal of International Students. The title of my poem is F1 visa where I kind of talk about different kind of challenges and level of precarities international students go through. And what happens when international student community interact with immediate outside world where they kind of owning their degree and what is the approach do they feel, do they take when they're kind of trying to be part of that community?

So you came to the United States to be a student and your main area of focus right now is composition, rhetoric and composition.

So I'm doing my PhD in rhetoric and composition and I aim to do my specialization in writing studies. So currently I am working in the writing center, UGA, UGA's writing center. I am part of the admin team. I also tutor students. Another aspect of my graduate teaching assistantship is to teach English composition. So I teach summer courses. I hope I'm teaching this year, but I've also taught in regular semesters as well, fall and spring, where I teach variety of first year incoming college students. Like sometimes I teach English composition section. That is where my sole audience is multilingual writers. And by multilingual writers, I mean international students, who are often multilinguals or multicultural students. Sometimes I teach all domestic students and sometimes I have a mixed batch of both.

So yeah, that must take a lot of energy. And so you mentioned earlier that a lot of times your creative writing is an emotional outlet for you, kind of therapeutic. So how do you balance the workload of teaching composition, which is pretty intense, with your own creative work? How do you make that, how do you make time for yourself and nurture yourself in that way?

You know what? I do not necessarily see it as taking intentionally time out for my creative pursuits. It is just a very normal being for me. For example, these days on Twitter, there's this Trend going on, 30 words, 30 days story. I kind of take out time for, you know, so let me eat my words. So what I'm trying to say is it just does not come. It's not an intentional process for me. I do it intuitively. For example, if I'm sitting right now, I'm looking out my window, I'm thinking about a poem. For example, when I actually got this, I'm showing you my contributor's copy of Washington Square review summer 2020. When I got this contributor's copy, the colors on here were very similar to the colors I'm able to see outside my window right now. So it just automatically comes to me to kind of prompts me to write a poem or something and kind of it connects to larger issues that I'm interested in or perhaps wanting to be interested in. So it just comes automatically. However, in my teaching, I intentionally do that by, by inviting My students to compose writing using not only scholarly text but also aesthetic text. Last semester I taught my students how to write poetic autoethnography, which is basically a research. It's a writing genre of autoethnography where people use their personal experiences as qualitative data and use different kind of cultural productions, be it collection of essays or poems as qualitative data and see it from a research point of view or theoretical point of view. So I have a lot of liberty in my department to teach whatever genre I need to teach. So they tell us that you have to teach a research genre. Or even if they don't tell, I feel like research is a very important part of any higher education student, regardless of what level they are. So just to orient them to the ethical research practices, I tend to kind of use storytelling for focused research methods to kind of get them started with composition. So this last semester I told them to kind of write a poetic auto ethnography where they can reflect back to some moments or something that is going on currently in their lives that they would like to kind of see it from a different theoretical or conceptual framework and use their feelings, embedded poems, or other cultural productions as qualitative data and write paper about it. So reading about them or sharing my experiences kind of really helps me to kind of feel intellectually and creatively stimulated. And it's a myth a lot of times that in a classroom space it's only the students who learn from teachers. One of the greatest moments learning experiences in my life has been where I often learn from my students. Because as I've mentioned before, sometimes I teach a multilingual section of English composition where under the roof I have students from 10 to 15 different countries and they come up with a plethora of their cultural wealth, literacies and so many stories that may or may not be aligned with American ways of being, or for me, Indian ways of being. But that is not necessarily wrong. They are just distinctive, they are just different. And there has to be a space. As a teacher, I feel it's my social obligation to kind of create intentional spaces for them so that not only me, but students learn from each other as well.

When you introduce this technique with the students, this pedagogical framework, do you ever have any resistance from students? Because that's quite different than what they might be expecting in the college classroom.

I know. So when I told my students that we gonna use data, one of the questions that I received from my students were, but there's no number. And I was like, or there are no numbers. And I was like, yes, poems are your data. So you're gonna analyze, so you're gonna introduce poems as your data. And in the analysis or discussion section you're gonna kind of talk about in what circumstances you wrote this poem or what was going on, or what do you think about that poem now, or why did you choose this particular metaphor to kind of explain what is going on or things like that. So yes, you are correct. A lot of eyebrows were raised. A lot of epistemologies or ontologies about research were revised. A lot of people were essentially in shock. So when I introduced autoethnography in my classroom, I still remember there was like a pin drop silence in my class. And I told my students to kind of come up with, you know, some questions or doubts or clarifications they may need from me after re reviewing the assignment sheet or syllabi or things like that I have shared with them pertaining to this genre. And I specifically remember Melissa, I had so many questions next time I think I essentially had to kind of re explain everything, which I happily did, because that is kind of the kind of reaction we often get when we kind of talk about auto ethnography or storytelling based research methods. Because in an English composition classroom we tend to get students from variety of intellectual backgrounds or some might be from stem, some might be from social sciences, or some might be from more applied sciences where they are used to doing research in a certain way. They have different kind of research audience population or different kind of data analysis method.

Mine also arrive in the classroom with the notion of what it's going to be. And then when you start talking about poems, that's not at all what they were expecting. What kind of responses do you get at the end of the assignment?

So I remember like when I was reviewing some of the papers and I have my students write self assessment after every genre that they complete. And a lot of them would say, hey, it never prompted me to kind of think about narrative based poem or use it as a qualitative data or maybe like writing poems about some of the mundane things or that they never ever thought of even noticing because they do, because they engage with those things very intuitively or those things are very, very common for them to find around themselves. So one of the specific examples I remember that my student wrote about the rose plant they had outside their in their front porch, which they always noticed but never prompted enough to kind of write a poem about it. While they were engaging with the academic writing process in my class, I remember another student who was an international student, kind of wrote about different cultural practices and they were kind of comparing, contrasting with what happens here and how things are different. So inviting that genre, a storytelling based genre, kind of helped diverse student groups to kind of bridge of different perspectives with other student population which they may or may not necessarily come across in their everyday life, but just because they come together in an intellectual space during a specific time and they get taught by me who is a die hard lover of stories and interested in other people's stories stories, they get to learn other ways of being in more socially equitable environment and make it better than it already is.

I love that. That's really beautiful. If people would like to stay in touch with you, where can they find out more about your work, what you're currently working on? And you mentioned Twitter. So if you're on Twitter and you'd like to say that, that would be great.

Yes. So yeah, my Twitter handle is underscore Saurabhanand. It is as generic as it can be. But I do share about things that I write on Twitter since I have a very unique and in quotes un American name. If you search me, I prefer to share my work on open access platforms so that I can people don't have to kind of go behind the paywall to kind of pay to access my work. So if you just google search me, my work is just a couple of click aways and I tend to write for more international student audiences and more literary background. So yes, just google me and you will find me.

Awesome. Thanks a lot for spending some time with us.

The pleasure was mutual. Melissa, thank you so much. And I would like to thank the entire editorial board of Washington Square Review for giving me this opportunity. Thank you so much.

Thank you for listening to our talented poets and authors. Until next time, this has been Washington Square On-Air, where we showcase selections from Lansing Community College's literary journal, The Washington Square Review, a publication featuring writers from the Great Lakes State, across the nation and around the world. To find out more about The Washington Square Review, visit lcc.edu/wsr. We hope you enjoyed listening as much as we enjoyed sharing.