An Interview with Farah Ali

 

 

Staffer Carli Brown talks with Issue 68.2 contributor Farah Ali about her forthcoming story collection, People Want to Live, which is currently available for preorder from McSweeney’s Publishing. Ali talks childhood aspiration, title inspiration, book design, and her novel in progress.

 

 

Can you tell me the story of this book: When did you start working on it? What were some of your preoccupations as you were writing it? How did you know when you had a complete collection on your hands? 

 

The oldest stories in this collection go back five years, which was when I said to myself, I’m finally going to properly start writing down all these paragraphs that have been in my head for so long. Some stories took longer than others, but there always seemed to be another one waiting to be written.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a mind reader. Being a writer allowed me to give in to a grownup version of that preoccupation with exploring how people behave when their lives feel like a trial. What happens when they want love or a dependable relationship or money or some other privilege and don’t have it? I wanted to see what they would do to survive, to fix the turmoil inside them.

I wasn’t writing with a collection in mind, but when I saw an open submission call somewhere for short-story collections, I thought, Maybe I could do that. 

 

 

Is there a story you feel is a good representative of the collection as a whole, or do you have a current favorite? Can you tell me about it?

 

There’s a story called “Together,” which is about a small group of women. It seems like their friendship is what keeps their minds from becoming completely untethered as a result of the individual pressures they’re under, but then that reliance on each other isn’t uncomplicated. And what they long for cannot be solved; it can only be managed.

 

 

I’m curious about some logistics: How did you come up with the title? How about the ordering of the book, its organization?

 

The title is from an article I once read about suicide-hotline workers. The workers said the fact that people call indicates the callers want to live. I felt that fit the people of my stories.

For the book’s organization, I tried to see how the themes flowed from one story to another, kept some distance between similar points of view. It was a bit of a clinical process. I had a fantastic editor, Amy Sumerton, who gave the stories their final order.

 

 

Tell me about the cover art.

 

Sunra Thompson gave these stories this incredible cover, really capturing the mood and tone of the stories and understanding the precariousness of the lives of the people in them. I love the figures on the roofs.

 

 

What’s it been like working to release a book during a pandemic? I’m sure that’s been challenging in a lot of ways. Anything you’ve discovered in the process of getting your book published?

 

Now that things are slowly looking better, the challenge is that of cautiously planning events again. The pandemic has put question marks on so many decisions, but I’m hopeful that the trend of improvement will continue. Throughout this whole process, I’ve had a lot of support from my agent and everyone at my publisher’s. There were some friends and family who were extremely generous with the help they gave.

 

 

Anything special you’re working on now?

 

 I have been working on a novel . It revolves around the lives of a man and those related to him. For them, water isn’t something they can take for granted, and that lack has a ripple effect on all other aspects of their relationships.

It’s been some time since I had the urge to rework a part of the novel, so maybe that means it’s done. I’m curious to see what happens next with it.

 

 

Preorder People Want to Live from McSweeney’s Publishing, here.


Farah Ali is from Karachi, Pakistan. Her work appears in Copper Nickel, Arkansas International, the Kenyon Review, and Ecotone. She received a special mention in the 2018 Pushcart Prize XLII for a story that appears in J Journal, and was the winner of the 2016 Colorado Review Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction. She also won the fall 2018 Copper Nickel Editors Prize in prose.