Chatting with Nila Gupta is always a challenge – a delightful challenge, granted, but the woman keeps her co-conversationalists on their toes. And we should be so perched, so poised, if only for our own vanity; because Ms. Gupta is blessed with the kind of ferocious, Cinemascope-wide intellect that makes lesser brains (especially those attached to the nerve clusters of lesser hacks, i.e. me) feel like they’ve been living inside a small, dusty box.

As a celebrity-botherer for The Globe and Mail, I spend most of my days chatting with myopic actors and publicist-programmed filmmakers – people who speak in "talking points", not sentences. So, my intense conversation with Ms. Gupta about the act of writing, and acts of self-expression as filtered through the vagaries of personal identity, was like a being fed a 9 course meal after weeks of living on mayonnaise sandwiches. If nothing else, Nila Gupta’s work, and ideas, give me hope for the future of Canadian literature. We need a dozen more Nila Guptas, and a dozen less Rebecca Ecklers.

Nila Gupta’s beautiful, at times chilling new book The Sherpa and other Fictions (Sumach Press), is the result of years of writing and comes out of Ms. Gupta’s long experience as a filmmaker, theatre artist, post-graduate student, and short story crafter. It is also profoundly informed by her own life experience as a hybrid citizen, as an Indo-Canadian born in Montreal, partly raised in Jammu, who then returned to Canada mid-childhood.

It is hardly surprising, given Ms. Gupta’s varied artistic practices and her youthful exposure to vastly different cultures, that the stories in The Sherpa chart the lives of characters torn between multiple spaces – psychological states, diasporic value clashes, and class alienation.

But The Sherpa is hardly another CBC-style collection of liberal guilt-infused "sad stories about people who are different". Infused, rather, with abundant wit and a keen sense of both the frailties and, most refreshing, the foolishness of human misunderstandings, The Sherpa often reads more like a C.K. Chesterton frolic (had Chesterton ever thought about people besides his club house fellows) than an Anne Micheals dirge.

As much as I distrust the cheap marketing of declaring anyone or anything "the new (insert noun here)", I suspect Nila Gupta’s fiction is, well, the first swell in what promises to be a new (and much more difficult to catch, contain, or codify, and therefore much more exciting) wave in the tide of "immigrant fiction".

Actually, can we just put that tired term to bed right now, please?

RMV: How did this book come together? Did you follow the traditional route – publish works in lit mags, then assemble the book?

NG: It’s complicated. I took a short story class after I went to film school. But I didn’t have enough time to write dramatic material, because I was learning production. I was always annoyed by that, so I took a short story writing course, and then the teacher asked me to put more of myself in the story, which I resisted, because in the 80s I’d written a lot of autobiographical stuff, and wanted to stay away from it. But in the end I did it, and then sent it out, and it got picked up right away, by Descant, and then I sent out more stories, and they got picked up, and then I realized I had a collection. But I don’t write with an intention, to make a project, so I’m always surprised by what I do. After I had eight or nine stories, I started shopping around the book. I didn’t know I had a collection, but the possibility of a collection – I didn’t realize it was a book until I was done.

NG: After I wrote my first story, I knew that that would be the voice of my writing, that I had found my own voice. What I went out and sought were teachers who could help me craft my work, as opposed to helping me determine the content or the shape, or where it would be seen. I wanted to learn how to hone and polish. I came to mentorship, being mentored, late in the game – I’m not young! I’m not a young chickie – so when I went back for formal schooling it was after I’d had enough life experience to not need my voice shaped. But I never think a mentor rejects you or you them – you may agree with them or not agree with them, but I never felt I had to run away from a mentor or reject wholesale what they have to say. I’m ready to hear critics of my work, around language, around content, around the politics, all of those things.

NG: When I started doing plays, it was a really critical moment. I remember being 15 and sitting down in my room, with the psychedelic curtains and bedspread, and that poster of Queen, and thinking "I’m going to write a book about aliens!", and then I’d write two sentences and throw it away, because I knew nothing about plot, antagonists, characters, those elements. It wasn’t until I took up playwriting and took a playwriting course, and then working with playwrights at Cahoots Theatre, that it crystallized, in my 30s. Before that I had been just dabbling in poetry and community theatre collective writing (which was fun).

NG: Yes, but also with plays you can have 20 minutes of dialogue, but in fiction you can’t. And you have to be very careful that you’re not too expository in a play.

NG: Um, yes. Yes to all of that! Ha! Absolutely. I use everything from my life. Being in social justice communities, that analysis, that consciousness, does come through – but I hope not too didactically!

NG: Well, thank you.

NG: No, because I always start with the character. Once I capture their voice, I really want to do justice to them. If they’re bad, they’re bad. I’m not going to redeem them. By "bad" I mean conflicted. I hope none of my characters are ever just symbolic of a particular class, or gender, or whatever. I’ve never tried to write a "lesson story". My characters are obsessed with rescuing or saving others, or are characters who need rescue. But each story has it’s own story in terms of how it got created, so I can’t answer questions about process in a general way. Writers want to be not too on the nose, not too obvious – we want to surprise the reader, but still stay true to the material. That’s what I try for, and I trust my reader to be intelligent enough to not need things to be spelled out.

NG: Yes. I am not my father, an immigrant whose major concern was how to settle his four children well in this country, how to make it in this country, and who regularly sent money back home to his widowed sister and occasionally threatened us with returning to India when we misbehaved. 

For me, it was never an option to "return". As a young teenager, India was not my home  - Canada was. I didn’t have the same sense of responsibility for my relatives in India that my father did.  I had, instead, a sense of entitlement about Canada that my father never possessed– it’s mine or I claimed it as mine or I would make it mine, despite the racist next door who put shit in our mailbox and told us to "go back home". 

It’s probably not an accident that the major characters in my book are then not immigrants like my father -  immigrants in the traditional sense (adults making their way over to Canada steerage class on a boat!), but the children of immigrants or young people settling in Canada. As a "native-born immigrant" (born in Montreal but raised for my early years in India) I do think that unique set of experiences shapes my concerns, but whether that signals a new wave of post-diasporic fiction I’m not sure. I’ll let the academics debate that one!

If one can loosely generalize and say that Canadian diasporic fiction wrestles with the experience and impact of migration and largely describes the settlement experience – for example, David Bezmozgis in The Natasha Stories describing the Jewish-Latvian immigrant experience and community in Toronto -- then perhaps you can say that my fiction is somewhat different, concerned as it is with the "glance back" to one’s ancestral land, to wrestling with this notion of the fictional "other" – a hunk of land over the rainbow, a geographic space often only existing in fantasy. 

My characters are asking the question of their parent’s home, "Who are you to me?"  Often, that home is a place that is romanticized (as often far-away not well-known places usually are), so in a sense my fiction wrestles with the fictionality of spaces, the place where we put our grief, our hopes, our dreams. 

Perhaps immigrants do this with the new country they are settling in while the children of immigrants do this with their parent’s home, the old country, a home they sometimes only hear of in whispers, in fragments of stories, or see in faded old photographs.