I used to just accept it. People would ask if I was Indian, and I would say yes. It wasn't until I was in my thirties that I would start correcting people, saying, no actually, I'm Sri Lankan. I would say it's this green little island at the bottom of India and maybe draw them a picture.
From the marketing point of view, there certainly is hope that [South Asian writers] will write sexy arranged-marriage novels. Because they believe that will sell.
I would say that sexuality was this sort of area of conflict and restriction for me growing up. Writers go where the conflict is, and that's where the conflict was in my life. I was having screaming fights with my parents about the fact that I was dating white boys.
At one point, my mother stopped speaking to me for six months; it was after that period that the whole erotica-writing thing became public. In some ways, maybe that made it a little easier for me, because I was used to fighting with them by then.
In my classes, I usually start the quarter introducing myself to the students. I give them the whole bio; I tell them that, among other things, I used to write erotica, or that I'm bi. The whole thing. I think it sets a different set of expectations for the class
Once they know that I'm willing to say almost anything about my life, I think it makes it easier for them to say things about their lives, to explore them through fiction.
It depends a lot on where I'm teaching, too. At Northwestern, students tend to approach these matters differently than students at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City might. Here's the brief version of it: You guys aren't as easily shocked.
I guess I set out to be a professional writer when I was about 23. I had finished college, and, at that point, I hadn't gotten in to any of the Ph.D. programs I'd applied to, probably because I'd arrogantly applied only to the very top ones.
I was temping and doing secretarial work while also writing for fun, all of the time. And I thought it would be really great if I could make a living doing this. But it served as patchwork for a while.
Even if I said I was making a living as a writer, I was still piecing together odds and ends; some of it was fiction, some of it was porn, and some of it was computer manuals. So there was a real range. It wasn't until I contracted with HarperCollins for a two-book deal that the money became the kind of money you could actually live on.
One of the stories I published in Aqua Erotica [a collection Mohanraj edited in 2000] was written by a woman who was a graduate student in physics at Stanford at the time. If you can write a sexy letter to your boyfriend or girlfriend, you can write an erotica story.
If you do it well, people will take it seriously. You do have to get past the initial reaction that this is just genre stuff. This is true if you write science fiction or anything other than strict mainstream. People have assumptions about the quality of the work, and you have to prove them wrong.
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