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Writer’s Block: Ayaz Pirani
In our Q&A with Ayaz Pirani, he reflects on the humbling advice of Michael Ondaatje and the art of stepping away from the page, offering a glimpse into his writerly life—where even the quietest moments hum with possibility.
Read on for our interview with Ayaz and more about his new short story collection Death to America (The Porcupine’s Quill).
All Lit Up: Is there one stand-out moment or experience you had that helped you realize you wanted to become a writer?
Ayaz Pirani: I began my undergraduate studies at Glendon College. In those three years, every fall semester, Michael Ondaatje would teach Creative Writing. He was thoughtful in his speech. He didn’t say much, in fact, but you knew how he felt. It was my first turn to submit poems and I read them aloud in class. Everyone offered comments. Finally, Michael said, “It’s good but there should be less of it.” It was a new kind of despair for me, trying to create something out of experience, trying to be a writer.
ALU: If you had to describe your writing style in just a few words, what would they be?
AP: Of course to my ear I’m just writing in plain English. It’s not so much a style then, you know, as it is a few fidelities. I really like plain speech. I’m pretty spartan and oddball, maybe a little gnomic. I like to let my characters speak for themselves. I see a little mystery and pithiness in everyone, I guess.
ALU: Which writers have had the most impact on your own writing?
AP: When I was a kid, there was a series of new paperback editions of fiction from between the world wars. My favourites were The Thin Man and The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett and the baseball stories of Ring Lardner. Wit and austerity were hallmarks of both of these writers. Few words generally sufficed. These male American writers contrasted against the wordy British tradition I had grown up with in Kitchener. I suspect the impact has been lasting.
ALU: How do you overcome creative blocks when they arise?
AP: I do my best not to think about them like that, like a “block.” I don’t want to spend any time trying to move a block, if you know what I mean? I’m going to try and think about the time I’m not writing differently. I like that time in fact. First of all, a bunch of time passes, that’s always good. I move on to bits and pieces, what little mail I get, dust the books on my desk. I try to move on to other things. Perhaps actually producing words is not the whole profession of writing. Being a writer also means reading, thinking, staring at the curtains, taking a walk, being adrift at an odd hour of the day, comparing the rooftop recordings of “Dig a Pony.”
ALU: How do you celebrate when you finish writing a book?
AP: Johan Cryuff, the dutch footballer, was asked why he didn’t celebrate wildly after scoring a particular goal. His reply was that he’d hoped to score more than one goal, and what was he going to do the second time? But I suppose I do celebrate each book though there is no clear-cut moment. Usually when I finish one book I’ve already started the next manuscript so the joys are a bit mixed-up with the agonies.
ALU: What can readers expect from your new book, Death to America?
AP: Readers of Death to America will find a collection of ironies and comedies from the postcolonial immigrant experience. People are hanging on to tattered frays of Empire, whether in Ontario towns, in East Africa, or in California. I’m trying to offer characters that are living in niches. There’s some liberty, you know, when you’re a bit untethered. But immigrants also do a lot of punching against their own nostalgia. That’s hard to show, it’s just so nuanced. I suppose that’s why I like to let my characters speak for themselves. Many of them are fond of vernacular poetic traditions, including the Ismaili ginans and the granths of Indo-Pak. Dropping a line of Kabir while scolding one’s child is a commonplace.
ALU: What do you hope readers take away from your book?
AP: A few hours or days of beguilement.
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In Ayaz Pirani’s debut collection of stories, Death to America, he doesn’t try to straighten a dog’s tail. His stories are the frays on Empire’s fringe, and his colored characters navigate a perennially perfidious Albion.
In the first story, “Battle of Waterloo,” Danju is obliged to choose sides in the struggle between disco and rock and roll, and in the last story, “Brief Survey of Coloreds in the Rift Valley,” Nunu’s feeble crush on his grade-school librarian spins out a second post-colonial yarn. The youngster Aqbal, in “The Lyric,” is rescued by racism, and in “They’ve Forgotten That I’m Not There,” the small-time fence, Mohan, observes the narrow path. And sometimes you get to start over, as Gently discovers in “Kitchener, née Berlin.” Other characters include Arf, Fruq, Eerfal, Salty, the East African dandies Sur and Nur, and the sparring teenagers Umed and Frenni.
With economy and a taste for the oddball’s angle, Ayaz Pirani makes the peculiar quotidian. He draws from Ismaili ginans and granths, and the Indo-Pak heritage of story-telling, oral poetry, and old-fashioned one-liners.
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Ayaz Pirani’s books include Happy You Are Here, Kabir’s Jacket Has a Thousand Pockets, and How Beautiful People Are. A short story collection, Death to America, is now available from The Porcupine’s Quill. Ayaz’s work has been reviewed in The Globe and Mail and Toronto Star.
