Janika Oza is a writer based in Toronto. She was the winner of the 2019 Malahat Review Open Season Award in Fiction and has received fellowships from VONA, Tin House, One Story, and the Millay Colony. She is published in The Best Small Fictions 2019 anthology, Cincinnati Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her KR Short Fiction Contest-winning story “Fish Stories” can be found here. It appears in the Jan/Feb 2021 issue of the Kenyon Review.
What was your original impetus for writing “Fish Stories”?
I think often about hauntings: how we can be haunted by a memory, a place, an action we did or didn’t take. I think these hauntings can manifest in very physical ways, like how we sleep or dream or digest. I wanted to take it one step further and consider what it might mean if that haunting walked through the front door. For the mother in the story, this is absolutely real, and I was interested in how the daughter would respond to something she doesn’t perceive, but maybe wishes she could.
Driven by the mother’s visceral imaginings of the brother’s presence, the story comes to an abrupt end when she finally turns around to find him vanished again—asking, in the final paragraph, “Oh . . . Where did he go?” How did you go about structuring this piece to correspond with the shifting perception of loss, especially as it exists so differently between two characters living within a shared reality?
When I first wrote this piece, it unfolded in one long paragraph with no breaks, like a single breath. That structure allowed me to occupy this ambiguous space between waking and dreaming: it felt to me that the mother had opened her eyes to a better world, one in which her son had returned, but the whole time we’re poised on the edge of this world, knowing that at any moment she might blink and see another reality. That line at the end (“Oh . . . Where did he go?”) was the blink. The important part for me was the idea of perception—both worlds are real, and in a way the mother’s longing and grief is so strong that it materializes before her. The daughter in the story views the world very differently, but I also wanted her to occupy this space of possibility, where she chooses to accept rather than disrupt her mother’s understanding of reality. I see that as a kind of love.
From the first line to the final image of this piece, the intangibility of death and memory is counterbalanced by habitual acts of cooking and eating. Can you talk a bit about the emotional response evoked by food in this story and how you see it to relate to grief?
Food comes up in my writing all the time, and it’s often associated with feelings of ancestral longing, diasporic angst, family ritual, and love. That’s a part of this story as well, but I wanted to challenge myself in this piece to write about food in a different way. I wanted the food itself to become a kind of haunting here, both in the muscle memory of the mother as she prepares a meal just the way her son likes it, and in the truth that the bowl of soup will once again sit untouched. The meal that was supposed to be a comfort ends up being the opposite, echoing the last time the truth of the boy’s death disrupted their world. The food in this piece reflects not only tenderness and care but violence and horror. I was interested in exploring how food can empty us.
What is either the best or the worst piece of writing advice you’ve received or given?
I’ve heard this one around, that you have to become the person you need to become to write the book you want to write. That always strikes me. It feels important to remember that my writing self is a part of a whole self, which exists in the world. To me, writing is one way of becoming, of unfolding towards a world where we can live better, be better. I think of this often with my novel. There were so many people I had to meet and parts of myself I had to understand before I could write the book I needed to write. And that’s a long process, one that requires some fallow periods and time away from the writing itself.
What project(s) are you working on now, or next?
I’m in the revision stage of my novel, which is a multi-generational story about an Indo-Ugandan family navigating their loyalties through forced migration and colonialism. Like “Fish Stories,” it’s interested in longing and survival and the things we do and don’t say to protect those we love.