Shastri Akella, THE SEA ELEPHANTS

Totally Booked with Zibby

Zibby Owens

Connection, Inspiration, Moms, Entertainment, Arts, Reading, Books, Parenting, Literary

4.4 • 602 Ratings

🗓️ 17 September 2023

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Zibby interviews debut author Shastri Akella about The Sea Elephants, an utterly immersive and spellbinding queer coming-of-age novel set in 1990s India, about a young man who joins a traveling street theater troupe as he tries to outrun the dark secrets of his past. Shastri shares how this novel suddenly became a queer love story (thanks to his professor!) and helped him come out in real life. He also shares his challenges with unsupportive family members and his decision not to return to India, where Hindu conversion therapy is prevalent. Finally, he shares how he got here, from working in tech at Google to MFA, teaching refugee art classes, and publishing this beautiful book.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Zibi Owens, and you're listening to Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
0:06.7	This 30-minute podcast features a new author interviewed by me every single day, 365 days a year, for about 30 minutes.
0:14.9	I am also the publisher for Zibi Books, which publishes 12 books a year in fiction and memoir.
0:21.9	Our books are already out now.
0:23.5	You can check it out on ZippyBooks.com.
0:25.6	And we have a magazine called Zibby Mag where we have lots of wonderful essays and lifestyle
0:31.2	features.
0:31.8	That's at Zibbymag.com.
0:33.1	We have classes at Zippy Classes.com.
0:35.4	And I recently opened a bookstore in L.a called zibby's bookshop
0:40.3	at one one one three montana avenue at 11th street in san monica i hope that you are able to
0:47.0	enjoy some of our other offerings but this here podcast is the basis of all of it and started in
0:53.3	2018 and no matter what i do this is basically my of all of it and started in 2018. And no matter what I do, this is
0:56.1	basically my favorite thing. Enjoy.
1:03.4	Shastri Akela is the author of The Sea Elephants, a novel. His work has appeared in
1:08.3	Gwarnica, Fairy Tale Review, The Master's Review, Electric Literature, Craft, and elsewhere. He earned an MFA in creative writing and a PhD in comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He's an assistant professor of creative writing at Michigan State University. Welcome, Shastri. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. We're going to discuss your debut novel, The Sea Elephants. Look at this gorgeous cover, by the way. Oh, my gosh. It's so amazing. I really lucked out. Oh, my gosh. For those listening, how would you even describe this? Navy blue background of a painted face looking, you know, red and yellow and white.
1:45.0	Anyway, I'm doing a terrible job.
1:46.4	It's really gorgeous.
1:48.6	It's the mask of one of the characters in the story.
1:53.1	Yeah, it's perfect.
1:54.5	Okay, why don't you tell listeners what your book is about?
1:57.2	The Sea on the Fence is a queer coming of phage novels set in 90s, India. I started
	...

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