In Conversation with Mehreen Ahmed

 

We have recently published Mehreen's collection of stories, White Moon. Today she tells us a little more about her collection.   

 

So White Moon is a collection of stories that have been published elsewhere. What made you decide to put these particular ones together?

That is correct. These are republished pieces. There is a reason why I wanted these together. The stories are speculative and fall under a broad genre with many sub-genres such as sci-fi, horror, fantasy, and alternate history. They explore the many facets of imagination blending in a genre-bending, and unique collection, pushing the boundaries.

Can you tell us a little about some of the journals and magazines where these were published? 

Yes, some of the publishers were journals such as Litro Magazine,UK. Panorama: Journal of Travel Place and Nature, UK. Kitaab, Singapore. Quail Bell, USA. Popshot Quarterly special collector's edition, UK. Decolonial Passage, USA. Ink Pantry curator of fine words, UK, BlazeVOX special issue, USA. The Chiron Review, USA.

 

Do you have a favourite publication?

While they all pushed the limits of my creativity, however, I was happy with what I was able to achieve with the River of Melted Chocolate in which I thought of an ultimate world where people had entered a house that was hosting a party for a motley crowd. But no one ever saw them coming out. It was a house without any exits.

 

Which story was the most difficult to write?

Yellow God was tough to write. Because I was trying to write it by bending the genres. Hence, this story blends fairy tales and cutting-edge AI, following Kant's transcendental Idealism which in simplest terms means what we see is a partial reality because hyper-reality exists in space and time of which we see a representation only. see https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-transcendental-idealism/#TranRealEmpiIdea. 

I wrote and re-wrote this many times tying and untying knots as it were while grappling to understand Kant's theory and use it in the story seamlessly.

 

Even though the stories have been published before we did quite a lot of editing. This was in part, I think because the stories work differently collectively from the way they worked individually.  Could you tell our readers a little more about this? 

When stories are published individually, they use a set of phrases, words, and sentences that work uniquely for that particular story only. However, when put in a collection, a lot of syntax may appear similar and redundant. To avoid this redundancy or repetitions, edits need to be done meticulously to preserve both the integrity of the individual stories and yet, not sound monotonous at the same time with the same kind of syntactic constructions.

 

Do you have any advice for the short story writer?

There should be some speculative elements in short stories with a reeling effect, so readers may come back as ask what was this story really about? The answer must be alluded to but not entirely written. Let readers connect the dots and come to their conclusions.

 

Do you have any more news about your writing or any events?

I am writing my third novel. I have only just drafted the first two chapters. I think this will take a while. I am also compiling another book of one-sentence pre-published stories, which I would like send out once I have enough one-sentence in it.