Rita Banerjee

Jessica Reidy, Pushcart Nominee, member of VIDA and Quail Bell Magazine, novelist, and yoga practitioner, interviews Rita Banerjee, Diana Norma Szokolyai, Elissa Joi Lewis, Alex Carrigan and Megan Tilley for her article Writing through Holiday Stress: Cambridge Writers’ Workshop Pre-Thanksgiving Retreat in Quail Bell Magazine.  In the article, Jessica Reidy discusses how daily yoga, craft of writing seminars, and workshops go hand in hand to spark creativity, encourage relaxation, and produce good writing habits.  Jessica Reidy writes,“No matter how cozy your family is, the holidays are stressful. Writers need their time, space, and routine to create and sustain their work, and these necessities fall by the wayside as Thanksgiving marches nearer. Then add the surplus of heavy food, sugar-packed nostalgic treats, and the stress-eating, and you’re feeling like a hot mess and your manuscript is still unfinished. The Cambridge Writer’s Workshop (CWW) knows this all too well, which is why the Pre-Thanksgiving Yoga & Creative Writing Juice Cleanse was born. On Saturday November 22 and Sunday November 23rd, from 2-4 PM, at Ashtanga Yoga Shala in New York City, we will be hosting an afternoon of creative writing classes, yoga classes, and juice for writers who need to decompress and write their hearts out, all with a little raw juice kick.”  (Read the article & interview at Quail Bell Magazine, register for Pre-Thanksgiving Yoga & Creative Writing Cleanse at Cambridge Writers’ Workshop)

Rita Banerjee will introduce and lead the discussion for Satyajit Ray’s 1971 film, Company Limited (সীমাবদ্ধ), on Tuesday November 11, 2014 from 6-8:30 pm for the Institute for Indology and Tibetology at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.  The screening will take place in Seminar Room 427 (Ludwigstr. 31, Munich).  The screening is part of the course Bengali 3: Intermediate Bengali Language and Literature at LMU.  Anyone interested in Bengali Cinema or South Asian Art House Film is welcomed to join the screening.  “In Company Limited, the hero is the amiable, self-satisfied, and ambitious young sales manager of a factory manufacturing electric fans, comfortably married and nicely set up in a smart apartment. The arrival from the country of his beautiful, intelligent, naive young sister-in-law unsettles him at the same moment as a crisis in his department awakens him to his own ability to fight dirty. He gets his directorship and emerges from the experience a good deal wiser and rather less certain of himself… This is one of Ray’s best films. The domestic relationship—the unrealized triangle of the man and the two girls—is revealed more by what is left out than by what is shown. At the same time it is one of Ray’s most richly comic films, with shrewd satire on the American-styled business world of Calcutta.” —David Robinson, London Times

Rita Banerjee will introduce and lead the discussion for Satyajit Ray’s 1966 film, The Hero (নায়ক), on Tuesday October 28, 2014 from 6-8:30 pm for the Institute for Indology and Tibetology at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.  The screening will take place in Seminar Room 427 (Ludwigstr. 31, Munich).  The screening is part of the course Bengali 3: Intermediate Bengali Language and Literature at LMU.  Anyone interested in Bengali Cinema or South Asian Art House Film is welcomed to join the screening.  In Satyajit Ray’s The Hero (Nāyak), a sharp-witted, serious young journalist finds herself stuck on a train with a movie superstar in Ray’s surprising examination of “intellectual” and “popular” cultures. Collisions are expected when the bespectacled intellectual (Sharmila Tagore) and the blustery movie star (Uttam Kumar, himself a Bengali matinee idol) wind up sharing tales and time on the train together, but soon the star finds himself revealing a surprising intelligence and self-doubt, as well as secrets from the past. And for the journalist, what begins as the hope of a star exposé turns into the glimpse of one man’s failures and dreams, as well as cinema’s (and fame’s) capability to destroy itself. Many believed the intellectual Ray was anticommercial or antipopular cinema, but The Hero offers a perceptive, empathetic look at that world’s dreams, hopes, and artistic dilemmas. Critic Albert Johnson described it best: it is “a realistic film about the unreality of dreams.” —Jason Sanders

The Cambridge Writers’ Workshop 3rd Annual Yoga & Writing Retreat was held from August 7 -20, 2014 at the Château de Verderonne in Picardy, France, located approximately 50 miles north of Paris. The conference featured workshops in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, as well as craft of writing seminars, art classes, free time to write, and daily yoga and meditation classes.  The faculty includes writers Rita Banerjee, Diana Norma Szokolyai, and Jessica Reidy, and yoga instructor Elissa Lewis.  The retreat was a wonderful time to generate new writing, revise longer manuscripts, enjoy French cultural excursions and countryside life, and practice relaxing sessions of yoga.  Photo Galleries of the 2014 Yoga & Writing Retreat are now up on the CWW Website as are blog posts of daily activities as recorded by Rita Banerjee, Diana Norma Szokolyai, Elissa Lewis, Victor Pachas, Jessica Reidy, and Meghan Tilley:

August 7 | August 8 | August 9 | August 10 | August 11 | August 12 | August 13 |
August 14 | August 15 | August 16 | August 17 | August 18 | August 19 | August 20

Rita Banerjee’s review of the new Ms. Marvel series, “Paging Ms. Marvel: The Perks and Perils of Creating an Islamic, Feminist Superhero,” has just been published on Jaggery: A DesiLit Arts and Literature Journal.  Here’s a selection from the review:

“The new Ms. Marvel comic series focuses on the trials and tribulations of Kamala Khan, a Muslim Pakistani-American high school student from Jersey City. The series is a reboot of the original Ms. Marvel comics made famous by the character of Carol Danvers, who debuted as Ms. Marvel in 1977 and eventually rose to become Captain Marvel in 2012. This new Ms. Marvel, written by G. Willow Wilson and inspired by the adolescence of Marvel Comics editor Sana Amanat, is full of surprises—from sly observations on cultural stereotypes to explorations of geek culture and the fan fiction–verse to redefining concepts of female beauty and empowerment. Or as Amanat writes at the end of the premiere issue of Ms. Marvel, “this book is a victory for all the misfits in the world,” as embodied in the “loveable, awkward, fiercely independent” Kamala. But in attempting to create an Islamic feminist superhero in the guise of an adorable and awkward teenager, Kamala Khan, the new Ms. Marvel has its fair share of both perks and perils.” – Rita Banerjee

Check out the full review here.

William Kelley Woolfitt, who runs Speaking of Marvels, a forum for interviews about chapbooks, novellas, and other short form literature, recently sat down to interview Rita Banerjee about her novella, A Night with Kali (Brooklyn Art House Co-op, 2011).  In the interview, Woolfit asked Rita a series of questions from which were her favorite chapbooks and novellas, to questions on her current writing projects, and her advice to writers working on new projects and book manuscripts.  You can read the full interview here.  Here is a selection of questions from the interview:

What’s your novella about?

A Night with Kali is at its core a coming-of-age ghost story. The novella is about a taxi-driver, Tamal-da, who explains why he left his fishing village near Krishnapur, West Bengal, to work on the dirty and crooked streets of Kolkata. Against an oddly purple mid-day sky, the narration opens on the rain-clogged streets of Kolkata, where Tamal’s car gets stuck in a flood. To pass the time and wait for help, he begins to tell his passenger of how he came to this city and his past, which is filled inexplicably with undead things.

What are some of your favorite novellas? How did they influence your writing or your desire to make a novella of your own?

Novellas seem to capture a magical middle ground between the poignancy and sharp edginess of the short story and the more decadent, sprawling ruminations available to novelists.  Some of my favorite novellas include Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, Leo Tolstoy’s Family Happiness, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, and Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49.  In Dostoevsky’s novella, the singular psychosis and at times, irredeemable actions of the narrator, an extremely likeable anti-hero, propel the narration forward.  In Tolstoy and Goethe’s novellas, both authors emphasize and exploit the desires and emotional uncertainties of their central characters to hook in the reader. And Conrad and Pynchon excel at exploring how objects, symbols, and terrain can reflect and provide commentary on the psychology and motives of characters.

What advice would you offer to an aspiring novella author?

First, read as much as you can, and don’t be ashamed to read those texts others may not consider “literature.”  Look back at the stories, essays, films, poems, speeches, etc., that inspired you the most.  Figure out what made them so effective.  Did it have something to do with the structure of the story?  The emotional authenticity and dynamism of certain characters?  The comedy and turn of events?  The ability of language to capture a lyrical moment persuasively and succinctly?  Figure out why you are drawn to certain narrative and lyrical works, analyze these texts for elements of their style, structure, and content, and from what you’ve learned, see if you can do it. Go ahead and experiment, grab some coffee or brandy if you need it, and write, write, write until you get it right.

excerpt from A Night with Kali

“By the time I reached the old Kali Mandir in the woods, I had lost sight of the shadowy white figure completely.  Walking by the main gate to the temple, I stopped in front of the arched entrance way.  The priest had not gotten up yet and had not opened the doors this early in the morning.  But through the grilled gates, I could see into the main temple hall, which rose majestically in the middle of the forest canopy.  Looking in, I saw the figure of Kali standing there, in the middle of the hall, with her wide and sinister grin. Her tongue was hanging out and in her hands, she carried a variety of weapons including a machete in one and a knot of severed heads in another.  Across her lithe, blue naked body a garland of skulls draped lightly over her breasts.  A short chain-mail skirt with links in the shape of human hands hiked up one of her hips as she stood with her legs parted wide on the body of her husband, Shiva.  Her tongue, thus, rolled down of its own accord.  Bracketed against the moonlight, she made a ferocious figure.  But there was something protective and eternal about her, too.  There was an air of mischief in her smile and the way her body posed provocatively for the spectator…

Watching the stationary figure watch me, I gave her a quick morning prayer… In the moonlight, the statue’s eyes glittered back at me.”

Full interview available at Speaking of Marvels: Rita Banerjee’s A Night with Kali

 

Rita Banerjee will introduce and lead the discussion for Aparna Sen’s 1995 film, Yugant: The End of an Era (a.k.a. “What the Sea Said,” যুগান্ত), on Tuesday July 1, 2014 from 6-8:30 pm for the Institute for Indology and Tibetology at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.  The screening will take place in Seminar Room 427 (Ludwigstr. 31, Munich).  The screening is part of the course Bengali 2: Introduction to the Bengali Language & Art House Film, II at LMU.  Anyone interested in Bengali Cinema or South Asian Art House Film is welcomed to join the screening.  The film focuses on the story of Deepak and Anasuya, who have been separated for eighteen months.  Deepak works as a creative director of an advertising agency in Calcutta, while his wife, Anasuya, is a dancer who is managing her own dance school in Bhubaneshwar, Orissa. They agree to go on a vacation in the fishing village, where they had spent their honeymoon, in an attempt to salvage their marriage. However, each moment that they spend together seems to dredge up old quarrels and unhappiness. Both, having changed over the course of their seventeen years of marriage, must now decide if they can still find a reason to stay together.  With a reference to the Gulf War, the director draws a parallel between the distance that has formed between the couple, the distance between mankind and nature, and the idea that mankind can no longer understand his own nature let alone the natural world.  [Award/Festivals: National Award, 1995 for Best Photography and Best Feature Film In Bengali; Films From the South Festival, Oslo; Alexandria International Film Festival; Fribourg International Film Festival; Indian Film Week in Hong Kong.]