Author Sarah Thankam Mathews spoke about her relationship with writing and her experience immigrating to the U.S. last Thursday as part of the Asian Pacific Islander Desi American Heritage Month keynote speech.
Mathews is a University of Wisconsin-Madison alum who published her debut novel, “All This Could Be Different,” in 2022. The book follows a young woman in Milwaukee in 2008 as she navigates relationships and employment during the Great Recession.
“I would say it’s about a young, queer, Indian woman who moves to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a city where she knows not a soul, and proceeds to reckon with her first job, her first love and her first real friends,” Mathews said.
This year’s theme for APIDA Heritage Month is “Beauty in the Brokenness,” based on the Japanese art of Kintsugi, where cracks in pottery are filled with gold. Mathews said the theme heavily aligns with the story of her life, which is a lot more complex than the upward trajectory life is typically presented to follow.
“The reason why I say that is not an honest characterization of my story is because, throughout my journey, in the interstices of the things I’ve talked about, are periods of meaningful challenge and difficulty,” she said.
Mathews came to the U.S. as a teenager and initially attended high school in the Chicago suburbs. She studied English at UW-Madison before working a number of miscellaneous jobs, culminating in a stable position in Washington, D.C. She ultimately left that job to become a fellow at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, a creative writing program at the University of Iowa.
While in Iowa, Mathews worked on a book that she did not end up publishing. “All This Could Be Different” is technically the second novel she’s written, she said, but only the first to be publicly available.
“I left that program having worked for almost eight years on a book that I could not sell, that I could not even get to a point where I loved it,” she said. “[‘All This Could be Different’] is the first book of mine that other people could read.”
Mathews emphasized that her personal connections are what kept her writing. She spoke of one college friend who constantly read her stories and encouraged her to write consistently.
“All through college, he would be like, ‘Got any writing for me? Got any writing for me?’ and I’d be like … ‘no, we’re in the middle of finals,’” Mathews said.
Without that support from her friends, Mathews said she wouldn’t have felt comfortable enough to publish a full-length novel. She called for writers in the audience to establish connections that can provide an unadulterated perspective on their works.
Mathews came to the U.S. as a teenager and initially attended high school in the Chicago suburbs. She studied English at UW-Madison before working a number of miscellaneous jobs, culminating in a stable position in Washington, D.C. She ultimately left that job to become a fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a creative writing program at the University of Iowa.
