Shashi Bhat

*COVER REVEAL* 🌿🍑🫐🐝 Thank you to Kelly Hill for this gorgeous, clever design. Very thrilled to share that my short story collection will be out this April! Available for pre-order now. For an early look at an excerpt, please visit CBC Books (links in bio). (Yes, I did accidentally give my book the same title as a Taylor Swift song. I regret nothing.) ~~~ DEATH BY A THOUSAND CUTS From the Governor General’s Award-shortlisted author of The Most Precious Substance on Earth comes a breathtaking and sharply funny collection about the everyday trials and impossible expectations that come with being a woman. "What would have happened if she’d met him at a different time in her life, when she was older, more confident, less lonely, and less afraid? She wonders not whether they would have stayed together, but whether she would have known to stay away." A writer discovers that her ex has published a novel about their breakup. An immunocompromised woman falls in love, only to have her body betray her. After her boyfriend makes an insensitive comment, a college student finds an experimental procedure that promises to turn her brown eyes blue. A Reddit post about a man’s habit of grabbing his girlfriend’s breasts prompts a shocking confession. An unsettling second date leads to the testing of boundaries. And when a woman begins to lose her hair, she embarks on an increasingly nightmarish search for answers. With honesty, tenderness, and a skewering wit, these stories boldly wrestle with rage, longing, illness, and bodily autonomy, and their inescapable impacts on a woman’s relationships with others and with herself. @mcclellandstewart @penguinrandomca @cookemcdermid

Happy Mother's Day to this joker, who once let me dress her up as a spreadsheet for Halloween and then won first place in her office costume contest. She was perhaps nineteen the first time she had her photo taken, and since then she hasn't missed a photo op.

I'm between rounds of edits on my book, so I am trying to start writing a new book, or rather, failing to start writing a new book. I have thousands of words of notes and many Chrome bookmarks and 972 words of a first chapter, but I dislike the 972 words. I keep looking at them and thinking I should start over, but on the other hand, 972 words is better than no words, so perhaps I should just ignore this feeling and keep going. This is identical to the dilemma many face in relationships, though in that case you should probably just leave. The 972 words are in third-person, the point of view of true literature. One time a magazine rejected a first-person story I sent them and said, "Have you considered putting this in third-person to make it more literary?" More literary? I wondered. What about Lolita? What about The Great Gatsby? What about this Ben Lerner novel? So I sent them a different story that was in third-person, and they rejected it and said, "Have you considered writing non-fiction?" The goalposts are always moving. Why is it that every time you (or is it just me?) start writing a new thing it's like you've never written anything before? I googled "how to start a new novel." First AI offered to write the novel for me. Then the article I read said "principal" instead of "principle," and I couldn't trust it after that. And look at these questions people ask: "Who pays $200 for reading novels?" I don't know, maybe the Canada Council. "How many books to sell to make $100,000?" Have you considered selling pharmaceuticals instead? Meanwhile, I am a flowing river of Instagram posts. I was trying to write and now here I am instead writing an Instagram post about trying to write. Is that why they named it Meta? With Instagram captions, it's like I have hypergraphia. It's so easy. Idea: write your novel in Instagram voice. It's a persona like any other. You didn't think this was the real me, did you? And what is a novel but many Instagram captions stitched together? Yes, but Instagram is in first-person. Literature is in third.

If you want to feel good about yourself and are a person who craves external validation, bake a cake for a room full of poets. I've been in this poetry book club for like 7 years? This was the first time I hosted. I used to have people over often. In Halifax, I had themed parties: breakfast-for-dinner party and wine-and-cheese party and miracle-fruit party and fancy-clothes-for-no-reason party, and a Halloween party where I rigged up a Scream mask to look like it was peering out from behind my shower curtain, to startle people when they entered the bathroom. I lost the habit during the pandemic, so this was the most people I've had over since 2019. 14 or 15 people? How amazing that 6 years ago we were isolating and hoarding canned goods and now we're brazenly dipping flatbreads in a shared bowl of hummus again. Arguably the best feeling is baking a cake and seeing people be excited to eat it. This book club is great for that, because poets are an expressive people. They describe flavours and use hand gestures and draw connections from this cake to other cakes they've eaten in their lives. I also like getting to use my cake stand. It's risky to bake a new cake for other people. It's not like baking cookies, where you can try one and make sure it tastes okay and isn't poison. I was happy with this cake. The recipe was for an orange cake, but I replaced orange with cardamom, vanilla, and rosewater. It's a semolina almond flour cake made with yogurt and vegetable oil, with a rosewater simple syrup poured over it after baking. I halved the syrup in fear it would be cloying, and I think this was the right choice. The poets mused about the texture and tried to guess what made the cake so moist. My photos so rarely have people in them, so it looks like I just bake reclusively, but how often should you interrupt genuine good times to perform having a good time? Here is the food I made. Hummus. A spanakopita spiral. A cake that's thematically unrelated to the book but coincidentally matches the book's colour scheme. Trust that the good times are happening offscreen.

As a child I watched a lot of HGTV and made my dad take me to the Home Show so I could meet Debbie Travis, and on days off from school I would reorganize the garage or paint my brother's bedroom green as a surprise; you know, regular kid hobbies. I dreamed of becoming an interior decorator or home organization professional, until my parents informed me that these were not valid career paths, though I bet they're regretting that now that I'm a fiction writer. As an adult I spend less time than expected decoupaging dressers and installing faux exposed brick walls, so I enjoyed the soothing, aesthetic task of culling and organizing my book collection. I am woefully parting with about a hundred lit mag issues I received while serving on Canada Council juries. You can't keep everything forever. All the dust is gone now, too--how do you fellow book people keep your shelves free of dust? Is there, for example, a clever spray I might buy at Home Depot? I wish these books were more representative of my actual reading tastes. There are lots of books I think are just okay and am only keeping for the associated memories, whereas many of the books I really love have been returned to the library. Probably this doesn't matter. Probably this feeling is unresolved MFA trauma from when people would come to your home and scoff as they gazed judgmentally upon your bookshelf, so you (hypothetical example) pre-hid Bridget Jones's Diary under your mattress. Probably when I die some stranger will come in here to haul my stuff into a 1-800-GOT-JUNK truck and take my emotionally shattered cat to the SPCA and they'll be like, man, books are so heavy, why didn't she just get a Kindle, and why didn't she buy that spray from Home Depot, and why did she hang on to this copy of Atlas Shrugged, was she like, a Libertarian, and why is this wacky Richard Farina novel flagged with so many Post-It notes? But again, this doesn't matter, because I'll be in the afterlife, where your book collection is not only infinite and dust-free but also says exactly who you are.

I'm on my way to renew my driver's license, and I suppose they will need to take a photo. While my hands won't be in the photo, I painted my nails, as it's important to feel confident from head to toe while having your photo taken. Maybe if I ask politely they let will me have my hands in the photo, in a sort-of face framing way. And then I can also use this as my author photo. Two birds, one stone. I like painting my nails, because you can't do much else at the same time, so basically it's part of my mindfulness practice. I've never gotten a manicure before. I did have a pedicure once, eighteen years ago, as a social activity. We all sat in massage chairs having our feet exfoliated while facing in the same direction. I also cut my own hair, because why would you pay lots of money to make smalltalk with your glasses off and lean on an uncomfortable neck rest for an hour in a cloud of chemicals, and then put your glasses back on to realize you look like someone else? Nightmare. My haircut is very normal and easy to achieve. One time in Baltimore they gave me a fashion-forward haircut and everyone commented on it, and that was enough for me. Fashion tangent: All the Instagram fashion ladies are in barrel leg jeans. I don't know how to feel. These are pants that give you the silhouette of a barrel? Ok. Wow. Fashion. I've noticed that when asking questions on a fashion subreddit, people say, "we." As in, "What pants are we wearing this spring, ladies?" This spring, we will all wear the same pants. Then, a blood oath. Dress for your body type they say. Wear what makes you happy, they say. Yes, but what if I just want to look cool? Recently a young person messaged me and said they'd read my book and called me "dope as hell." That was the coolest I've ever felt. Occurred to me this might look like an engagement announcement. I bought these rings on Etsy like five years ago. (Also pictured: a lizard from a flea market in Barcelona; The Bedside Book of Birds.) I am not engaged, unless you count my engagement in the act of living.

During the semester I get buried in work, so to save time and mental energy I eat the same meal on repeat. This term was especially hectic, so I ate the same breakfast and lunch for like three months. For lunch I had raisin bread toasted with peanut butter, a sprinkle of cinnamon, a drizzle of honey, and thinly sliced apples. Have I been meeting my macronutrient needs? Let's assume yes. It's quick and strangely transcendent, delicious enough to eat 90 days in a row, and gets me through a three-hour class. I swear I eat a pile of vegetables for dinner. Sometimes while toasting the bread and slicing the apples, I listen to a productivity podcast, and in this way I will eventually become my best self. I save bread ends in my freezer, so my end-of-term reward was making this bread pudding. Bread pudding is just bread transformed into a new, spongier, more protein-rich bread. It's bread recycled into bread. It's like in elementary school when you learn how to make paper by tearing up existing paper into tiny pieces, soaking it in water and flattening it into new, inferior paper. What was the lesson there? I reduced the sugar and skipped the decadent sauce to make it more breakfast than dessert. The second day it had settled into a fudge state, so I toasted a slice in the pan and ate it with maple syrup. (Also made tomato soup, croutons, and muffins, to clear the fridge/freezer of Parmesan rinds, sourdough heels, just-expired yogurt, and last year's blueberries.) Now I'm trying to get through this bread pudding so I can buy more bread and start the process over, then repeat, and this is how the rest of my life will unfold. Most bread I buy is discounted to begin with. It's funny how you go through the year saving $2 on raisin bread and rewarding yourself with a Depression-era loaf, and then you do your taxes and the CRA says you owe them like $4,130.22 or whatever outrageous number, equal to a really nice time in Tokyo or more raisin bread than you could eat in your life. Meanwhile, retirement remains a distant dream.💸

My 20-year Cornell reunion is coming up this June. I was the yearbook editor, which explains my propensity for nostalgia and my obsessive need to document everything with photos and captions. Yearbook captions have a specific formula: Two sentences. The first, in present tense, describes what's in the photo. The second, in past tense, provides context. "A sign displays the masthead of the 2006 Cornellian, with an unfortunate fallen letter E. Behind this sign was a windowless office in the basement of Willard Straight Hall, where Shashi Bhat '06 spent an unreasonable number of hours writing captions according to a rigid formula, when she should have been enjoying her precious youth." Our yearbook won an award--I forget what it was for, but somewhere in my parents' house there is a trophy in the shape of Benjamin Franklin. If you say you went to a school like Cornell, everyone assumes your parents are rich, and though I knew the occasional peer whose family had an octagonal bathtub, many students were like me, from middle class families, receiving hefty financial aid packages. I lucked into a job as the yearbook editor, which was more work but also better pay than any other student job and allowed me to work more than the maximum number of hours allowed to international students, and to graduate without debt. Yearbooks in the US are a surreal, competitive business--after we signed our contract, Jostens literally flew me and my co-editor to Hawaii for a week and bought us a lot of drinks with umbrellas on them. Nowadays that would all be a Zoom call. Am I living the extravagant lifestyle that my college yearbook career suggested I would live? Perhaps not. And perhaps I am not running Goldman Sachs or Google Arts & Culture or the US Treasury or whatever it is my classmates are doing, but hey, I wrote and sold four books, and...have I mentioned I invented the Post-It note?

It was satisfying to hit 100,000 words, but it was EVEN MORE satisfying to get the same manuscript down to 80,000 words. I met the goal like two weeks ago, but then I added stuff and had to do the cutting process again. I really like the James Baldwin quote about writing a sentence as clean as a bone. I scratch it down in the margins of student stories. Here on Instagram though, words don't matter, do they? Since I hit 80,000 the second time, it's become easier, like I am in a flow state of cutting. It's because I'm reading Lauren Groff's Brawler. Her sentences are so clean and nimble--they lift off the page--and then you reach the ending of a story and a line just knocks you over. I was tearing up on the SkyTrain reading an ending of a story today, but that's okay because nobody notices anything anymore.

My usual drink order is a glass of cheap white wine. At happy hour, both the server and my friends look expectantly at me, shocked if I order red. I only have 5 or 6 ounces, because at 8 ounces I become a hugger. (Once every five years I'll order a refreshing herbacious cocktail, because I enjoy imagining I'm a hummingbird sipping dew from a leaf.) I went to college in a wine region, which is silly. Why do college students need nice wine? College students should drink coffee and Pabst Blue Ribbon and should probably also drink more water. People at my college would rent busses to go on wine tours and return using words like "terroir." College students are like a newly engineered species. Last week my students were talking about how hard it is to make friends when you're not in school. "But you ARE in school!" I said. It's not the same, they said. There's no playground, they said. Everyone agreed that the college needs to install a playground. In my other class, half the people didn't know what a toonie is. "You guys don't know what a toonie is?" I said. Cash is an artifact of the past, they told me. I said I was in Grade 6 when they introduced the toonie, and we were all trying to separate the outside part from the inside part, due to a rumour that you could trade them in and double your money. I feel that an occasional anecdote illustrating how old I am increases my credibility in the classroom. One of the most popular courses at my college was Intro to Wines. Seven hundred people took it every term. You had to purchase a little black suitcase full of wine glasses. On Wednesday afternoons, people walked around campus carrying that little suitcase as a status symbol. I, however, spent the Wednesday afternoons of my junior year taking The Art of the Essay, a small seminar taught by the greatest professor on planet Earth; a life-changing, eye-opening course, ironically held in a windowless room. I was a pre-med English major, a nightmare coin-flip for a South Asian parent--and by the end of that semester I'd dropped out of my MCAT prep courses and decided I was going to be a writer. Imagine I'd taken Intro to Wines! Perhaps I'd have become a sommelier.

This is my tenth year at EVENT's annual fundraising used book sale. It would be the eleventh, if not for the ill-fated book sale of March 2020. It's easy to get cynical about people not reading these days. Our attention spans are trash! we exclaim. Students don't even read whole books anymore! cries The Atlantic. Wuthering Heights is now a sexy motion picture! says Hollywood. The EVENT book sale is the antidote to all of that. A student asked me if we do the sale at other colleges, and I said, nope, just this one. She thought for a moment, then brightened and said, "We're lucky then!" Since the books are donated, we never know what we'll find. This year I found a book on how to convince your husband to see a doctor, which I decided to file under Drama. One year Ian found a personality-by-colour book that revealed unsettling truths about us all. I also get a lot of satisfaction out of operating the payment machine. I like to try to predict who will want a receipt. I was surprised when an employee from Finance did not. Young people often laugh to themselves when given the option. They're like, "Haha, why would I want that?" and I'm like, "You must have missed the webinar about filing your taxes as an independent contractor." I hold up the machine, and they reach out their phones to tap, and as the machine goes beep-beep-beep, I think of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the two fingers almost touching, the divine spark of life--except in this case, one of us goes home with a book, and hmm, I've accidentally constructed an analogy where I am God. I told myself I would donate more books than I brought home this year, so I bought just one: RK Narayan's The Vendor of Sweets. But then at home I realized I already had a copy, under the title The Sweet-Vendor. Now that I'm reading it, I see that I have read it before. This book is so charming. It's like listening to an uncle tell you an anecdote that he probably made up. Perhaps one day I will meet an ideal reader for this book and give them a copy. For now, though, I think I'll just keep both.

I still have twenty things to do today, but this morning I was grading a student's Lovecraftian tale in my living room and the outside kept getting brighter and brighter, i.e. the opposite of the story I was reading. Before social media, this was what distracted us--sunlight. So I took a walk. I made it a productive walk by stopping for groceries and also by pondering important thoughts, like, when is it worth keeping a joke in your manuscript when it isn't really anything but a joke? How many jokes can you cut without sacrificing voice? Can I shoehorn these cut jokes into my real-life conversations so that they aren't just lost forever? How many Shoppers Drug Mart jokes can a manuscript sustain? Should I write a novel set at Shoppers Drug Mart? Related: In workshop this week we discussed how to reduce the word count in a story to find more space, so I described my ongoing journey of trying to cut down my manuscript. It was 100,000 words, then 92,000, and now 80,296--I am aiming for under 80k. I told them how, while I am cutting some longer sections, a lot of it is just going sentence by sentence, word by word, and compressing the way you would a poem. They stared at me as if to say, Professor, why are you once again telling us about your tedious life? I didn't tell them about the whole chapter I cut depicting the tragic euthanization of the narrator's cat, which is the most silly and heartbreaking thing I have ever written and also a subtle critique of late-stage capitalism, but, yes, basically irrelevant to the plot of my novel. Kill your darlings. Or--transform your darling into a weird novella and self-publish it under a fake name?