Professor Sindya Bhanoo
by Sukhjot Sal
While journalism and fiction might seem like very distinct fields of writing, for Assistant Professor Sindya Bhanoo, they are intertwined.
Bhanoo enjoyed writing in high school, but focused on her interest in STEM, leading her to complete her undergraduate degree in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University.
“It was much later that I started writing again, and journalism felt like a much more practical pursuit than fiction writing, so that’s the path that I took,” Bhanoo said. “But in the back of my mind, I still had that memory of being a girl that loved books and stories and storytelling, and I eventually came back to it.”
The gradual shift from the tech world to journalism began in India, which Bhanoo used to visit often.
“It was striking, every time it was striking, to go to India and then come back to my life in the U.S.,” Bhanoo explained. “I had this sense, from a young age, that telling stories could bring people together, even if they’d never met, and that it was important for one person to know another person’s stories. I think I saw journalism as a way to help facilitate that and it has.”
A few years after completing her bachelor’s, Bhanoo studied journalism as a graduate student at UC Berkeley for two years, allowing her to learn more about the craft from mentors and internships. Her background in computer science made Bhanoo perfect for tech and health and science reporting.
“I became a newspaper reporter and I loved it,” Bhanoo said. “I went to prisons and on fishing boats and it has always been just so fun and so interesting. And still, in the back of my mind, [I had] this idea that I had these stories that I wanted to tell someday.”
After becoming a mother in 2011, Bhanoo reflected on the limitations of journalism, feeling she could not examine peoples’ day-to-day lives as much as she wanted to. In that moment, she felt that if she didn’t write the stories she had in her head, it would be as if they never existed.
“These stories are about a particular community, people that are important to me, and I wanted them to be documented,” Bhanoo said. “Stories of certain people, immigrants and women, marginalized communities, are often untold and they’re absent from the record, absent from the newspapers of the past. Fiction is one way to go back and recover some of that, and tell some of those stories.”
While she admires beautiful language, Bhanoo’s journalism background has led her to favor a simple writing style.
“The telling of the story is not something that I want to complicate,” Bhanoo explained. “I think that life is complex and characters are complex, and that’s where I want the complexity to be.”
In her writing, Bhanoo pays close attention to the seemingly ordinary moments in a person’s life. Her most recently published collection of stories, Seeking Fortune Elsewhere, won the 2023 Oregon Book Award for Fiction.
The collection demonstrates “just how complex the immigrant experience can be and how asserting one’s individuality can grant characters a way out of the past—or lead them back to it,” states the Harvard Review. Bhanoo’s stories “rattle and shake with the heartache of separation,” says a New York Times review, “rendering palpable the magnitude of small decisions in our less-than-small world.”
“My stories are not big adventures,” said Bhanoo, describing some of the themes in her novel. “I have a story about a woman who lives in a retirement community and misses her daughter, a story about a young girl who goes to India to visit her family and then over the course of her childhood, she becomes disconnected with that family. Nothing is huge, but in spending time with these characters and moments I’m hoping to unlock something about who they are.”
"...there are certain stories that I feel equipped to tell... but I think as a teacher there’s a possibility to do so much more."
She completed her MFA in fiction at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas, and taught there after graduating.
“I loved teaching, and I think what I loved about it, is that it allows me — in the same way that journalism does — it allows me to tell other people’s stories,” Bhanoo said. “As a writer of fiction, there are certain stories that I feel equipped to tell and certain stories that I want to tell, but I think as a teacher there’s a possibility to do so much more.”
Teaching both fiction and journalism at Oregon State is important to her. “For me the two are not disconnected, it’s about the same thing — it’s about discovering a truth, and articulating that truth and sharing it with a broader audience,” Bhanoo said.
In the fall, Bhanoo plans to teach a class concentrated on translated literature to MFA students. She’s interested in studying translated works outside of French, German and Spanish to learn more about topics and writing styles from non-western regional writers.
“Being on faculty is really special because it gives you time to do your own work and also to teach and engage with students,” Bhanoo said. “It’s this wonderful sweet spot where I have the freedom to explore what I want to explore, and then also be in the classroom and be in conversation with students. It’s just a joy to be here — this is a beautiful place and part of the country to be in for writing in particular.”
Sukhjot Sal is a fourth-year honors student majoring in English and minoring in writing. She is the Editor in Chief of OSU's lifestyle magazine, Beaver's Digest, and is completing her thesis on OSU's treatment of former English instructor Bernard Malamud and the writing department under mentor Neil Davison. After graduation, she will intern at The Bulletin in Bend and apply to graduate schools for journalism.