TC had the opportunity to sit down with the the author of "The Panic Button", Koom Kankesan, and find out he stumbled upon his calling in writing. Check out our interview with this creative and thought provoking writer below.
TamilCulture: Tell us a bit about yourself. Koom Kankesan: I was born in Sri Lanka. My dad, and then a little later my mom, went to England because my dad was doing his PhD there. I was about 4 when I went to England to join them. We were there when the civil war broke out in the early 80s, so going back to Sri Lanka was not an option.
My dad found England a difficult place to get work, and he didn’t like it there. He got a job in Peru, and from there we came to Canada because at the time Canada was accepting people more readily than they are now. My dad got a new job and had to go back to school in his 40s. We kind of lived a very hard scrabble immigrant life here and I was expected to become a doctor like most kids of Tamil parents.
That’s the kind of belief I was labouring under until about midway through high school, and then something happened, some kind of switch. I realized that my heart wasn’t in the path that my parents wanted. By the time I finished high school I just knew I wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t know how to do it. I always felt sort of outside of it—there aren’t a lot of people in our culture who become writers. I went to university and took courses that I was interested in but not really knowing what I was doing. I dropped out and tried just being a writer, but that didn’t work because I didn’t have a direction. So I went back to school and went into a creative writing program in Montreal and I finished my undergrad.
I was just sort of stumbling around blindly knowing I wanted to be a writer. The other part of it was just figuring out how to be a writer. Eventually I became a high school teacher and wrote part time. I had published a few articles but I couldn’t make a living from it. It’s been a very difficult path, much of it in isolation. Fortunately I’ve had a few teachers who encouraged me along the way.
TC:What has kept you going in spite of the obstacles that you’ve faced? KK:Well I have a theory—I think everyone has a cardinal virtue that they feel tied to or that they’re good at. I think that mine is this quality of honesty or the nature of honesty that really appeals to me. Even when I was really young, the kind of conversations I would have involved probing things; I wanted to understand things. I think that always made me different. Because of that I was drawn to writing. A good writer will open up things, be introspective, and explore things. So if that’s something that’s inside of you—this virtue—it’s got to find an expression. Writing, for me, became the possibility to do that.
TC: Who has helped to guide your career? KK:I had teachers or mentors who gave me good feedback about what I was writing. Even if it wasn’t quite perfect yet, they saw something in me that could grow in the future. That’s what a good teacher should be able to do.
I had a lot of doubts about whether I was a real writer or just wanted to be a writer. I think they saw that I was a real writer, whatever that was, and their reassurance was enough to keep the spark going.
TC:What do you think set "The Panic Button" apart in terms of why it has had the success that your earlier pieces did not? KK:I think with time I had to learn how to write very directly and not think about it in such an artificial, constructed way. And I just got better with time. I learned to express myself more directly and get the emotion from inside of my heart or inside of my head onto the page. The whole development of craft is finding your method for doing something in a way that allows other people to understand and be carried along with what you idea or message is. It just took me a while to practice, fine tune and express my voice clearly and succinctly, with as little diminished as possible.
TC:What advice do you have for aspiring writers? KK:Just admiring someone’s writing is not enough. You can’t just copy them and write in their shadow. You have to write what you really feel, want to say and want to change about what you see. It took me a while for that to really happen, to figure out what I wanted to say. It’s hard to find a way to tap into it so that it all comes together.
TC:What drives you to keep writing in spite of how challenging it is? KK:It makes my life meaningful. It’s the most important thing to me. That feeling hasn’t gone away. People would say to me you shouldn’t write unless you feel that you absolutely have to, unless it’s an urge that you can’t extricate from yourself. I wasn’t sure if that was the case with me, I thought maybe I just wanted to be published. I just wanted that validation. But more and more as I get older I think it just becomes a comfortable part of who I am. The writing doesn't necessarily become any easier and when I begin a new project, all of the uncertainty about whether I’ll be able to get it published is there. But the middle ground is okay like the Buddhists say; you don’t have to feel one extreme or the other. You just have to find an honesty or an authenticity that takes you through.
TC: Do you feel that you can describe your style of writing or is it always evolving? KK:I feel like I’m trying to find my voice constantly. It is very different from most South Asian writers that are writing today. I never really liked that voice. I didn’t like that kind of style that was influenced by Rushdie. I love the fact that there are books that are about my culture, or those similar to it, that are being published now, but there does seem to be a trend of female South Asian writers writing about arranged marriage in this very flowery sense. I don’t really write like that or relate to that.
TC:Do you have any new projects in the works? KK:I’m working on a sequel that’s more ambitious and kind of different in scope. It’s about 5 years later from "The Panic Button" and focuses more on being Tamil, specifically in Scarborough, and addresses what it is to finally know that you are not going to have a state or homeland to return to.
For more information on "The Panic Button" check out the official facebook page.
—Nive Thambithurai
