Faces of SAL: Akshaya Ajith
April 1, 2021
By Gabriela Denise Frank
Writing serves many purposes for Writers in the Schools (WITS) Intern Akshaya Ajith.
“It’s a tool and a gateway for people to connect and to understand and open doors to mutual respect,” she said. “Writing can be an exploration, but it can also be like going into battle, whether that’s with falsehood or injustice or a conflict inside of you. I use writing to talk about my sense of cultural identity. I’m trying to pinpoint why I felt torn.”
Akshaya is not only a WITS intern, she’s also a WITS student. For three years during middle school, local writers like Imani Sims and Jourdan Keith brought creative writing into Akshaya’s classroom. Her first experience with poetry came in sixth grade.
“I hadn’t really had teachers talk about poetry more than rhyming or making little poems on Mother’s Day,” she said. “It was one of my first experiences making my own poetry. It was a bridge between being creative and academic. That wasn’t really stuff we did in school, being independently creative.”
Knowing that her high school didn’t participate in the Writers in the Schools program, Akshaya reached out to SAL’s Director of Education, Alicia Craven, to see about internship opportunities. Akshaya first met Alicia when she was asked to read her poem, “Imperfect,” at a SAL event; today, Akshaya writes about events for the SAL/ON blog. (See her most recent post on the event with Madeline Miller.)
Akshaya said, “I didn’t want to lose the community I had built in WITS. I reached out to Alicia when I realized my new school wasn’t going to have a program like this. WITS has meant a lot to me. It’s helped me explore my voice as a writer and as a person.”
As you’ll see from our conversation, Akshaya is bright, curious, and driven, but the choice she had to make—finding another way to stay connected to a creative community—is an unfortunate one. In one breath, we assert the power of writing, yet it’s the first thing under-funded or defunded (along with music, dance, theater, visual arts, crafts) in schools. Writing has become the dessert we’re promised if we’re good, rather than an essential tool for change and expression. When writing is considered nonessential—a luxury or (heaven forbid) “fun”—we lose as a community, a society, and a culture.
What good is a degree in English literature when we have to put food on the table? (A question in my home growing up.) In the short-term, particularly in hard times, it’s easy to pick practical over reflective or creative. Practical pays the rent; practical keeps us alive. Practical comes with charts and dollars, so it must be worth more than joy. And so begins a lifetime of small “practical” choices that leave us both aching and numb though we can’t pinpoint why, exactly. We feel lonely. Misunderstood. What we do and have and earn isn’t enough, yet we do and make more to buy more. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer describes this state of being as: Everything for sale here is dead.
What good is a degree in English literature when we have to put food on the table? (A question in my home growing up.) In the short-term, particularly in hard times, it’s easy to pick practical over reflective or creative. Practical pays the rent; practical keeps us alive. Practical comes with charts and dollars, so it must be worth more than joy. And so begins a lifetime of small “practical” choices that leave us both aching and numb though we can’t pinpoint why, exactly. We feel lonely. Misunderstood. What we do and have and earn isn’t enough, yet we do and make more to buy more. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer describes this state of being as: Everything for sale here is dead.
What Akshaya said fights against this. We should listen to her. And act.
“I think people miss out on how artists and creative writers and journalists to have contributed to the world we see today,” Akshaya said. “Once people familiarize themselves with writing and open up, it’s fundamental to how we see ourselves, how we perceive identity, and how we perceive the world around us.”
If ever there was a moment to make the literary arts more than dessert or luxury goods, it’s now.
The pandemic has not only cracked open our hearts, it’s broken through our thinking of what’s possible and impossible—what we took for granted would always (or never) be, and what seemed too big and foundational to change. Writing, literacy, and creativity are not “nice to have.” The ability to know oneself, to question and reimagine how the world works, to think critically, to inspire others, to express gratitude and ideas—to collaborate and even warn each other of disaster through the power of story—this is what sustains us as human. This is what keeps us alive.
We are not made of plastic or steel or glass. We are not hard.
The elegant, infinite complexity of our soft bodies and brains is evident each time we push away from the computer with Zoom fatigue. Our physical and mental overwhelm in response to hard things shouldn’t surprise us, but it does. The nourishing power of a hug, a tree, or a story shouldn’t surprise us, but it does.
“My friends said their parents were a lot more upset than they were because they weren’t really prepared for something like this to happen,” Akshaya said, “but for the kids around me—myself included—it’s scary how much we’ve normalized it. This moment can’t be lost to history. It can’t be thrown away. It can’t be desensitized. It can’t be normalized. Language has to be used accurately and it has to be used with weight and with power.”
Today’s challenges and opportunities won’t be met by machines but creative minds and hearts, if we nurture them—if we exercise them to keep them supple. We cannot forfeit our nature as curious, emotional beings because it’s difficult to assign a numerical value to our creativity. Talking with Akshaya underlined what’s felt more true with each passing day:
“It’s not easy to face a world where you’re seeing only one version of humanity,” she said. “That’s what’s impactful about language: we use it to understand differences and what makes us unique, but also what unites us.”
“It’s not easy to face a world where you’re seeing only one version of humanity,” she said. “That’s what’s impactful about language: we use it to understand differences and what makes us unique, but also what unites us.”
And so, we must write our way toward the future we imagine. As poet and essayist Aimee Nezhukumatathil says, “When you approach the world with a sense of wonder, the reflex is joy.”
That is worth living for.
Gabriela Denise Frank: I’m excited to talk with you, Akshaya! Before we dig into Writers in the Schools (WITS), which you’ve participated in as a student and an intern, how did you come to writing? Were you a reader from a young age?
Akshaya Ajith: It’s funny, when I was a lot younger, I was really bad at reading and writing. It wasn’t my strong suit. I went through a phase where I wasn’t able to find a lot of joy in it. In elementary school, I started reading more, like the Percy Jackson series and these epic childhood fantasy stories that allowed me to understand the world around me in a different way and find joy and escape into fantastic stories. I got introduced to writing as a reader. Some of the first things I started writing were stories of my own. They were fun to write, and when I look back on them, I laugh a little bit now. I think I got started because I was drawn to the stories I saw around me, and that was what I wanted to write about.
Gabriela: And you went through the WITS program for three years, right?
Akshaya: Three years through middle school. I transitioned away from it when I went into high school because our school didn’t offer it. That’s when I started doing writing with Seattle Arts & Lectures (SAL), like more journalistic writing on the events that they host.
Gabriela: What is WITS like as a student?
Akshaya: During sixth grade, we were doing a poetry unit. It was one of my first experiences with making my own poetry. That wasn’t really stuff we did in school, being independently creative. I remember being drawn to that. It was a bridge between being creative and what we were starting with, which was more academic. I remember falling in love with that. It was a chance to write in different ways that I haven’t thought of. That’s what eventually led me to find even more joy in creative writing. I had never written poetry before, but now it’s one of the things I find myself doing a little bit more than writing short stories like I used to do in elementary school.
Gabriela: Your first poetry class was with Imani Sims. How did class work?
Akshaya: She set up the lessons as her own, and then our teacher would connect them back to stuff that we had done earlier in the year. It was a unit of its own. We would take the time to fully immerse ourselves in poetry and how we could use it. It’s not something I had seen before—it was such an immersive experience, the art of poetry and creative writing. It was definitely a formative experience.
Gabriela: What types of work did your read in sixth grade?
Akshaya: More short stories, novels, fiction. I remember sixth grade for its poetry unit because it was one of my first exposures to poetry. I hadn’t really had teachers talk about poetry more than rhyming or making little poems on Mother’s Day. It was interesting because it was an introduction, but at the same time it allowed me to play with poetry in a way that I hadn’t done. In seventh grade, we had both the poetry and the short story unit; Jourdan [Keith] was our short story teacher for seventh grade. That was interesting because the unit combined poetry with writing short stories, and because they were two different parts of creative writing, it gave me a way to connect the two and allow both to influence my style of writing and how I put my voice in my own writing. It was cool.
Gabriela: I remember that you read a poem called Imperfect at a SAL event. It’s a really beautiful poem. How did you come to write it?
Akshaya: Imperfect was my way of filtering the chaos I was seeing around me. Between sixth and seventh grade, I started getting more involved in political and social justice and activism. I was learning more about the world in that way. I was interested in the usage of metaphors and more descriptive language for something I was working on, which was something that I thought really drew people into a piece of creative writing. I wanted to write something a little bit serious about filtering the world I saw.
Gabriela: When I read the poem, I sense isolation alongside a desire to be seen and remembered. There’s a tension between wanting to express something but also wanting to protect it.
Akshaya: It was a starting point for me of using my writing to talk about my own sense of cultural identity. That’s something I’ve been following with my writing. I was trying to pinpoint why I felt torn between like cultural identity: I am American but my parents are Indian. They came from India, so I grew up with Indian culture. There’s definitely a sense of, am I more Indian? If I’m more American in this sense within the immigrant community there’s a feeling like you don’t belong in either place. Culture is something you hold richly because it’s how you grew up; it’s like family. At the same time, it makes you feel different than other people, and that’s not always something you want when you’re a sixth grader.
Gabriela: Have you read Bitaniya Giday’s poem, Hyphenated Identity Crisis? What you said reminded me a bit of our conversation last year.
Akshaya: Yeah! I’ve seen so many amazing women of color, who are short story writers and creative writers, and some of them talk about this experience of cultural isolation that they feel sometimes. It connects to me in a way that I don’t think I’ve connected to other literature before. When I first started writing, I didn’t know of a lot of people that wrote about this experience. It made me feel a little bit isolated; I didn’t have anybody to talk to you about this feeling of not really belonging to either place. Writing has allowed me to understand what I’m feeling a little bit more and understand the way to express it, and why it’s so important to express it and reach out and connect to other people through writing.
Gabriela: Agreed. Have you had people express that to you about your poetry? That it is a gateway for them to connect with you and themselves?
Akshaya: Yeah. I’ve had a couple of people. Usually friends when I show them pieces of writing. A lot of them are from different communities, and they feel the similar sense of feeling both united but at the same time isolated. We talk about how they experienced their culture, their community. I read a book last year, The House on Mango Street [by Sandra Cisneros]. I love that book. It’s such a good book. It was a way for me to further my own writing style and explore the connections of identity, family, the people around me, and my connection to a community. It was a piece of literature that connected to me; I saw myself a little bit in that. I think that’s definitely a way that writing is a tool and a gateway for people to connect: to understand and open doors to mutual respect and understanding.
Gabriela: I see it in your writing for SAL, which is a great segue: how did you find out about SAL—was it through WITS?
Akshaya: I was a seventh grader when I was first asked to present my poem. Then I met Alicia, the director of education. She’s amazing. I got to know her a little bit more because I did a few presentations: a different poem and a short story. I didn’t want to lose the community I felt I had built in WITS, so I reached out to her when I realized that my new school wasn’t going to have a program like this. WITS has meant a lot to me because it’s really helped me explore my voice as a writer and as a person. I reached out to her and asked if I could continue working with SAL and help out.
Gabriela: What is it like to be a WITS intern?
Akshaya: It’s a lot more about understanding the people around you rather than your voice. I do a lot of writing on events and people—the incredible speakers who come and talk about their work. It’s allowed me a window into a world of arts and creative writing that I want to make sure is accessible to people, especially if they can’t afford to come to events or buy books. Working with SAL as an intern has given me more responsibility to pay attention to the world in a different way. And to make myself a little bit more aware of the ways I can help people. At the same time, it’s given me a window into how writers can evolve into something much more and become important figures in our society.
Before an event I do a little research. After the event, I sort through quotations and look through what they said to piece together an analysis of the person and how they’re important to the world. I think sometimes people miss out on how artists and creative writers and journalists to have contributed to the world we see today.
Gabriela: I noticed connections between the events you’ve written about—Lindy West, Yamiche Alcindor, and Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey. These conversations touch on the guise of perfection that many of us feel we have to wear and offer artistic means of facing uncomfortable truths. What you drew you to write about them?
Akshaya: Uncomfortable truth is a really good way of putting it. I think that writing can be an exploration, but it can also be like going into battle sometimes. Whether that’s falsehood or injustice you see around you or a cultural identity conflict you feel inside of you, the battle isn’t always beautiful, but it’s always meaningful. I think that’s what makes each of these women incredible, and their writing and art so important. That’s what I try to look for because it can be frightening to write sometimes, but it’s always necessary. There’s drive and mission with writing and art that’s so impactful; you can see the focus, the devotion, and the passion behind each word.
Gabriela: Do you see a future for yourself in the literary arts? Or, how do you see writing fitting in your life through high school and beyond?
Akshaya: That’s a tough question. I think writing has been and always will be a part of me; it’s allowed me to find my voice and think about things in a different way than I did before—and find a way to express them, which I used to have trouble with. It’s given me a lot of confidence because I wasn’t able to find words to say what I meant to say. The literary arts have given me a way to channel it. For a career, I don’t know. Using language in creative ways is something I’ve always wanted to do, but I don’t know how I’m going to do that. It’s a part of my identity that I haven’t fully thought out. It’s an open question, but I do know that it’s incredibly important to me. Once people familiarize themselves with writing and let themselves open up, it’s fundamental to how we see ourselves, how we perceive identity, and how we perceive the world around us.
Gabriela: Bitaniya pointed to Mahogany L. Browne as an example of someone who uses poetry and art in her activism, the way Bitaniya might like to do as a career some day. Mahogany describes herself as Mother/Womanist/Writer/Professor/Organizer/Curator. Does that idea of combining writing with other passions appeal to you?
Akshaya: It’s funny, because I think a lot in law and social justice comes down to a love for writing and using writing as a way to understand the world, communities around us, and ourselves. It comes down to loving the way art can translate something into meaning. I’ve always wanted to use words to tell stories that we don’t hear as often as others—to tell stories we don’t pay enough attention to or stories that make us a little bit uncomfortable. I was looking into going into law because I thought that words and language that can convince could impact communities and people around me. Language has always meant something to people: it’s meant change and it’s meant anger sometimes. As the world unfolds around us we see words are present in everything. They create change, they can stop change. It’s really important how we use them and how we listen and interact with them. They really matter.
Gabriela: What are some stories that you don’t feel you see enough of?
Akshaya: Right now, I’m reading a bunch of short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri, who I adore. I would love to see a more writers that bring this voice of a community that isn’t always represented in terms of cultural conflict and identity. I am interested in seeing stories that provide a different way of looking at things. One book that gave me a new perspective was The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. It changed the way I thought of things, and how it’s easy for us to hold onto ideas we’ve grown up with or ideas we’ve surrounded ourselves with. The dynamic behavior of change is something The Tipping Point gets at. It’s something I hadn’t thought of too much. I used to think in more black-and-white terms: there is a right and a wrong, and this is how you do it and this is how you don’t. I think it allowed me to push the boundaries of what I think about change and how I carry out activism in my actions.
Gabriela: To your point about language, these books show how words matter and how they can be used for the benefit of society and for ill.
Akshaya: Yeah, they carry weight. It’s how you use the value that they have. Everybody has the ability to use force, everybody has the ability to infuse meaning through art or action. It’s about where the effort goes, where the strength is, and how brave we can be with our words.
Gabriela: Speaking of bravery, what is it like to be a student these days?
Akshaya: It’s interesting. I remember [last] March—school closed and it was chaotic at first—we lost a bit of community during those first few months. That was really difficult. There was a loss of interaction within friendships or even with acquaintances you’d see in the halls and say hi to. I think we’ve emerged from that as we’ve learned more about online school. Things have changed. We’ve adjusted. That’s what’s so powerful about humans: we can adapt and we always do. It’s a matter of how stubborn we’re willing to be and how much we’re going to try to make it out. It’s been difficult, and I wouldn’t say it’s gotten a lot easier. It’s definitely harder for people who don’t have access to all the resources that others do, or those who have difficulty with technology. Teachers, of course, are overworked because there’s so much they’ve had to figure out in a short span of time. But our school has gotten a lot better. Teachers and students have fallen into a sort of flow. At the same time, I think it’s important to acknowledge that a lot of my friends and a lot of the people I know and care about have also felt isolated. It feels so much easier to be apathetic and alone now. That’s resulted in a loss of community that we’ve felt over time.
Gabriela: I heard a lot of concern for students from teachers Arianne True and John McCartney last spring when online school began. They pointed out that students often have to care for younger siblings or maybe even a needy pet as well as themselves while they’re trying to learn. Do you see this happening with your classmates?
Akshaya: Yeah. My school has a large range of how people are dealing with a pandemic. There are definitely people who are having a lot more difficulty than others, because my school is more used to people of a certain economic class. The issues they have, maybe aren’t always as talked about as I need them to be during school. As we’ve slowly adjusted, our school has started helping out people who need a little more help with accessibility to resources. Last March, they eliminated the grade system, and I don’t know if it helped or hurt. A lot of kids were relieved because they’d been so stressed over their grades, and a lot of kids were disappointed because they were worried it would hurt their ability to get into college. There was a lot of stress over it at the time. Now, my school is back to a normal grading system. I’ve seen people have to work a lot harder than they used to. I think it’s gotten easier in that we’ve adjusted to it, but it’s still there. Situations occur where people can’t really reach out and help as much as they used to be able to because we’re in a pandemic. I’ve had situations where, like, family trouble happens and you’re a bystander—you can’t really do anything and you feel helpless. The fact is, we’re all trying to be united more than we would have been.
Gabriela: The word unprecedented is overused, but it seems like one thing after another has happened over the last year that can only be called unprecedented.
Akshaya: It’s all lost shock value. I think my entire generation will say this but, like, we’ve essentially grown up in a period of political unrest. Obama was elected in 2008; I was three. I’ve spent a lot of my growing up during this term of resentment on each side of the political spectrum and it culminated [with the attack on the Capitol] but it wasn’t that a lot of people in my generation were surprised. I was sitting in class, and we had gone out for lunch—that’s the funny thing about online classes, I was watching the Georgia runoffs a bit obsessively—and my dad came up with his computer and showed me what was going on. It wasn’t surprising, but it was still jarring. Shocking in a way, but not surprising.
My friends said their parents were a lot more upset than they were because they weren’t really prepared for something like that to happen, but for the kids around me—myself included—it’s scary how much we’ve normalized it and become desensitized to it. It’s definitely increased the importance of using language and words to capture the feeling of the situation and to capture the moment because it can’t be lost to history. It can’t be thrown away. It can’t be desensitized. It can’t be normalized. Language has to be used accurately and it has to be used with weight and with power.
Gabriela: Do your teachers encourage you to write about how you feel? Does that come up in class?
Akshaya: They try to. It’s a little bit awkward in class, I have to say, because there’s a lot going on when we’re doing online school. There’s so many issues and the world around you is spinning. I’ve had a lot of conversations with friends. I think a lot of kids in my school have done that, too, where it’s sort of sitting down and reflecting a little bit because we all feel out of sorts with what’s going on.
Gabriela: I learned a word from the Grammar Girl podcast: acedia. In the 1500s it was used to described the social dissociation that monks felt after long periods of isolation. The word was lost for hundreds of years, and now we’ve rediscovered there’s already to describe what feels—again—unprecedented to us as a society at the one-year mark of lockdown.
Akshaya: It’s gratifying to see that validated, like this is a universal experience. I think language can totally be used as a way to validate experience that other people feel like they can’t talk about.
Gabriela: How is storytelling happening at school these days?
Akshaya: They usually find a moment in class where someone’s done something really incredible or something that feels necessary for the community to hear. Earlier this year, we had a bunch of drama students write their own play about social justice and about topics they felt weren’t being heard enough. There were some powerful things they said, and I think our newspaper did a really good job of talking about that and spreading awareness to the community. These students are younger than me, so a lot of them feel like our words don’t carry weight, but I think the school newspaper has a way of elevating them and giving them a chance to tell their own story—to spread their language, their words, their story to a wider audience.
My school has a really excellent English department. I think a lot of our storytelling gets done in English classes. That’s a way to give students’ voices power. Sometimes it can be uncomfortable, sitting with that. Knowing these words can be something that’s a part of you and written down on paper—permanent in a way—it’s given a lot of people a way to tell their stories and accept those parts of themselves. That’s beautiful.
Gabriela: What are you reading for school right now? And for fun?
Akshaya: Right now in school I’m reading sections from Jhumpa Lahiri’s short stories. I’m really excited about those. For fun, I’m reading a different book that she wrote earlier. This unit, we’re studying short stories, and I wanted to get to know some of her other work. Another thing for fun that I’m reading is Inglorious Empire by Shashi Tharoor. In history class, we were talking about colonization, which hits home for me because I’m Indian. My parents have some experience with that topic; their grandparents were fighting for Indian independence. A lot of people think they should go back to having a British Empire. The perspective of the people who were colonized is often lost to history so there’s only one story we tell about colonization and usually it’s a positive story about the British building roads or something like that. I read that book during winter break, and it was incredibly validating because it told me different stories—Indian stories I didn’t have much access to even though I was Indian because my parents weren’t alive during the Indian independence. It’s easier for us to find information that is more pro-British colonization. It was interesting to me because I was getting so much experience with a topic that I had only thought about a little bit, but still felt a connection to, and it was giving me a perspective that I felt like, Oh, this is valid, this is something I can feel, even though I am exposed to a lot of people who say the other way. It’s interesting. It sparks conversation and dialogue about colonization, and that’s something that I’m always interested to have with people around me.
Gabriela: When you’re looking at short stories in class, are you looking at them from a craft perspective or as models to try on your own?
Akshaya: We look at them thematically, which opens a lot of conversation on topics like cultural identity. I do this for myself, but with a lot of the books we read in school, if they’re good, I notice the way authors communicate their messages effectively and beautifully. I did this with The House on Mango Street. The sentences and the punchy flavor of the writing appeal to me. It’s taking these elements of authors who are so inspiring and who create such beautiful art and understanding how those elements apply to my own voice and how I can use them in my own writing.
Within my school, we have a lot of people who need to see authors who have shared similar experiences to them; it’s not easy to face a world where you’re seeing only one version of humanity. I think that’s what’s impactful about language: how we use it to understand differences and what makes us unique, but at the same time what unites us together.
Gabriela: One last question: what’s bringing you delight these days?
Akshaya: I’ve been going on a lot of walks lately; it feels like you’re locked in your own little world because of quarantine. It can be desolate and isolating sometimes, but it gives me access to letting myself think about and reflect on what I’m feeling and how the world has changed and shifted and how I’ve grown as an individual. Winter walks can be unifying in a way. They let me find beauty in things I don’t always see. I remember seeing a mother and her little girl walking down the street and the same day there was like a beautiful sunset. I take delight in those things we don’t always talk about but that we hold dear.
Gabriela Denise Frank is a literary artist whose work has appeared in galleries, storefronts, libraries, anthologies, magazines, podcasts, and online. Her essays and fiction have been published in True Story, Hunger Mountain, Bayou, Baltimore Review, Crab Creek Review, Pembroke, The Normal School, and The Rumpus. A Jack Straw Writer and Artist Trust EDGE alumna, Gabriela’s work is supported by 4Culture, Mineral School, Vermont Studio Center, Jack Straw, Invoking the Pause, and the Civita Institute. www.gabrieladenisefrank.com.