U of C alumni Kirti Bhadresa releases short story collection An Astonishment of Stars
By Ansharah Shakil, October 8 2024—
Calgary-based author Kirti Bhadresa released a short story collection titled An Astonishment of Stars on Oct. 1. The story depicts the lives of women of colour, each character distinct and defined and each story reflecting different aspects of humanity. Bhadresa studied Political Science at the University of Calgary, and this will be her first book. In an interview with the Gauntlet, she shared her excitement over the book’s upcoming release and the process of writing it.
“I was always interested in the intersection of politics and literature and in some ways … writing [this] book felt political to me and just claiming a voice felt political,” Bhadresa said. “To this day now that I’m putting this book out there and it’s becoming more public, I’m reminding myself that the part I love is the writing. I love reading, I love writing, in the same way.”
An Astonishment of Stars was started by Bhadresa around ten years ago, beginning as a list poem of different kinds of kitchens — each story now still has a kitchen it — and expanding into paragraphs and then stories. After receiving a mentorship through the Alexandra Writers Centre, she ended up with a rough version of the final collection.
“It’s a magical thing to be able to create stories and share them, with even your own self,” Bhadresa said. “Like you’re working on an idea and developing it into a narrative and you can just be anything you wanna be, you can do anything, you can say anything, it’s just so exciting, like it’s painting with words.”
A thread present in An Astonishment of Stars is the idea of never being able to see yourself directly, even in a mirror, something Bhadresa explained she wanted to be able to express in her writing.
“I walk around as an Indian woman and people see that all the time … and that might be the first thing they see about me, but I really wanted to go inside of my characters and expose the interiority of [how] they’re just trying to live a day-to-day life,” she said. “They’ve got to get some errands done, pay the bills, deal with grief, deal with big feelings.”
“I want them to be relatable and I want people to forget the question [where are you from] because it’s not always the most important thing to know,” Bhadresa added. “And I really want people to see my characters and experience their strength and their vulnerability without knowing the obvious answers.”
When I interviewed her, Bhadresa was in France, a funny coincidence considering she moved there when she was 17, living and writing there for a year.
“I used to […] sit in a cafe and just [write and write and write] and [fill] up notebook after notebook and just chuck them away. I was saying to my husband, oh, I haven’t always been a writer but I’ve always been a reader, and he was like okay, well, tell that to the boxes of writing you have stored away in our house,” she said with a laugh.
For aspiring writers, Bhadresa said that this might be some of the most common advice you hear, but it still rings true: read as much as you can.
“I don’t know how you could write if you haven’t read the works of others,” she said. “Sometimes the idea of reading something and copying that style is a really interesting way to improve your writing … I’d say read a ton, figure out what you’d like and then edit a ton once you’ve got something.”
When Bhadresa wrote An Astonishment of Stars, almost every story in it had been written at some point from the point of view of every character in it, even if none of that made it in, something that allowed her to hone in on the right point of view for the story. Each story has that precise quality to its prose, making it a stunning observation of all the details of womanhood.
“I grew up reading. I went to the library every week and took out nine books a week because that was the maximum I could get,” Bhadresa said. “In stories I’ve always found myself. I think that almost like reincarnation, you get to experience so many different lives and I feel like in writing I can … tell the most honest stories I can think of.”
More about Bhadresa can be found on her website. An Astonishment of Stars is available for purchase on a number of platforms, found here.