by Zachary Shea, M.F.A. ’27
The first piece I read by Meghana Mysore was a poem taped to a door in the graduate lounge here at Hollins, though it is only now, after reading her fiction and getting the chance to talk with her, that I notice her name on this piece of wall literature. Reading Meghana’s recent fiction, I was struck by how wildly creative she is, how deftly she deploys the surreal, and how she can elicit pain and hope at the same time. These are skills that can sometimes feel far off when you’re a student. But here is this reminder that she was also a student once, a piece of her still taped to the door.
Meghana graduated from Hollins University with an MFA in fiction in 2022. Since then, her writing has been featured in The Yale Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Audacity, and other venues. Most recently, her short story “Repair Shop” was awarded the 2025 Barry Hannah Prize in Fiction. A 2022-2023 Steinbeck Fellow and a former Tin House and Bread Loaf Scholar, she currently teaches at Bucknell University. Her debut story collection, Let All Our Ghosts Depart, will be published by West Virginia University Press in Fall 2026.
“I write a lot about family,” says Mysore, “and the question of belonging and what we inherit from one generation to the next, emotionally, physically, and mentally. I’m the daughter of South Indian immigrants, and I think that identity definitely comes into my writing a lot. Many of the stories in my collection right now are from the points of view of women who are South Asian, across different ages, and they’re dealing with questions of memory and belonging, and of the body and what it holds on to, what it lets go of, and what happens with grief through the generations. How we can inherit loss through a family line, and also how it can transform. What it might become over time, and can it grow into something beautiful?”
I got the chance to talk with Meghana over Zoom in October 2025 about fiction, the truths we reach for with our writing, the surreal, and the need to hold despair and hope at the same time.
The following interview has been condensed and edited for grammar and clarity.
You’re well-versed in every genre, so I was curious: Why fiction? What pulled you in that direction recently?
I like fiction because I get to write about these questions that are ever-present for me, and also ask the question of “what if?” I really enjoy that playfulness in considering “what if this happened?” or “what if that happened?” and not being bound to a kind of fact-based truth. There’s some other kind of truth that I get to seek while I’m writing fiction that, for me, feels like emotional truth. There’s more that I want to explore and begin to understand through writing and through putting these pieces together. I can take pieces of my own experiences and of what I’ve witnessed and put it all together in a certain way, along with that question of “what if?” and then I feel like I can get to a place where I understand something better.
Two of your more recent published pieces, “Hoarder” and “Repair Shop,” both have these wildly creative, fantastical elements, like ghosts who inhabit cars and people who turn to scarves when they break up with you. Where do those fantastical ideas come from for you?
A lot of what I’ve been experiencing in the past few years, which I think collectively we’ve all been experiencing in our own ways, is grief and loss and the many forms these experiences can take. I do find something kind of confounding about grief and loss. These experiences transform at least my relationship to time and to logic.
It’s partly living through the pandemic that transformed my relationship to time. And then also, personally, having things happen in my family. Almost two years ago now we had this huge tree fall on my family home and destroy it. And shortly after, my grandmother died in India. There was something really strange that came for me in the aftermath. After watching my dad grieve the loss of his mother, watching my family in the experience of losing our home, and watching myself through all these years of transitions that felt like I was simultaneously inside of reality and outside of it, I started writing in a more surreal way. It felt like the boundaries of the world as we see it didn’t feel sufficient to explore the kind of grief that I was going through, and that my characters were going through too.
I wanted to ask you which came first, the more grounded aspects of the story or the more surreal, but it sounds like it was the latter.
I think my stories always come from a very real, grounded place. And then these fantastical elements grow from it. I really love speculative stories that also have a grounding in reality. Some very specific texture of it, like, “oh, the character is eating this McDonald’s burger,” or whatever. There’s something that brings us back to the real world.
Even when I’m using strangeness, or an otherworldly element in a story, I do so to talk about an experience that is very human. I don’t think I can get away from the fact that I do tend to write about heavier topics. But I feel like it doesn’t seem true to life to write a story that is entirely weighed down by grief because, in times of my life when I’m experiencing grief, when I’m moving through periods of loss, I’m also laughing. Really weird things are happening in life that are just absurd or funny, and there are these little moments of hope. It was one of my professors at Hollins, Karen Bender, who talked in class about story endings and how the most powerful story endings are those that hold despair and hope together, and that it’s not simply one or the other.
And that holding together of those things is something that I was really interested in with my story collection. Finding a way towards hope for these characters that felt real. I don’t think any of their lives by the end of the story are resolved, or any of their problems are solved. But they do feel a greater sense of connection to the world, whether it’s to a friend from their past or between a mother and a daughter.
Do you think those fantastical or surreal elements helped move those characters towards that hope?
I think so, yeah. That’s something that I definitely found through writing. It helped me get them towards hope. It allowed me to feel a bit freer and a bit more playful in the writing and notice the parts of the worlds that they’re in that are funny or absurd, and how that can bring delight and pleasure. I don’t believe that any of us experience emotions in isolation. There’s a lot of experience in the world that is simultaneous. It can’t be a one-note experience, and the absurdity or the otherworldly elements allow me to reach into these other notes.
Shifting to your forthcoming collection “Let All Our Ghosts Depart,” did you know that the stories were connected when you conceived them? Or is it something you discovered about the stories as you wrote them?
It was more of the latter. I wrote the first story eight years ago, and through all that time, it’s gone through a lot of different iterations. The collection began from stories that I worked on in undergrad, and then later at Hollins, and I saw them as linked. But then I got an agent after my MFA program, and we had submitted the book as a “novel-in-stories” to a couple of places. I got a lot of really nice passes, but that made me reconsider what I was really trying to do with this work.
Then I took some time away from that project and wrote. I just started having fun, writing things and responding to what I was experiencing in life and not really thinking about it as “Oh, I’m expanding this into a larger story collection.” Then I started looking at what I had, seeing that some of these new stories had found homes in journals, and looking at some of the original stories from the novel-in-stories, finding a couple of those pieces could stand alone. I realized that there were a lot of themes that were overlapping through all the stories that I’d written over this time: memory and grief and what grows from it, and ancestry, and mothers and daughters. Finding that they were all linked in some larger way made me understand that I had a story collection.
How are you finding balancing the creative side of writing with the professional side? And even balancing teaching on top of that?
When I feel like all these things work together, that’s when I feel best. For instance, when I’m teaching a class and we’re talking about how to build scenes, and then I can come home and look at a scene in something new I’m writing or in one of these stories that I’m editing, and I can actually feel inspired by something that a student said in class. When I really lean into that energy, it moves my own writing forward, and it makes the whole process feel so alive.
But, in the practice of it, there are definitely times when the balance is a little out of whack. When I’m spending a lot of time on class planning, or applying to things and writing cover letters. I definitely struggle when I neglect my own writing, but it’s just necessary, right? You have deadlines or things that you have to do. But I do think that I feel best when I’m writing regularly and when that’s the center of all of these experiences.
How do you think your writing career was impacted by your time at Hollins?
I wrote so much in that program that I look at today and I’m still working with. So many seeds were planted for me as a writer there, and it’s because it was really two years where what really mattered was that I was writing and I was doing it in community with other people.
Richard Dillard and Scott Blackwood were two professors that I worked with who saw my writing and were very influential to me. Scott Blackwood, who passed away from ALS, which is very, very sad, he was my advisor for my thesis. In a lot of ways, these stories feel really connected to him, how supportive he was, and how much he believed in the work, even when I didn’t really believe in it.
Do you have any advice for the folks at Hollins or folks pursuing their MFA?
It’s such a special time, so make the most of it and don’t be afraid to write “bad work,” to write work that doesn’t make sense, to ask a lot of questions, to ask professors to meet individually and talk more about something you’re working on. The professors at Hollins are really open, and they really want you to grow as a writer and as a person. And so, you know, don’t be afraid.
You can read some of Meghana’s work at meghanamysore.com.
