In the winter of 2025, resident member and Creative Writing Master's student Ihomehe Agbebaku sat down in conversation with Green College's 20th writer in residence, Jaspreet Singh. This is a record of that conversation.
IA: Fiction thrives on ambiguity, contradiction, and emotion. Do you ever feel like your scientific past and your literary present are in conversation with each other?
JS:
Conversations at the intersection of disciplines... Perhaps a bit like my dining hall conversations with the residents of this wonderful Green College. Sometimes while eating chickpeas or ratatouille one ends up discussing particle and unparticle physics, dark matter, Japanese filmmakers such as Ozu and Miyazaki, interspecies anthropology, Rilke’s Eurydice poem, David Graeber’s essay “There never was a West,” Darwish’s “Last Sky,” extended techniques for the piano, Manga novels, Chimamanda Adichie, auto ethnographies, water, and Musqueam verbs. I learn that sapiens are the only species with something called Alzheimer’s. That an individual’s eyes (retinal changes) might be able to alert health practitioners very early on if an individual is headed in the direction of memory loss…
IA: You have written across genres, including fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Have you ever started writing in one form, only to realize the story was demanding something else?
JS:
Yes, this does happen. And sometimes one also starts blurring the genres. My novel Helium, for instance, includes numerous caption-less photographs. And sometimes one ends up questioning the chosen genre on every other page. My book My Mother, My Translator is both a memoir and an anti-memoir in this sense.
The more I reflect about your question the more they come to me the lines by Czeslaw Milosz:
I have always aspired to a more spacious form /
that would be free from the claims of poetry and prose
IA: Many of your works grapple with memory, not just personal memory, but collective memory, the kind that nations and communities carry. What is your relationship with forgetting? Is forgetting ever an act of survival?
JS:
The forgotten, the silenced, the erased, the unacknowledged, the hidden, continues to impact the present. Past, someone once said, is never dead; it is not even past. Always, it’s a good idea for entire communities and countries to work through the difficult chapters of history. Especially the unfinished histories.
You ask a good question. Forgetting may save lives, but it continues to haunt. The occasional thunder, the bark of the forgotten. Both of us know by now that the field of forgetting is much bigger than the unresolved collective traumas (in your work and in my work), or even those sudden involuntary Proustian rememberings (that come say after dunking madeleine in a cup of tea). Please allow me to share with you a different kind of forgetting, the one I am trying process these days. The long overlooked forgetting in the larger discipline called literature. So human-centric the literary novel became, it completely forgot the planet. The writer Amitav Ghosh talks about many such imaginative failures of the literary novel in his book The Great Derangement.
So it is really remarkable that in this new epoch the planet is slowly returning to most of our narratives. The planet, one might say, has created a disciplinary crisis for all the disparate disciplines. Some call the crises the planetary turn. Theatre directors have plans to adapt Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard from the point of view of trees. Even historians are thinking and writing very differently today. This is how the Belgian historian David van Reybrouck entangles human time and planetary time: “There is more to colonialism than historical colonialism… Today’s climate change is deeply colonial: it has largely been caused by temperate zones from the northern hemisphere and it is most deeply felt in the tropics and the Arctic. You can’t decolonize without decarbonizing and vice versa.
Going back to your question, I might say sometimes “not forgetting” is an act of survival. Becoming more and more aware of the Earth system is an act of survival.
IA: Your work often examines the human impact on landscapes. If the land could speak back to us, if it could tell its own stories, what do you think it would say?
JS:
At times during a creative writing class I ask my students to write a page or two from the point of view of a melting glacier or some other “object” from the more than human world.
During discussions, most students reflect on the changing voice of the glacier, how (as they were writing) the voice became increasingly angry.
But, really, this anger on the page is our emotion, not the emotion of the glacier.
IA: What was the last piece of writing that truly surprised you? Something that came out of you in a way you didn’t expect?
JS:
My newest book Dreams of the Epoch & the Rock. Last year when I sent the final version of this poetry collection to my publisher I thought the pages were ready for the printers. I felt lighter, and out of that lightness began writing a new poem for some other project. Little did I know then that the new poem —“Earth Scientists”—would become an essential part of the book I had just finished. For me the poem embodies all that I had been trying all along to go toward.
IA: You write about displacement, migration, and history, but your books don’t read like manifestos. How do you navigate the line between storytelling and political engagement?
JS:
Specificity, character, detail, place, relationships, language. Craft is important. Learning the so-called golden rules, then one by one perhaps breaking some of them. Sometimes during my creative writing class I play an audio recording of the 2017 Nobel Lecture delivered by the writer Kazuo Ishiguro. The students listen to Ishiguro reflecting vividly about his evolution as a writer, most of them inspired and amused by his confession—that he had figured out “the plainly obvious” much later in life. Slowly our workshop wrestles with what makes “a good story”? For Ishiguro, “all good stories, never mind how radical or traditional their mode of telling, had to contain relationships that are important to us; that move us, amuse us, anger us, surprise us… Stories are about one person saying to another: this is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I am saying? Does it also feel this way to you?”
IA: Some writers say they feel they are in control of their stories, while others say their stories are in control of them. Where do you fall on the spectrum?
JS:
When I was younger I would think about such questions whenever between books.
Writing is so many acts brought together: personal, social, aesthetic, ethical, political… And then there is language. Language as an environment.
More and more I am interested in questions that question the human-centric-ness of the stories we live and tell. Questions that encourage me to try moving away a bit from “ego” to “eco”.
IA: If you could visit yourself at the moment when you first started writing seriously, what would you tell your younger version of yourself?
JS:
This is what I would tell my younger self: Don’t ever listen to anything your older self might tell you some day[MH1] .
IA: What is the question about your work that no one asks, but that you wish someone would?
JS:
“How old were you when you first stood by the sea?”
I was nineteen when I first saw and heard and touched and tasted and smelled the sea. I grew up in the mountains, which means I grew up with a lot of frozen water, also rivers and lakes and falls, but I never got that chance to grow up by a large body of water. I wonder how different my life and work might have been if my childhood had had the opportunity to dwell by some ocean.
IA: Universities are places where knowledge is created, but they are also places where knowledge is sometimes buried. Your work engages with histories that have been erased or silenced. Do you think universities have a role in challenging that kind of forgetting?
JS:
Universities are very contradictory spaces. W.G. Sebald and Edward Said belong to a long list of my favourite writers. Both worked at universities for numerous years and felt a sense of ease there. But they also felt a great sense of unease being associated with these institutions.
What filled me with hope at Green College (right after arrival) was the following quote by Edward Said posted on some doors, and some windows. “Nothing in my view,” writes Said, “is more reprehensible than those habits of mind in the intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic turning away from a difficult and principled position, which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take…”
These lines reminded me of my grad student days at McGill university in Montreal, where I had the good fortune to stand one evening in a packed hall and listen to that remarkable, immensely charismatic visiting professor, author of books such as Orientalism, On Late Style, Out of Place, Reflections on Exile, and Speaking Truth to Power.
Thank you very much, Green College.
Jaspreet Singh is an acclaimed author whose work explores deep time, the Anthropocene, and the ecological crisis. A former research scientist, he has published eight books, including Chef (2008) and Helium (2013), which received international acclaim for their exploration of violence and memory. His 2021 memoir, My Mother, My Translator, was widely praised and award-winning. His recent writing focuses on climate crisis, decolonization, and interspecies relationships, with his latest poetry collection, Dreams of the Epoch & the Rock, released in 2024. He was in residence at Green College from January to April, 2025
Interview by Ihomehe Agbebaku, Green college resident member