Interview: Graduate A. W. Prihandita

A. W. Prihandita (she/her) is a Nebula Award-winning and Ignyte Award-nominated author of speculative fiction. She splits her time between the U.S. West Coast, where she’s currently finishing her Ph.D., and Indonesia, where she grew up and where her home remains. She attended the Your Personal Odyssey workshop in 2023 on their Fresh Voices Scholarship, and the Clarion Workshop in 2024 on their Octavia Butler Scholarship. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Clarkesworld, Uncanny, Cast of Wonders, and khōréō magazines, among others.

Congratulations on your Nebula-winning novelette “Negative Scholarship on the Fifth State of Being,” which came out in Clarkesworld in November 2024. Did you know this would be a novelette when you began writing the story? How do you determine story length for your ideas?

Thank you! The nomination came as a surprise, but I’m very glad of it. I didn’t intend “Negative Scholarship” to be a novelette at first. I wrote it for a workshop session that had a word count limit (I believe something like 6,500 words?), and I was very aware that magazines don’t prefer long stories. For a few days when I was intensively working on the story, I was determined to keep it within the word count limit. But when I laid out the first iteration of its plot outline, I felt like the story needed a dual plot structure, one where the doctor struggled with her alien patient and another where she faced her imposter syndrome and restrictive knowledge regimes. From there, it became less easy to fool myself. A story with two subplots probably wouldn’t be a short story! That was when I made a list of some novelettes I had read and their word counts, to study their rhythms and lengths and gauge what mine would feel like in comparison. “Negative Scholarship” was the first novelette I’d written more or less intentionally and successfully, so I realized there needed to be some learning curve.

These days, I think I’ve gotten pretty good at forecasting how long a story will be, up to novella length (I still have almost no idea how to deal with novels; this is next on my “Things to Figure Out” list). When I get the seed of an idea, it might come with an intention or a vague sense of if it’s going to be a short story, novelette, or novella, but usually I’ll only know for sure once I write down an outline of the story’s acts. That’s when I’ll know how many turning points the story needs to get to its end. I can then also detail the scenes in each act and approximate their word counts. These approximations don’t always turn out to be correct—probably not, actually—because sometimes something isn’t working on the page and I have to overhaul the entire structure. And sometimes the length changes after the drafting process. There’s this story I wrote that I felt would probably be a novelette, and its first draft ended up at 8,500 words, but I was under a non-negotiable word count limit for the magazine I wanted to submit to. I revised and line-edited mercilessly and was able to get it down to 7,400 words.

You attended Your Personal Odyssey in 2023 and won the Fresh Voices Scholarship, which is given to an outstanding writer of color each year. What made you decide to attend Your Personal Odyssey? How do you feel your writing and writing process changed as a result of having attended Your Personal Odyssey? What insights did you gain into your own work?

I think a part of it was this urge to get as many resources as I could when I was still in the US, because I didn’t know—and still don’t know—if I’d be able to stay after I’d finished my PhD. Of course, Odyssey being online means I would’ve been able to do it from Indonesia anyway, but being here was much easier because I didn’t have to deal with time difference, and as a graduate student, I had the summer off. (Another difficulty was money. I wouldn’t have been able to pay for anything if I hadn’t had a job that paid in US dollars.) So it felt like the circumstances aligned well for me to do writing workshops. I applied to a few and was delighted to get into Odyssey.

I think doing Your Personal Odyssey was among the best choices I’ve ever made in my life. I’d already sold one pro-rate story when I started YPO, but the workshop definitely gave me much more awareness and control over the elements of fiction. Things that now feel fundamental and second nature to me—like psychic distance, show don’t tell, and causal chain—were things I was barely aware of. I vaguely knew what they were and that they were important, but YPO really helped me see how they work in a concrete way, and to spot good examples from the bad. One big difference in my process after YPO was that I now always build my stories in terms of acts, each of which is driven by a goal. I used to just think in terms of “what happens next,” but making sure there are goal changes that mark the progression of a story is such a simple way to create a dynamic plot. Before YPO, I thought plot was one of my weakest points, but my current agent recently told me it’s one of my strengths!

You’re represented by Thais Afonso with Azantian Literary Agency. How many stages did your story go through before you found your agent? How much of your time was spent writing the first draft, and how much time was spent in revision? What sort of revisions did you do?

This is going to sound weird and possibly even annoying, but Thais signed me based on my short story works. She read my khōréō magazine story “The Cursing of Herman Willem Daendels” and my Fusion Fragment story “To Fall in Love with a Dying Sun,” then reached out to me via Twitter DM to ask if I had more stories she could read. I sent her “Negative Scholarship” and a couple other stories, as well as the first draft of a novella I worked on at Odyssey. She said she was ready to offer representation by the time she finished reading “Negative Scholarship.” I sent her that story the same day I submitted it to Clarkesworld, so it had gone through several revisions—I think at least one big revision and several line-level passes. I drafted “Negative Scholarship” in about two weeks in early-to-mid July 2024, though I’d had the germinal idea at least a few weeks prior to that. Then, I think I did my first big revision at the end of July or beginning of August, then some line-level passes after that. I submitted to Clarkesworld in mid August. This would definitely take me much, much longer if I’d been working on a novel!

Your bio mentions that you balance academic work and creative work. How do you manage this? How does academic work influence your creative work?

Oh gosh, I honestly don’t know how to answer this question! Tongue-in-cheek I’d probably say I don’t really balance them. I’d go through a period of hyperfixation on one of them, then shift my hyperfixation to the other thing to deal with the repercussions of ignoring work on that front. These periods last for weeks or even months each, depending on the project I’m doing. For example, in February 2024 through March 2024 I was focusing on a novella. This means I spent most, if not all, of my time working on it, except for the time I spent teaching my classes (because that’s a non-negotiable obligation). But I wasn’t at all working on any academic work, not even my dissertation. I had zero dissertation chapters at that time, and since this was a year before I was supposed to graduate, I really should have written more dissertation and prioritized that. But I didn’t—in those three months, my novella work consumed me. Then things on the dissertation front got dire; I had to submit something to my dissertation chair, so once the novella was finished, I had to speed run a dissertation chapter. That was what I did for a period of about four weeks in May-June 2024, and then I had to leave for Clarion, which meant my primary focus in June-September 2024 was my creative work (though I did spend a few hours here and there doing academic work, especially if there was a deadline to chase). Since September until now, my focus has been on finishing my dissertation and braving the academic job market. I’m hoping to switch back to creative work this summer.

I wish I could’ve been better at doing many things at once. And maybe to be fair, I am and have always been doing many things at once; there are just too many, and it’s impossible to give full attention to every one of them. But I do think I operate better if I work uninterrupted, so there’s always only one thing I keep at the forefront of my mind, and the rest are obligations I have to do on the side, with minimum effort, in a way that doesn’t completely dislodge the One Thing from the forefront of my mind. It’s a way for me to maintain momentum and manage my emotions, because I’d rather have all of my passions poured into one project at a time than give only faint slivers to a hundred different things. So even though it might sound unreasonable that I’d “neglect” one side of my life to work fully on the other side, it’s just a strategy I have. In the end, I’m usually pretty good at catching up and delivering good work. It’s just a different approach to time management.

You grew up in Indonesia and spent time between there and the U.S. Your biography says you’re interested in “decolonial and transnational writing.” Do you usually keep these themes in mind during the first draft, or do you tend to draw them out in later drafts? What other components of craft do you have in mind during the initial draft of a story?

I definitely keep themes in mind during the first draft, and even much earlier. When an idea comes to me, it usually comes with a set of themes, though sometimes the themes do change as I develop the story further. Many of my speculative concepts are crafted in a way that allows me to ponder on questions about coloniality and the politics of knowledge. This includes “Negative Scholarship”! I was working on a dissertation chapter broadly about cultural translation, and one thing that helped solidify the story idea early on in the brainstorming process was that the story would have “the vibe and theoretical framework” of this essay by the anthropologist Viveiros de Castro. And so the rest of my pre-writing and the drafting was often about how I could express this theme in concrete terms, as worldbuilding details, as events the characters go through, as a narrative that builds into a climax and makes you feel things. I never start drafting a story before I’m sure of the theme, though there’s this one project I’m working on whose theme refuses to stabilize, and so I might embark on an experiment soon in which I start writing theme-blind, which honestly scares me. There are also occasions where the theme I had in mind didn’t work well on paper. Those are not my best stories, in my opinion, and sometimes I end up abandoning those projects. I see themes as a story’s raison d’être, so when the theme doesn’t work or doesn’t exist, there’s almost no point in me pursuing the story. Of course, not all stories have to be like this—I’ve enjoyed stories that accentuate elements other than themes—but as a writer, theme is really important as a unifying device for me, even if the final product does end up accentuating other story elements.

Your most recent short fiction publications include a number of dark fantasy and horror publications. What draws you to write horror?

I think maybe a part of it is that I’ve been told by many people (including Odyssey Director Jeanne Cavelos at Your Personal Odyssey!) that I wrote horror, even when I didn’t intend to write horror. So there’s always that tendency, and I’ve more recently decided to just embrace that tendency and write horror deliberately.

As for where the tendency came from, I’m less sure of that. I guess I’m just drawn to the aesthetics of it, the unsettling and uncanny details you can create for a “horror” mood. I also like how speculative elements in the horror genre are often crafted to comment on social issues, which is pretty much like my approach to themes in any story I write. I see horror is often more explicitly about things that are wrong in society, things to be feared, so the genre lends itself well to social critique. But above all, I suspect I just generally like dark stuff; it fits my personality better, as I’m not much of a sunny sunshine girl at all!

What’s next on the writing-related horizon? Are you starting any new projects?

I’m trying to get back into a writing groove after spending months and months only on academic stuff, which feels never-ending. I have a few projects I’m toying with, both short fiction and novel projects. I really need to get a novel done so I can send it to my agent! There have been a few novel-length projects I was considering—a sci-fi romance, a secondary world fantasy horror, a contemporary eco-horror. I’ll probably do the contemporary eco-horror, which is set in near-future sinking Jakarta. I just need to find an angle that really grabs me. I’ve been reading a lot of horror books for inspiration, but I’m also trying not to put too much pressure on myself. It’s been a very stressful year, and I feel it’s better to approach a creative project with an excitement to experiment rather than the pressure to be perfect (which is hard to ignore, especially with the high stakes of a debut).

That being said, I also feel like I should be writing and publishing more short fiction! The Nebula nomination did make me worry a little because I don’t really have anything to follow that up. I do have a flash fiction upcoming in the July/August issue of Uncanny, but nothing lined up after that, and not anything at the scale of “Negative Scholarship.” I have a few ideas simmering and an unrevised draft, but life has been really overwhelming, both politically and professionally. Maybe some people who’ve been to graduate school will understand, but to put it mildly, my dissertation wasn’t necessarily built upon very good sets of relationships, and it’s taken its toll on me. I fear it will take me a while before I’m ready to start a new relationship with a writing project, and for that relationship to be a healthy one. There are some things I’m doing to get myself to that point—journaling, reading, exploring new genres, doing some light brainstorming sessions—but I understand a lot of it probably comes down to time and rest. I think it’s important to acknowledge resting as an active part of writing.