Shruti Swamy, the Academy’s 2024 Rome Prize Fellow in Literature, is a writer based in San Francisco. She is the author of a novel, The Archer (2022), and a compendium of short stories, A House Is a Body (2020). Her project in Rome is a second novel, Margret and Vishnu, that is populated by a variety of mothers—a grandmother, a stepmother, the sister to a baby brother—who navigate the pleasures and painful complexities of collective caregiving.
Swamy spoke to AAR about the development of her writing in Rome.
What have you been working on while at AAR?
I’ve been working on a short-story collection and a novel, both of which are trying to think expansively about motherhood and caregiving.
Has your project changed since arriving?
Perhaps it has: maybe it will change even more after I leave, when the effects of my time here show up on the page. Before coming to Rome I had been thinking about beauty, what makes a piece of writing beautiful. I am a fairly lyrical writer but recently the work I have been writing is in plainer language. Writing about motherhood without the muck of it, the mess of the body, the snot and farts, really does not feel truthful to me. So I’ve been wondering about this shift and where beauty arises from other things, like a movement between characters or a precise articulation, while surrounded by so many Roman and Italian ideas of beauty, and of course all these other artists who are thinking about beauty too. During the spring trip we traveled to a little town on the Amalfi Coast called Ravello for, like, one hour, and it was one of the most hauntingly beautiful places I have ever been in my life. Ravello has literally nothing to do with what I’m working on, but I can’t help but feel that walking through the long, green finger of the garden there did something to me and to my work—it’s just too early to say what yet.
What’s something that has surprised you about being at the Academy?
My project is broadly about the role of community in family life, so it has been wonderful and not totally unconnected to my writing to be part of the family community in 5B. We have our own apartments and can always shut the door, but experiencing the movement of children some afternoons after school, from apartment to apartment, has been beautiful for me as well as my daughter. This has made me think about ways I could set up my own life at home to be a little more communal.
Have you had any great conversations with other fellows or residents that changed your perspective?
I’m not an academic, so when it comes to everything outside fiction I’m a layperson. I’ve learned so much about the other fellows’ areas of study through their generosity—and through the exceptional generosity of Allison Emmerson, who gamely answered my many elementary questions about ancient Rome.
What might be more perspective shifting is the length of time these conversations could span, given the months we had together, and the ways our ideas weave in and out of formal presentations and informal conversations over lunch or dinner. For example, I was really excited by the architect César Lopez’s five-minute presentation last February about his reimagining of the US-Mexico border, and a few weeks later he gave us an in-depth look during an electrifying shoptalk he did with the historian Nhung Tuyet Tran.
Then over the months, we had many conversations where I heard both granular stuff like how Lopez’s drawing was going, as well as bigger-picture thinking, like how things he was encountering in Italy were influencing his approach. It was amazing, after all those months, to see his work during Open Studios, and see the way he had brought these ideas onto (and sort of growing out of) the page.
What have you seen in the city of Rome that has made a strong impression on you?
I had never been to Rome before and always wondered what the air smelled like here, if it was different from home. I arrived at the Academy late at night in February and one of the first things I smelled was the cold water of the fountain, a wet, mineral smell that made my body first register it was elsewhere. My time here has been dense with such moments, so much so that it’s hard to pick just one or two to name—it feels to me that it’s this glut of beauty that Rome offers, very casually, to whomever is around to see it, the aggregate of it that will be what leaves its impression. One afternoon my daughter charged up a hill in Villa Doria Pamphili on the way home from school, on the ridge of the hill she was a bright blur in the deep green of the park, she was laughing, and some tree was shedding tiny leaves that in the wind looked like flakes of light. Sometimes when I feel anxious I haven’t seen enough of Rome, I think of this ordinary and extraordinary moment of my life and remember that no time is wasted here.