Danielle Bradley
Meghana Mysore’s Let All Our Ghosts Depart is concerned with the unseen. These stories consider the unsaid, the lost, and the ways that we grieve ourselves and each other. Let All Our Ghosts Depart is a sharp yet tender collection filled with keen observations about how strange it is to be alive. Mysore’s characters pick apart their memories to make sense of the past and find meaning in what’s to come. Ranging from the speculative to the real, these stories are humorous yet cutting, and offer what I most love about short story collections: the ability to transport us both in part and as a whole.
In this interview, Meghana and I discussed art, art-making, the absurd, and how to build a story collection.
Danielle Bradley (DB): To begin, Let All Our Ghosts Depart exists in both speculative and realist traditions—often at the same time. What does the drafting process look like as you move between the two?
Meghana Mysore (MM): It was a bit later in my writing life—maybe the last couple of years—that I took a turn towards writing the more surreal or speculative. What it’s offered me is a sense of freedom and playfulness. Now, when I’m writing I think: what could happen? Which has allowed my writing to not be as bounded or guarded or afraid. Before, when my writing was more skewed towards the realist tradition, I struggled with balancing that with the other aspects of my voice, like the humorous and darkly absurd, especially because I often write about heavier themes, like how grief and loss manifest inside of our bodies. I really wanted to bring that into this collection because those things—the dark and absurd—are also part of these women’s experiences.
DB: I’m thinking about the story “Spring Fling,” which cascades from the real into the otherworldly and then to a very unexpected, almost absurd yet tender ending. For me, it felt microcosmic of the whole collection. Could you say a bit about that balancing of both the realist and speculative in your work?
MM: I want those two traditions to coexist in my writing. Many of my stories deal with themes of grief, loss, and internal transformation. I’m very interested in how we come to know ourselves, particularly as women or as women of color, and so I think of all these experiences in a continuum. With the collection, I wanted to explore that continuum by writing about the absurd and heavy and magical and real simultaneously. Like in “Repair Shop,” where a character’s mother becomes alive as her Prius. It’s something that doesn’t happen in “real” life, but I think does capture something very real about the process of grief and how absurd our reality actually is. Just even in the last few years, the collective grief that we’ve experienced as a society, the ongoing genocide, all the things happening with technology and AI, and my own grief and losses, too–I’ve felt there was no way to capture those things without the speculative.
DB: Could you name some of your influences?
MM: I felt really inspired by contemporary authors like Aimee Bender, Karen E. Bender, Yōko Ogawa, Yohanca Delgado, and Kimberly King Parsons to name a few.
DB: The collection thinks a lot about ghosts and inheritance. In particular, it asks whether we can continue to learn about people who have passed. I’m thinking about Blood and Bone and Hair Bright as the Moon, where characters are able to continue to directly communicate with their dead, either through a phone or by physically visiting them. Could you speak more to this? About how you view our ability to talk across time/space?
MM: My family is very spread out between India and the U.S., and then between the West and East coasts, so my understanding of connectedness has always been elastic. I’m really interested in that elasticity and how we can communicate across space and time. What are the limits of it? What kinds of knowing or understanding can distance open up? In some ways, I think writing about it was a coping strategy because I miss my family and I miss people that I’m no longer with, either physically or in a larger way because they’ve passed on. I believe there is an interconnectedness in the way that we communicate with our ancestors that transcends or goes beyond the present moment. It’s present in many cultures, this sense of connectedness with our ancestors, and certainly in my context coming from a South Asian background. I think of the voices of my family and ancestors as ever-present, and I wanted to write towards that in the collection. For example, my paternal grandfather passed when I was young and I felt that I didn’t get to know him well. Many of my memories of him are concentrated around this single image of sitting on a cot in my grandparents’ home in Mysore and talking about times tables and math. For me, after his passing, there was a lot of trying to understand him by filling in the blanks. There is a certain grief in not knowing or in those gaps and spaces. A lot of my writing is piecing together histories through imagination and through my family’s collective memory, and a natural way that I’ve filled in those gaps is through creating narrative.
DB: There are also many artists in these pages. Painters in “Hoarder” and “In Lamplight You Are Made Whole,” a photographer in “Love Letters,” a sketch artist in “Adalita.” Relatedly, I was very drawn to the father in “Blood and Bone,” who had many unrealized artistic ambitions, especially around gardening. I’d love to hear you talk generally about the role of art in this collection, how it relates to labor if at all, and also in your life as a writer. What draws you to writing other artists?
MM: Coming to the U.S. as immigrants from India, my parents didn’t really have the options that my generation does, or in some ways does. There were many ways in which they felt forced into certain roles—like marriage or careers—and didn’t have the possibilities to be something beyond what those around them wanted them to be. I think that was passed down to me. In college, I wanted to write, which was a conflict in my family. Understandably, my parents were fearful about whether that could be a stable way for me to live or be. I inherited that fear, I think, in relation to work and the need to always be working. I used to think: if I’m not working, what am I? These are all questions and struggles I wanted to address in the collection. How does one become an artist when there is the pressure of capitalism? The pressure to be a provider? Within the practical aspects that are financial and real, where does art live? I’ve seen many of my family members abandon various aspects of their own artistic lives and selves in favor of what they feel they need to do—and I think there is a lot of grief in that. Many of the stories in the collection are a comment on the way that capitalism forces people into being skeletal versions of themselves. But it was also important that there be hope in the collection, which is the note that “Blood and Bone” ends on. I wanted to ask what’s next after loss and how the narrator can slowly become more alive to her present life.
DB: I’m thinking about a line from “A Sweater For You,” where you write that “we sit . . . easily with one another . . . reveling in each other’s artistry in a world that did not recognize us as artists.” Could you say a bit more here?
MM: The collection thinks about this too: who is recognized as an artist? These questions come from a personal place. Can I be a writer if I don’t come from a family of writers or academics? Which is a kind of silly question—because, yes, anyone can be a writer—but one that I think many people feel. I also think about this as a teacher. I really want my students—particularly those that don’t come from backgrounds of recognized artists or academics—to know that they are and can be artists, too.
DB: Nature features so prevalently in these stories—especially celebrated is the nature of the U.S. Pacific Northwest, where I know that you’re from. Could you talk a bit about how you approach writing the natural world? What draws you to it?
MM: This question makes me think of the sky once, over a Kroger in Roanoke. The store was framed by the Blue Ridge Mountains and then backdropped by just the most beautiful sky and I kept thinking about how uncanny and strange it all was. This man-made thing set against something so beautiful. I was really interested in that sense of simultaneity in the collection. How there are many truths at once, and how my characters are moving between these different places.
DB: I’m wondering what the process of compiling the collection was like. There is a splendid variety to the stories: long, short, speculative, realist, diasporic, at home in India, West Coast, East Coast. How did you decide order? What went and what stayed?
MM: I started off writing poetry. I still feel like I kind of have a poet’s heart and I think this has invited me into noticing the rhythmic quality of language and sequencing. I feel something similar with the ordering of an album; there’s a story that is being told based on where the songs live. I wasn’t interested in a linear progression, but wanted something that felt more jagged. I’d ask: how can I be playful? Or how can I insert an unexpected energy here? Let All Our Ghosts Depart didn’t initially come to me in the order its published in. It took time, seeing the initial layout of the book, and talking with my editor to realize the exact order. Initially, Spring Fling was the last story, but we switched it to Repair Shop because it ends with “I’ll take us home.” I liked this because it’s not a resolution, but does offer a sense of pause and relief. We don’t quite know what’s going to happen next, but I liked the feeling of openness and community in that ending line.
DB: Thinking about the above, could you talk about the forthcoming audiobook for Let All Our Ghosts Depart?
MM: It’s been fun to witness this happening! I just really admire voice acting and acting and all these different forms of art. It’s something I’m jealous about, even, that many of these other art forms contain so many collaborators. I get to experience this through this process of seeing the audiobook being made. It’s opened up for me different parts of the stories that I hadn’t seen or noticed when writing, or even when reading and editing. It’s allowed me to see a new interpretation of the work and feel a connectedness to whoever may read this book—like it’s an alive thing. The actors who are reading the stories are incredibly talented and will bring the collection to life beautifully. I’m very excited that the audiobook offers another way for readers to find and engage with the book.
DB: What are you working on now?
MM: Something new, but it’s a process as I’m launching this book and starting a new job. It’s a novel that will be somewhere in the dark academia and literary traditions. I’m very interested in the experience of being visiting or contingent faculty, and how women of color experience working in academia. Like with the collection, I’m thinking about who gets to make art, how it is recognized, and about power dynamics more generally.
___
Meghana Mysore is the author of Let All Our Ghosts Depart, published by West Virginia University Press and Blackstone Audio. Her stories, essays, and poems have appeared in The Yale Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Audacity, and more. She is the winner of the Barry Hannah Prize in Fiction. Mysore has been a Steinbeck Fellow and a scholar at McCormack Writing Center and Bread Loaf. She holds an MFA from Hollins University and a BA in English from Yale. Mysore has taught as visiting faculty at Amherst College and Bucknell University, and is now an assistant professor of English at Randolph College. From Portland, Oregon, Meghana is a daughter of Indian immigrants and a lover of non-sequiturs and used bookstores.
___
Danielle Bradley’s debut novel, CRYING IN BASEBALL, is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster’s Avid Reader Press in 2027. Her work has been supported by a grant from the Mass Cultural Council for creative individuals, the McCormack Writing Center, where she served as a 2025/2026 Reading Fellow, and Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, where she was selected as the winner of the 2025 Elizabeth Alexander Creative Writing Award. Danielle’s work appears in The Rumpus, Indiana Review, Colorado Review, Salt Hill Journal, the Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. The second daughter of a Nuyorican landscaper and an Irish-American domestic worker, she holds a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and an MFA from the MFA for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Liminal Transit Review 