Shreya Fadia
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by Avantika Chitturi
Fourteen Hills: When did you first realize you wanted to write?
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Shreya Fadia: I think I was probably in elementary school and there were a couple of school assignments we had to do, and I just really enjoyed those. And I just kind of kept doing it. In
school I would write in my own time and when I started working full time, I started working on a novel that will remain forever on my hard drive somewhere.
14H: Who are some of your favorite authors?
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SF: Let’s see, there are so many. This is always a tough question. Narrowing it down is always difficult. I’m a fan of Kelly Link. There’s Carmen Maria Machado who is a big influence. I really enjoyed Brandon Taylor’s Real Life. Really, there are too many to list.
14H: What is the meaning behind the title of your short story?
SF: Well, it’s from Hinduism. The idea of rebirth and the cyclical nature of life. So, I was kind of drawing on that, on the cyclical nature of things and I think it comes through in different ways in the story.
14H: What is the inspiration behind “Samsara”?
SF: That’s a tough question. I can’t say there was necessarily an inspiration. I’d say the idea started with a kind of feeling. There was a sort of persistent thinking of this character who was having this feeling of emptiness and wanting to be cared for. I think some of the images of planting were also on my mind. I think I was writing it in the winter so there was this sense of things being dead and things coming from the Earth and the spring and that kind of promise.
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14H: How do you go about researching a story like “Samsara”? The characters, the experience of domestic abuse, all of that?
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SF: I can’t say that this is a research heavy piece. I have written some pieces where I have done more research. I think this is more of an accumulation of things that I’ve been thinking of. It’s not an autobiographical story but
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there were some elements I was drawing on that are reflected from life. Elements from life, things I have read, things I have seen over time that all kind of melded together through the lens of fiction.​
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14H: What do you think happens after the ending? Do you think your narrator finds love again or chooses to remain single after her experiences?
SF: I think I envisioned this character remaining alone for her life. I envision her remaining single romantically. I think it’s possible that she develops other forms of relationships. Obviously, her mother is dying and that is in an important relationship that she will lose. But, I don’t think she will be entirely alone. I think the kind of trauma that has happened to her has scarred her.
14H: What do you think healing looks like?
SF: That’s a good question. I think for this character, I think what healing meant to her was to reclaim her narrative and she does that kind of by causing herself to scar over the injuries she has sustained. So that is like a more literal version of that, of taking things into her own hands. I think some of it is the power of the scarring and her own bodily autonomy, but also of returning to herself. Like early in the piece, she talks about laundry as a thing she returned to as a ritual of sorts and in the time when she was in this traumatic relationship, she had not been doing that. Just returning to these forms of labor and those things that were sustaining for her before this relationship was a way to sort of heal.
14H: One final question. What can you tell me about what you’re working on right now?
SF: I’m currently working on a novel and I’m right in the murky middle of it. I’m close to finishing a draft of it. It’s very different from this short story. It’s more of a campus novel. It’s pretty different. The novel is about a character who is an adolescent who is starting college so it’s someone who is in a different stage of life. This character in “Samsara” has gone through a lot of things and has had this kind of hard life. And the novel I’m working on is about someone who is on the cusp of things and where there’s all this promise and excitement so it’s just wildly different, the two stories.
Shreya Fadia is a writer and editor based in the mountains of North Carolina. She holds an MFA in fiction from Indiana University, where she served as editor in chief of Indiana Review. She was a 2025 Periplus fellow, and her work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Booth, The Margins, and Phoebe, among other publications. She is currently at work on a novel.
Avantika Chitturi is a master's student from the San Francisco Bay Area. She has an associates in English from Chabot College and a bachelors in English from UC Berkeley.