Interview: Anu Khosla
In “Blackberry Bush,” writer Anu Khosla captures a fleeting childhood memory, filled with the innocence of giggles, slippery rocks, and sun-dappled streams. Through the lens of flash nonfiction, the piece explores nostalgia, friendship, and the weight of growing older, all while avoiding the need to over-explain. In this interview, the author discusses the delicate balance of memory and ethics, the intimacy of namelessness, and the undercurrent of grief woven through the story. As childhood rivers dry up and summer skies fill with ash, “Blackberry Bush” becomes a meditation on loss—of people, places, and even one’s former self.
What inspired you to write “Blackberry Bush?”
My initial impulse for writing this piece was actually about craft more than theme. I wanted to explore the flash form, though I don’t remember why I decided to tell this particular story. At the time that I wrote it, much of my writing was quite analytical and expository, so I wanted to play with writing something sensuous and a bit ambiguous. So much of memoir writing is concerned with explaining what happened, then justifying a reaction and an interpretation. I wanted to explore what it would look like to simply remember the details, to try and conjure the feeling of a nostalgic moment of childhood without trying to filter it through an adult mindset. Flash ended up being a perfect form in which to play with these ideas, because with so little space it is impossible to over explain. Though the piece is memoir, I hoped that that openness within the story allows readers to map their own nostalgia onto it, or even to treat it as fiction and fill it in with their own invented stories.
In your flash essay, there is a nameless speaker known to the reader only as “her.” Who is “her” and why did you decide to omit her name?
“Her” represents a childhood friend of mine, with which I hold these memories of walking down a chilly stream. As a nonfiction writer, I think a lot about the ethics of what I write. Part of the omission was an ethical choice. I was writing about her as she was central to my own experience as a child. I feel I have some ownership of my memory of us together in the stream, but I didn’t necessarily have her consent to write about her, so conjuring us as a single entity of friendship –– our twenty toes, our four soles –– felt like a way to bridge my agency in the writing with my concern around consent. In the end, using a real name for her grandmother felt like a way to honor the reality of her role in the story while still keeping her somewhat anonymous.
But this idea of us being a single entity, a friendship unit, feels just as important as the ethical concern I mention. The nostalgia is potent because we long for a time when our friends were so caught up in our lives that we were essentially one life, not two. To name her would be to distinguish her as separate from me, but the desire behind the piece is to return to that moment of perfect joy, when our giggles were indistinguishable.
The Blackberry Bush symbolizes death and grief, but also love. This is especially resonant given the last line of your essay: “These days summer skies fill with pine tree ash.” Can you elaborate on the significance of the final line? What did you want to leave the reader with when you wrote it?
I am Californian, and so the locations of these childhood memories of mine are quite literally burning, or at least filling with the smoke of nearby fires. Not long before I wrote this, the blackberry bushes along that stream were under evacuation order. This piece, for me, is really about depression. Part of the longing for childhood and friendship and the sunny disposition is to go back to a time when the mind was unburdened, the water was pure, and the air was clear. The narrator of this piece wants to live up to the grandma’s vision of her, as someone with a sunny disposition who holds her joy as close as her friendships, but she is no longer that person. This final line aims to point out the futility in this desire. Childhood is as out of reach as a stable planet untouched by climate change. The final line also serves as a justification for the narrator. How can one overcome depression and connect with an adolescent joy when the world around them is burning?
