As part of an ongoing series celebrating the work of award-winning authors and poets, the Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts hosted a fiction reading by the Fall 2023 Writer in Residence, Akil Kumarasamy.
With a newly published novel, “Meet Us by the Roaring Sea,” a short story collection, and numerous awards under her belt, Kumarasamy took to the podium in the evening on Tuesday, Oct. 24 to read aloud several excerpts from her novel.
Kumarasamy jumped around within her book, presenting excerpts from chapters throughout the story; her goal, she said, was to most accurately present the entirety of the book (without spoiling too much, of course) to her assembled audience in Bucknell Hall and allow listeners to make connections and analyze narrative threads on their own as she read. Her unnamed main character narrates the events of “Meet Us by the Roaring Sea” in the present second person, which is already a wildly unexpected approach to novelization—Kumarasamy goes even further, though, turning the timeline within her book upside down as chapters alternate between a “near future” setting, flashbacks to the main character’s life before her adulthood, and excerpts from a manuscript the main character is working on translating.
Very deliberately, Kumarasamy wove her thematic emphases in such a way as to mirror the real, present-day in her exploration of an imagined past and hypothetical future. When she began writing “Meet Us by the Roaring Sea,” it was the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, so the escapism that ended up being a large presence in the book itself was heavy on her mind. She felt a discussion of compassion and grief was necessary but wanted to hold it in a fictionalized medium easier to digest and wrestle with; thus, “Meet Us by the Roaring Sea” was born.
Ultimately, “Meet Us by the Roaring Sea” is so rife with theme and meaning that no two readers come away with the same interpretation. The book explores purpose, grief, struggles within bureaucracy, dichotomies between limitations and freedom, love in a time of impersonalization and homogenization… and so much more. It critiques the dynamics of modern consumption—a running motif throughout both the “near future” and manuscript-centered chapters is the television, and the notion of escapism as it ties into “reality shows” and commercialism—whilst staying steady on a course that challenges readers to wrestle with the notion of compassion and how we care for other people. A cohesion of seemingly unrelated themes knits together to form the strong fabric of Kumarasamy’s book.
It was with intention that Kumarasamy limited the characters and settings in her book, despite jumping across so many iterations of time. She kept a focus on domestic and personal spaces, ensuring the heart of “Meet Us by the Roaring Sea” stayed intact; during her reading, she made sure to emphasize that all the spaces she presented were “infused with meaning,” intended to “build focus” on the important, “primary world” of her protagonist. Everything that happens in the book is “grounded in the narrator’s visceral experience.” The details of the story, the embellishments and emotional waves, are intentionally invoked by Kumarasamy’s application of sensory associations.
