By Creative Nonfiction Editor Stephanie Seguin
Girl, Sunsplit by Neethu Krishnan, was Bacopa’s Creative Nonfiction prizewinner for 2022. One of the things that stood out instantly about this piece was how words were so carefully selected to create beautiful images. In the very first paragraph, "talons" of heat foreshadow the author's painful condition, and the use of the word “snail” perfectly conjures the image of a large procession moving slowly.
I’m cross-legged on my bed, the AC safeguarding me from the talons of South Indian heat. Padding to the dark-tinted, curtained windows of my bedroom, I keen my ear to the thuds and clangs, trying to gauge how long till they snail to the road facing the front of our house.
The language is beautiful throughout, but the words don’t distract from the story itself, that of a young girl reckoning with an unusual illness, at odds with her very environment. And in fact, the beauty of the images created seem at odds with the anguish the author is experiencing.
A surge of cold cocoons me. Relieved, I nestle into the dryness. I keep my eyes trained on the muted sun, nose-pressed against my window, as the cold kneads its chilly fingers into me, reconstituting me from an infinite incoherence of molecules into a finite and mostly non-ionized human-approximating whole.
When reading creative nonfiction, I am also easily charmed by an unfamiliar world I can spend a few minutes in and feel at home.
Steel plates loaded with rice and curry in hand, we emerge from the dark cave of the bedroom into the corridor, where there’s no dearth of sun. Large sections of the outside-facing walls are criss-crosses of vibrant, kingfisher blue painted wood, just like the twin front doors and their frames. Seating ourselves on the narrow bench and desk in the corridor, we finish our meals, large diamonds of warm light tickling our sweaty backs.
Girl, Sunsplit was a complete immersion into someone else's world, with all the beauty and all the pain. For me, writing like this is what makes creative nonfiction so compelling.
Neethu Krishnan is a writer from Mumbai, India. She holds postgraduate degrees in English and Microbiology and writes between genres at the moment. Her work has appeared in The Spectacle and is forthcoming in Seaside Gothic and the anthology "Dark Cheer: Cryptids Emerging" (Volume Silver) from Improbable Press.
