Sethi Earns Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship to Teach in Hyderabad
Robbie Clipper Sethi’s writing has seen her weave American culture into that of India, using experiences and observations from her own narrative to help shape her fiction. In The Bride Wore Red, for instance, Sethi examines the related tales of three Anglo-Indian marriages and takes her characters on a journey that spans the Indian subcontinent to the United States.
Sethi, a professor of English at Rider University, will now be able to meld her unique perspectives with those of students at the Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) in Hyderabad, India, through the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship she was awarded in April. Through the program, Sethi will teach creative writing to IIIT students at the central India campus from the fall semester, which runs from August 31 through December 11, 2009. She will actually depart for Hyderabad, a city of 7 million residents, in mid-July.
The opportunity to teach creative writing in India represents an opportunity that Sethi has long been interested in linking. “I’ve always been interested in India and Indian culture, at least from young adulthood,” said Sethi, who has taught at Rider since September 1985. “The Beatles went there and took us along with them, and those images we saw in the ’60s sparked a lot of interest. I’ve gone several times, but haven’t gotten my fill.”
Sethi also sees her fellowship, which was awarded by the United States-India Educational Foundation, as an opportunity to foster yet another relationship between Rider and international students. “I’d like to work on linking the IIIT students with ours through an electric workshop,” she said, adding that they could be connected through a Blackboard-type program. “It’s a wonderful chance for increased peer feedback and for them all to immediately broaden their readership.”
Such technology is clearly an advantage, Sethi says, in helping young writers gain exposure. “When I was 18 years old, I thought I was a citizen of the world,” she recalled, amused by her youthful naïveté. “This would make the world much smaller to the students, letting readers from another continent see their fiction and poetry, and they really can be citizens of the world.”
Though she has never before taught in India, Sethi has spent considerable time travelling, both internationally and within the United States. Born in Camden, N.J., and raised nearby in Cherry Hill, Sethi left the Garden State for the Midwest after high school, and earned her bachelor’s degree in English and Slavic Languages and Literatures at Indiana University. From there, she headed west, to the University of California at Berkeley for a master’s and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature.
Her studies and work in Comparative Literature also took Sethi to the Soviet Union for two months in 1974 – “I was there when Nixon resigned!” she recalled – and she once sought a Fulbright fellowship to teach in the Republic of Mali. “But there were none available in creative writing – only in literature, and I really wanted to teach writing,” she explained.
Certain cultural aspects of the region promise to lure Sethi to the West African nation before very long, however. “My interest in Mali comes from the spectacular music scene happening in Bamako right now,” she said of the sounds that have drawn such prominent western artists as Robert Plant and Ry Cooder to play with local musicians. “Maybe I'll go there some time in the future!
Sethi’s academic degrees notwithstanding, it may have been a conversation with her brother that really jumpstarted her career in writing fiction. “I was in California visiting my brother, Paul (Clipper), who was a motorcyclist journalist with Dirt Bike magazine,” she recalled. “We were carrying a motorcycle down some stairs in Encino, and I told him how I wanted to write fiction. He said, ‘Then why don’t you?’”
Spurred by the simplicity of the suggestion, Sethi began to work intensively on pieces of short fiction. Before long, she had a story published in the now-defunct Mademoiselle, an influential women’s magazine that also published short stories by Truman Capote and Susan Minot, and was guest-edited by Sylvia Plath.
Sethi explains how the story in Mademoiselle was her first published piece, but not her first accepted submission. “The Literary Review (published by Fairleigh-Dickinson University) ran a story two-and-a-half years after I submitted it,” she said of the noteworthy journal, which has featured work from 22 winners of the Pulitzer Prize in Literature since its founding in 1957. “By then, the other piece had run in Mademoiselle.”
Since then, Sethi has published a number of other short stories and poems, which have appeared in Atlantic Monthly and The Philadelphia Inquirer, as well as a number of literary magazines and anthologies. The recipient of fellowships in the past from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts, Sethi has also been able to provide Rider students with opportunities for off-campus publication as the fiction editor of The Kelsey Review.
“I believe in empowering students through the workshop method of teaching writing and literature through discussion rather than lecture,” she said.
Sethi, who has published novels, The Bride Wore Red and the more recent Fifty Fifty, has referenced her own experiences in her books. The Bride Wore Red, she explains, depicts a family of mixed ethnicity, blending members from the East and the West. To write it, she invoked her own impressions, as well as those of another American woman, of marrying into a Punjabi Indian family. Calling upon personal experiences, however, is something with which Sethi has fueled her fiction since she began to pen her ideas.
“My first manuscript was based on a summer I spent in Cape May as a barmaid and waitress, before it became a national historic site,” she said. “It was such a modest and down-to-earth place, and was really only inhabited by the ‘townies’ and sailors from the Coast Guard. I lived in a coffin-sized room in the Carroll Villa Hotel on Jackson Street for $17 a week, and just wrote about the people I met.”
Observations of the people who fill a story are what makes Sethi’s fiction come alive, and they are impressions she’ll soon be able to share with students from the very land upon which she has based so many of her own characters. “This is what I really wanted to do,” she says of teaching creative writing, not just those in India but anywhere there are students eager to learn. “I’ll be there to help them write a better story.”
