Concluding her week leading a workshop titled “The Stories You Need to Write” through the Writers’ Center, Sejal Shah will deliver a reading and craft talk titled “Objects Will Speak if You Listen” at 12:15 p.m. today on the porch of the Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall for Chautauqua Literary Arts’ Summer on the Steps.
Shah is an educator, writer and interdisciplinary artist based in Rochester, New York. Her most recent book How to Make Your Mother Cry: Fictions was longlisted for the 2025 Story Prize and her award-winning essay collection This Is One Way to Dance was an NPR Best Book of 2020. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, The Kenyon Review and Lit Hub, among others. She currently teaches community-based writers’ workshops at Writers & Books in Rochester.
Shah is the recipient of the 2025 New York State Council for the Arts Support for Artist Grant, sponsored by Chautauqua Institution for her project “The Gujarati Girls: Growing Up South Asian American in Western New York in the 1980s.”
As a partner with NYSCA, Chautauqua connects with a local author who has a project for which they need additional support and helps them submit the project to the Support for Artist Grant. This is Chautauqua’s third year in partnership with NYSCA, collaborating alongside previous recipients Jimin Han in 2023 and John Brantingham in 2024.
Stephine Hunt, managing director of Literary Arts, said that she reached out to Shah at Han’s recommendation.
An essay titled “Betsy, Tacy, Sejal, Tib” in Shah’s first collection, This Is One Way to Dance, inspired her current project. The grant application offered Shah the opportunity to expand the essay that was originally inspired by the Nancy Drew and Betsy-Tacy and Tib book series.
“It’s about reading these middle grade and young adult series and not seeing anyone who looked like me in them,” Shah said.
Shah grew up in a Gujarati community in Rochester and wanted to develop an adventure story representing her own childhood in Western New York.
Hunt said that the grant offers a unique opportunity to propel Western New York-based writers to delve deeper into their craft while also fostering relationships that allow writers, such as Shah, to share their work in Chautauqua.
“We love to elevate these writers in this way, and if these dynamic connections between places can help elevate a writer’s chances to get the support they need for their project, it’s worth it,” Hunt said. “We’re thrilled to support these writers like this.”
In her presentation today, Shah plans to read selections from her fiction and her essay collections that were inspired by objects.
She will bring the objects that inspired the work to show the audience how writing about photographs and other sentimental objects can stir stories about oneself and one’s past.
One of the selections that Shah will read, “Curriculum,” centers largely on writing about an object from memory. When Shah found the object again, she had initially thought that she would update her story, but did not.
“I stayed with the kind of dream image and the memory of the object more than the object itself, which is not what I would have expected,” Shah said. “… Our memories have a kind of emotional logic to them.”
Hunt anticipates that the talk will connect well to a week about building community through the arts and tie in with workshops such as Mary Hall Surface’s “Find your Muse: Creative Writing Inspired by Visual Art.”
“I feel like it’s going to be a pretty lovely conclusion for our week where we’re bringing (together) many different artforms in conversation,” Hunt said.
