Shah brings important, refreshing, and depressing observations about what it means to have dark skin and an 'exotic' name, when the only country you've ever lived in is America ... The essays in this slim volume are engaging and thought-provoking ... The essays are well-crafted with varying forms that should inspire and enlighten other essayists ... A particularly delightful chapter is the last, called 'Voice Texting with My Mother,' which is, in fact, written in texts ... Shah's thoughts on heritage and belonging are important and interesting.
Through incorporating poetry and fiction, moving from place to place, and switching among first, second and third points of view, Shah has produced a work as original and distinctive as she is...She shows what’s possible when we don’t subscribe to personal or creative restrictions.
What we witness in these pages is Shah making a place for herself in the world, for the life she lives and the creative fulfillment she pursues ... As a sort-of creative travelogue, the book’s form constantly reminds you of itself, of the journeys that the author took to produce it. Each piece ends with a date, informing us of the long expanses of time between each composition, which Shah clearly undertakes with great care. The prose is tight and succinct, but unhurried; each sentence and paragraph patiently closes the gaps between those expanses, adding another detail, idea, or layer on the story she tells ... As a result, we’re relaxed, welcomed, to ease our breath between each stop in Shah’s journey ... This is One Way To Dance becomes its own act of place-making for the reader, carefully and meticulously building a home for us and inviting us to a seat at the table. A place of comfort in the midst of this widely traveled yet deeply interior endeavor we call a writing life.
... illuminating essays ... Shah’s embrace of the lyric essay—a form that allows her to use her early training and natural instincts as a poet—and its appearance alongside the narrative essay gives the book the intimacy and intelligence of a trusted friend ... Shah’s desire to clarify, reflect upon, or amend original thoughts contribute to the sense of continuity in this collection ... a necessary and absorbing look into what it means to be this particular woman, this particular writer, at a particular time in America. As we see the uniqueness of her, we also see the experiences of many—of being brown in America. In a time when immigrants are blocked from entering the country by racist, scapegoating policies, This Is One Way to Dance reminds us of the richness immigrants and their offspring bring.
... [a] memorable collection ... Dancing, spinning, and twirling don’t fix a body in place; they worry boundaries and borders. These elements define Shah’s forays into creative nonfiction, which encompass 'the wildest field of voice, thought, and performance' ... These probing dances that re-turn and redefine, while still encapsulating the germs of the prior affective experience, come full circle ... While her resonant prose powerfully registers loss, the persisting power to astonish and be astonished enables her to 'dwell and revel in the spaces between.'
... a line, like so many others in the collection, that stops the reader, makes the eye pass over it again and again. A language. A culture. Like the lines we reread, Shah makes us question: What do we use? What are we expected to use? ... Shah does have these sorrows we can use, and she gives them to us wrapped in a beautiful fabric of words. These essays—many of which border on poetry—explore and contemplate the experiences of an American other and the languages lost, found, and inherited for children of immigrants. Each piece, whether about cooking, weddings, traveling in both foreign and familiar places, carries the weight of Shah’s history, the history of her blood, and the history of a language we never knew we used until we start to read.
Your essays span such a wide range of time, and yet you did the most brilliant thing: rather than smoothing them out to make them all 'contemporary,' you added notes at the end of each to denote when the essay was written and then when you updated it...You leave the essay as it is, a moment in time, and then enter a correspondence with the essay itself ... What is fascinating to me about your book is exactly that: how you handle the oddness of the experience of time itself, what it hides from us and what it reveals ... I think this is what created the mind-blowing yet subtle effect of this collection: the essays are ordered not by 'when stuff happened' with the childhood stuff first. They are ordered based on when they were written, so that we are tracking your consciousness as it unfolds through time, as it loops backward and returns to previous themes and changes perspectives. The effect, for me, was of a kind of writing intimacy that one feels in reading letters or diaries: there’s a sense of being in the head of the writer as they have a conversation with what they are writing. It’s like turning over a needlepoint to view the back. But then—whereas a needlepoint’s reverse is often a mess of threads—what you do is you make the back of the essay beautiful. You tuck the ends in and connect them ... The loose ends of the essays all curve and dovetail toward a larger design, making something beautiful, and it wasn’t through forcing them to align. It was through exposing the pattern of their making ... What a brilliant and subtle design.
Shah’s collection of essays helps to bring the often invisible sub-community into a more mainstream consciousness—which is something I, as a diasporic Indian writer myself, deeply appreciate ... Each anecdote is expressed in such vivacious detail and with a poignance that attests to Shah's mastery of her craft ... Since the essays have been written across two decades, This Is One Way to Dance bestows on readers the privilege of witnessing Shah's evolving understanding of her own cultural mixedness and personhood. This is further underlined by the fact that Shah occasionally reworks or responds to her earlier text-pieces ... The collection also allows readers to observe and examine for themselves how the diaspora and its relationship with the larger American society have evolved with time.
Sejal Shah seamlessly invites you into the experience of a life other than your own. The Rochester native and creative writing teacher explores life as an Indian-American and her relationships with her culture and identity in this debut memoir in essays ... Each essay is an engaging read. Some are warm and lighthearted, the recollections of a charismatic writing teacher, or about the practice of writing postcards to friends. Others are more grave, the wake of 9/11, a friend who took her own life. While these parts are joined by the running theme of being Indian-American, This is One Way to Dance is by no means a rambling lecture on that one topic. It’s a picture of an individual, accounting for cultural identity among many other things. This is part of what makes the running theme stand out so powerfully ... The memoir brings you in and gives you one person to care about, someone whose clever and compelling voice paints the world around her so vividly, and then shows you how those big problems affect her. This is why it’s so crucial to the functioning of the memoir that the moments captured are widespread, from lighthearted to serious—they create the full picture of a person and make room for connection.
The poetic, probing debut from short story writer and essayist Shah forcefully tackles the complicated intersection of 'identity, language, movement, family, place, and race' ... Closely attentive to nuances of race, she reflects on the marginal status accorded South Asian identity in both popular culture and academic writing ... Shah is insightfully self-reflective. She also makes lyrical use of language ... In this sterling collection, Shah has created a striking self-portrait.
She portrays a life rich with places visited and lived in as well as family, friends, writing, and exuberant Indian weddings—including, finally, her own, with its vibrant clothing, jewelry, and especially dancing ... Despite inevitable repetition, this is a sensitive, poignant collection.
