Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan is a writer, performer, and arts consultant from India living in Ireland. Her work’s been published by Dedalus Press, Lifeboat Press, Little Island, Poetry Ireland, Banshee, and The Stinging Fly amongst others. 

She’s been the recipient of multiple Arts Council Awards, one of which supported her being the 2023 Writer in Residence for the Institute of Physics. In 2024 she was selected as a Goethe-Institute Studio Quantum Artist in Residence, and is currently under commission with Skein Press as part of the Play It Forward Fellowship. 

We talk about her (very brief) AI experiment with poetry, how her sense of Irishness has developed since we last spoke, her participation in ‘Queering The Green’, observations about queer migrant space in literature in Ireland, her recent discovery she’s AuDHD + more.

And she reads several of her beautiful poems for us.

You can check her website: ⁠https://www.chandrika.ie/⁠ and her instagram: ⁠@chandrikanm.art ⁠

• ⁠Queering The Green⁠, edited by Paul Maddern, and published by Lifeboat Press.
• ‘Mapping the Depths of Us: a pamphlet of physics poems’ by Chandrika – which you can ⁠download for free⁠. 
• The anthology of essays by autistic Irish writers that Chandrika also wrote for – ⁠Wired Our Own Way ⁠published by New Island Press. 

Wander is produced by Bairbre Flood (⁠@bairbreflood⁠) with thanks to funding from the Arts Council of Ireland.

previous eps: Amano // Noor Hindi

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan Transcript

MUSIC 

Bairbre Flood: Hi and welcome to Wander with me Bairbre Flood, and with thanks to the Arts Council of Ireland for their funding support.

This week my guest is Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan a writer, performer, and arts consultant from India living in Ireland. Her work has been published by Dedalus Press, Lifeboat Press, Little Island, Poetry Ireland, Banshee, and The Stinging Fly amongst others. Chandrika has been the recipient of multiple Arts Council Awards, one of which supported her being the 2023 Writer in Residence for the Institute of Physics. 

In 2024 she was selected as a Goethe-Institute Studio Quantum Artist in Residence, and is currently under commission with Skein Press as part of the Play It Forward Fellowship. 

We talk about her very brief AI experiment with poetry, how her sense of Irishness has developed since we last spoke, her participation in Queering The Green and her observations about queer migrant space in literature in Ireland. 

And she reads several of her beautiful poems for us.

This is Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan…

MUSIC

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan: So what I’ve learned from working with AI is that like any tool, it suits some people and it doesn’t suit others. But in fairness, I didn’t choose to engage with it. I wasn’t working with AI in the slightest and didn’t really have an interest in it. And then Open AI opened their Dublin offices and they somehow found me and approached me to create a piece of poetry using one of their tools, chat, GPT, and I was like okay. It notoriously writes bad poetry, so I was just thinking I wanna do something creative. I don’t want to write badly, and I don’t, I have quite strong opinions about not using AI to replace what would be a paid activity from an artist. One, it’s not as good quality. Two, I don’t want to replace an artist.

So what I did instead is I worked with my best friend Melissa Clissold, who works in creative storytelling for social justice, but also working with technology climate. She does a lot of really interesting projects in Istanbul, but we went to school together. And she’s really interested in working with AI.

And I was like let’s work together. So instead of doing it myself, I split the project with her. She knew my concerns. And so what we figured out was I wanted to use Chat, GPT to facilitate the process, not to generate poetry. So what I did is I created a database of poetry lines based on environmental observations, like describing a neighborhood in different seasons.

She helped me create variables within that hot, cold or icy, warm, just the descriptors could change. And then we encouraged it to write prompts for her. To write memories of cities. So what ha And then I said can you connect that memory that she just described to my existing database of lines that I have uploaded to you?

And can you pull lines together that resonate with that memory and use the variables as needed. So it was an interesting experiment. And, it was my own work at, at some point because it’s not, it’s both immensely. Like it’s good at problem solving, but it’s also quite stupid. Every 10 commands, it forgets things.

So it suddenly started writing its own poetry out of nowhere, even though I explicitly said, do not generate your own writing. And it was so bad. It was so bad. I was like, what’s happening? It’s suddenly really embarrassingly flowery, overly lyrical, like teenage poetry. I was like sorry.

And I realized, oh, it’s, that was 10 commands ago I told it not to generate any new lines. Only connect these so it was interesting and it was an interesting experiment. 

I prefer to engage with something and then form an opinion on it rather than jump on an angry bandwagon.

So I have engaged with it. I worked with it, and my conclusion was that’s grand. 

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan:  It was fine, but I could have done the same thing and better on my own in two hours. Yeah. And instead it took a week, like actually I could have just facilitated that myself and it would’ve been way quicker and cleaner. So it used more time. I was really grateful for the opportunity and I like being able to play with the tool. And the interesting thing is that the people who I work with, they tend to really like it.

And then they get a new connection into that company and they can go off and do things, whereas I’m like, thank you. Really appreciated the opportunity. It’s not for me. I tried, again with a recent project using their video generator Sora, and yet came to the same conclusion again that it’s beautiful.

It’s insanely impressive, like it’s sc impressive while also being a bit dumb. But I ended up just playing the video and then stopping the video and just doing a whole performance of just me and a piece of paper so I could showcase. The tool and then make a statement of that exists. I played with it and, but it’s not me and here’s my performance, which in the end it’s just me alone on a stage with a bit of paper, is simply how I work.

But I’m glad that I got to go through the process to. Solidify the choice. ’cause sometimes you don’t, you, you don’t realize how much you do out of default, and it’s cool to be presented with an actual active choice and go, oh no, I actively choose this as a better vehicle from our, my artistic voice.

Now again, the collaborator I worked with, then David Oe is an incredible performance poet. Oh, he harnessed it in a totally different way and it really enhanced his performance and it was integrated intelligently and it worked, yeah, to each their own, give it a go. Find out if it’s your tool or not.

And it might not be, but also, when we were talking to other artists about this, Walham said, look, if you’re gonna use things like AI justify it, don’t do things just because you should have a strong argument for why you need this tool and how it’s gonna affect the artistic output. Have.

Put thought into it and justify it. Don’t just do it because, and I think that’s a solid piece of advice for any artistic tool. 

Bairbre Flood: Yeah. Tell us bit about the ‘Queering the green’ anthology. When was that? Was that last year or the year before? I’m sorry. I should read my notes here. 

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan: Oh my God. No,it’s I have it in front of me. It’s, I think it’s Yonkers ago. Oh, sorry. I know you’re gonna get paper sounds now in the microphone. Oh, 2021. Actually, it’s not that long ago. I thought it was longer ago than that. Yeah. Okay. I still don’t understand how I ended up in it. I was like, this is amazing, but like, how did I end up in it?

That’s pretty class. Like it was only like. Maybe a year and a half, two years since I had got published for the first time ever In, in, in Writing Home by Doubtless Press. And yeah, Paul Madden is an incredible editor, but also just a really cool writer massive support for artists with the running of the River Mill writing retreat.

Yeah, and he’s the one who put that together and it’s like a massive honor to be in. Such a like, iconic anthology. I didn’t realize what I was getting into and I was like, I don’t know. Here’s some poems. And the interesting thing was like, this came up last week. I am, I just joined a new reading group at Trinity.

I’m not part of Trinity, but I joined it. ’cause Raphael Mendez, who’s one of the poets I did wanna talk about later who was a fellow published poet in writing home he’s doing some incredible work and yeah he started a sort of queer. Queer Studies reading group and we were talking about Queering the green and like what makes a poem queer.

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan: And I remember at the time I was like, Paul, I don’t really have any queer poems. Like I don’t write about that experience simply because it’s not, it’s never at the forefront of my mind ’cause I’m too busy being a really stressed out migrant and I just have other things that I’m doing. Like it’s just not, for me, it’s not my main writing topic. And I just remember him going. That’s really not the point. It doesn’t matter. You belong in this. And I was like, oh, okay. Because in my head I had this assumption that like you have to. Write about queerness to belong in queer ary spaces. And I’m like, that’s fine that checks out to me.

And they had a symposium and I was really sad. I wasn’t there for the symposium, but apparently this is something that he talked about specifically, which is what is queer poetry? And he’s it’s this intersection between the writer being queer, the topics being queer, but also that poetry. His opinion is intrinsically queer in itself in terms of how it uses language and how it tells stories.

And it’s not necessarily all these three things have to be in every poem, but it’s, pulling from these three elements is that’s a queer poem. And I found that really interesting. Because I just reread my poems in there. I’m like, yeah, they’re not about queerness, they’re about just all sorts of other things and yet it still found a place there. So it’s exciting that these years later it’s as relevant as ever.

MUSIC

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan: ‘Stargazing With My Mother’

We’ve seen stars fall before. She says over the phone as we peer out over rooftops from different sides of Europe, looking for a blip or a spark against the blue. Trying not to mistake a rocket for a star.

You need binoculars, she says, and I remember how she demonstrated before handing me a pair as the hail bop comet blazed across a new deli sky.

Look over there. She exclaimed one time pointing to a needle streak of white. As we stood outside a Swiss hotel not caring what people would think of two Indian women gazing upwards into the night.

MUSIC

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan: That poem, in fairness, was one of the things that kind of started nudging me. Back towards writing in the space between arts and science, which I couldn’t really write in all the years I was busy dealing with immigration issues. ’cause I dunno, all I wanted to write about was immigration. I didn’t really have the head space, but by that time.

I had gotten a stamp for, which meant I could finally freelance, I could work outside my job legally. So I was doing gigs, I was yeah, doing all sorts of things. From my computer ’cause lockdown, but I had all this new freedom and stability and with that my brain remembered I had other interests.

And yeah, that poem and then two other poems I wrote during the same period, like about the Perseverance Rover engineers and their. Research journeys. I wrote a poem about that and that really is the trajectory that’s taken me to where I am now working with science communication through poetry, which has been a really interesting journey over the last few years.

Bairbre Flood: It’s something that people really take for granted when they just grow up in a country and stay in a country and never have to negotiate anything to do with immigration. And I think it’s something that’s very, I dunno. It’s hard for people to understand, I, or I think and it just seems to me like such a waste, do you know what I mean?

That so much goes into that, that, like you said you are, you just get very focused on your it’s almost like a survival mechanism. And I just think it’s just such a. waste. But also I think, do you notice your writing then, obviously it changed as you became more secure in Ireland and with your status, but did your sense of Irishness as well develop, or how do you feel about that?

Do you describe yourself as Irish Indian or what way do you? 

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan:  I do now, and that’s really only ’cause I got citizenship last spring. Oh. Technically December. 2023, but because it took three years to process from beginning to end, and we only got the paperwork three months.

After the ceremony. So I was like I’m technically a citizen and have not once not even one sentence on paper or an email to prove it. So I’m not sure what to do with that. So I’m good. Yeah, so basically spring 2024, I got Irish citizenship and it took about just about 12 years. Since I turned up.

Really? Yeah. And that’s when I changed, yeah. I was like, actually I’m, I am Irish Indian now, and I did change my bio. I’m like, oh, I don’t have to say, an Indian, a writer from India living in Dublin. I’m like, I don’t know why, but that’s less relevant now I can just say Indian, Irish. I think before I had attached myself to the city more than the country, because I don’t know.

So yeah. Indian like a, yeah, an Indian writer living in Dublin. It was, I don’t know. That was my way. ’cause I couldn’t, I don’t know why living in Ireland wasn’t quite the same. But yeah, that was my anchor in the city. And now with the passport, I don’t need those things. I can just say Indian, Irish and like that.

That’s it. That’s all I need. So it is interesting and like after all these years, I’ve been here a long time and these are, these are my problems, my country, my problems. This is how I feel. I can vote. So that makes a huge difference. Yes, this is my country, my problems and my responsibility to vote for, who gets to represent like me and our decisions.

I never, I’ve never voted. I’ve voted in, sorry, I’ve voted as a resident in local elections, but this is the first time I’ve ever voted in general elections, European elections. I just missed a referendum, but India doesn’t have postal votes, so I’ve never done it until last year, ever.

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan: Yeah, I think nothing quite cements citizenship like voting, to be honest. And yeah, that it definitely has changed a lot of things. And also, like the landscapes changed a lot in terms of the the art scene. It’s, it’s about time. It got more diverse. People have been in it for an awfully long time, they were happily nudged out or ignored and now we’re platformed more than we used to be.

And it’s nice to see that landscape changing. And again, a lot of people who I was published alongside and writing home. We’ve got citizenship now so we’ve gone on, it feels like we’ve gone on this journey together, like a lot of people who have, we’re sticking it out to get that passport so that we can finally be stable.

A lot of us have gone on really parallel journeys, so it’s been nice to not do it alone in a way as well. And it’s been nice to see so many people getting secure, one by one and not being. Not like just living in terror of the rug being pulled from under you. Especially some of them have kids, like they can just be artists and earn their living and do what they need to do, like anyone else, like without just this constant buzz of fear that never, it doesn’t leave you until it’s over, yeah. And it’s distracting and I don’t think it may, like I’m, I wrote poems all that time, but I don’t very much believe in the suffering starving artist. I think we make good art when we have the headspace to make good art. Sure. And stability and security and time. Allow for more play and experimentation.

I have not been a playful person for well over a decade. I’m only just starting. I’m like, how does one be playful? I don’t know what that even means. I’ve taken myself and my life so seriously for so long because. It was serious. It was scary. And now it’s like I don’t have to be serious anymore.

And my art’s becoming really experimental. It’s so cool. And I don’t think I could have, I don’t, yeah, that was, it didn’t exist. My brain wasn’t in the head space to be playful for over a decade, and now it’s very directly affecting my art and it’s really interesting. 

Bairbre Flood: That’s a good point. And I think I haven’t, like you said, the spaces seem to have opened up a little bit more.

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan: There was always people with different backgrounds writing here, but I feel like that, maybe. The literary scene has become more spacious for different voices. And that, that, again, when you have an outlet, it helps with your writing. If you feel you’re never gonna be heard, you don’t bother trying, do you just go off.

Yeah. 

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan:  And the barriers are well and truly still up. Like more spacious means like, I don’t know, a few tiny, it’s still so small. Okay. Was it. I forgot who was first, but Nitti Casa or Nandi? Jola was Nitti first maybe. ’cause they’re published by Dura Press and I haven’t been corrected so far, so if I’m wrong, I’d be delighted for someone to correct me.

But I think that was the first full poetry collection by a black poet in Ireland by an Irish publisher. No one’s told me I’m wrong, but if I am, I do want to know I’ll, but that’s. That’s mad. They have that, writers of color have been here for a long time.

They’ve existed. There have been people from other countries. I’ve had collections, maybe I saw some, I’ve seen. But, where’s the data? All you can really do is look for names that aren’t typically Western or Irish. And that’s your assumption, right? Okay, that looks like a name from that country.

And they have a collection with Salmon. So they have been published, but again, these are all assumptions. So there they have been, there and Douglass have been platforming, migrant voices before it was cool. Yeah. With the anthologies before writing home that, that’s one of a few similar anthologies.

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan: But yeah, in terms of like whole collections, it is still dismal. Come on. Like it, yeah it’s, it hasn’t magically evened out to represent accurately the people making that kind of work in Ireland. It’s still very narrow and it’s still very homogenous, beautiful writers. But, yeah, it’s not exactly been cracked open.

But yeah, like Raphael Mendes, who I mentioned before he just, or I have it here because I want to be accurate about it. He just won like the trustees of the Ireland chair of Poetry Prize for a poetry pamphlet series. So Raphael won that actually, along with a writer called Ben Keating.

And Raphael said, did you know that Ben was in writing home with us? And I had no idea. And I looked back a mike. So he is, so actually two people from writing home a migrant poetry anthology just won that, which is really cool. And then, parker HIIT has knocked it outta the park. Oh my God. Hi, jump RAs story is just incredible.

Like what? A collection that was published by Xi they got shortlisted for TS Elliot Prize. Wow. Yeah. What I feel it’s really a runaway hit and I don’t know, I don’t know if Gustav. If Parker describes themselves as migrant, but I know that they are like a black poet used to live in America and I think originally from New Mexico.

I think it’s in their bio. Okay. But wow, like that collection is a knockout and it’s doing really well. And it’s really exciting to see a writer like this a wonderful queer writer of color, but also just a really kick-ass writer getting this recognition. It is like such a gorgeous collection.

It’s really tight. It’s really engaging. I remember I read it, I’m like, yeah, like that. That’s a good one. That’s special. And I’m really glad it’s getting the recognition it deserves. And then, yeah, Nithy Cass’s collection was beautiful. Paulina Cosgrave, who was also in my collection, who’s also queer migrant writer.

She’s got her second collection out last year, I think with gallery. So again, there’s not a gazillion of us, but it’s nice to see a few of us getting out there and hopefully pulling more people up with us, 

Bairbre Flood: And what kinds of things could help that process?

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan:  I think publishers like Skein Press are doing a lot of really important work where working with traditionally underrepresented and marginalized voices is like not an add-on to their work. It is like a backbone to what they do. Yeah. The danger is that everyone just goes yeah.

Do it through, take your work to scheme. They’re the ones who handle those people. And you know what? That’s not what we want. We want everyone to go, oh, that’s how they do it. We can also integrate this into our processes and. As a consultant, that’s also what I do. I work with arts organizations.

I don’t like doing diversity, equity, inclusion stuff loads. But it is interesting to work with good clients who actually do wanna make those changes. But yeah, scheme’s doing really amazing work and like they’re, I. They’ve done some poetry and the focus more is on like work in tra work in like translation but mostly it’s like essays and like nonfiction and a really important focus on traveler writers and artists.

So yeah, like having a publishing company that does that work pushes these writers to the forefront, commissions them, like really puts their money where their mouth is. I’m one of their play it forward fellows and they were like. Here’s support. What do you need to do a thing? I was like, that’s very open.

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan: They’re like, I don’t know. What do you wanna do? I’m like, honestly, I dunno, because yeah I do owe them an essay collection, but that is a genre I’m new to and it’s interesting to see that, okay, this takes time. These things can’t just happen overnight. When I have to process a lot, I have to learn a lot.

I have to upskill a lot. And so they’re helping me with all those things, paying for retreats, paying for development time, paying for a mentor Kirsty Logan, oh, like one of my favorite authors, which is wild. They got her to be my mentor to just work on things, and I’m currently doing a. I think it’s a six week course with Roe McDermott on fragmentation in writing.

And again, that’s the playful side of things. Oh, what if I write in a fragmented manner? What if I somehow make. Nonfiction, more poetic, like just figuring those things out. Anyway, sorry. Basically support to experiment, space to fail, space to figure out what your voice is, but also, yeah, money.

Here is support for however many weeks it’s gonna take for you to do this work. That, and just. Just asking, what do you need? ’cause if I had kids, that would’ve been, childcare would’ve been the number one priority. You know what I mean? Yeah. What, whatever people need.

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan: And that’s in general, not just a specific group, but what do people need to make their work? And having those initiatives that are slightly more open are great. But my thing about diversity, to be honest, and I do harp on about it a lot, is that yes, these the initiatives are great, but I think.

It should be more boring than that. I should be think it should be about recruitment. And basically diversifying the decision makers in the literal office. That’s how to diversify like the voices that are being published and platformed is that if the people reading them, the editors, the decision makers, like if they’re from a more diverse group.

And that’s like diversity is also a very wide net. It includes it includes disability, includes. Ethnic background like migrants, but queer people, that’s all intersectional as well, but also very specific. Not everyone has those same experiences and even within those groups, such different experiences and challenges.

Yeah so having more editors or more guest editors just from those backgrounds or those life experiences, helps. It just helps identify a wider net of really exciting writers because. I think it just, it’ll make stale art. If this, if everything’s homogenous, it’s not good. It can’t move forward, it can’t progress.

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan: It’s not innovative. It’s not a sustainable model in any way. So yeah, a few different ways in terms of recruitment, in terms of decision makers and making an active effort. And yeah, that usually involves inconveniencing yourself. That’s how it is. Otherwise, things end up as lip service, like it’s a lot of behind the scenes desk work.

To actually invest money, time, energy into the writers that have not been afforded those things before. And yeah. And then they blossom and then they produce amazing stuff and then everyone goes, oh look, that’s one of ours. Yeah, it takes the credit. Yeah. But no, it’s great. And it’s just, it’s a matter of going for, yes, these people are winning prizes, but like, how do we support people at every stage in their journey and in ways that they.

Actually have the room to identify their needs as well as being. Given opportunities. Sure. It’s a mix. It’s a big mixed bag of work. But it’s great to see a lot of people doing that work. And I can’t I can’t talk about my own client’s work, but it’s really encouraging ’cause I’m so cynical.

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan: It’s like people have really good intentions, but then they’re just too busy and under resource and these things do get kicked down the road. And I’m like, actually watching that not happen, it’s oh, you’re actually, even though you definitely don’t have time to do this, you are actually doing it. And wildly inconveniencing yourself, which is.

Difficult and encouraging to just see, the act like people doing the difficult work which isn’t easy with such like small grants and things. True. Yeah. I think things are changing for the better. Slowly but surely. Always a lot of room for improvement, endless room for improvement, but it’s definitely better than it was.

Bairbre Flood: It couldn’t have been much worse to be fair. But anyway would you read another poem, Chandrika? Would you 

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan: I, yeah. Okay. So this is a poetry pamphlet I made as part of my Institute of physics writing residency from 2023. So what I did was interviewed five different physicists about their research journeys, and the idea was to demystify what discovery is and ask them about pivotal points in their career successes, failures, challenges, and then turn those into poems. And the idea is that they’re from most different areas of physics. 

Bairbre Flood: Did you research a lot of the science be like what they were, their backgrounds and 

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan: Yeah. I asked to send me on any papers or things that they did, I watched if.

One of them, made a documentary. So I watched that documentary, one of them was Linda Hughes, who is the meteorologist on my Aaron on tv doing the weather. And she always makes a point going, I am a meteorologist. Because a lot of, even just to. Inform girls out there that this is a job, she’s a meteorologist and she has an academic background and she actually does the science and then shares it on tv, which is really interesting.

Yeah, so a bunch of different people, and the idea was that the pool of people would be people underrepresented at underrepresented in stem. So science, technology, engineering, mathematics, which is hilarious because it’s ev everyone except one really narrow type of person. It’s underrepresented in staff.

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan: So it’s silly in that way, like it’s a bit ridiculous. But that’s the reality of things. Women and queer people and scientists of color would be my pool of people to interview, but they have no, no obligation. What’s our, to talk about diversity? That’s just a pool of people I wanna chat to.

And then they would just talk about their work. Yeah. And I would do. Like science is not my strength. Physics is my worst word subject. And yet this is my job now somehow. But yeah, the idea is that I go in through the storytelling side of them sharing their research stories and that’s how I understand the subject better.

And I read about their work in that subject. So not a massive deep dive, it’s more about the story, their story of being a researcher is the thing to communicate. I have a poem here, and I really like Dr. Sydney Joshi. She was so cool. She, and like by weird coincidence, almost every single person I interviewed of course had an art.

Hobby or side gig or something. Sydney, Josh’s Dr. Sydney Joshi works in mapping the sea floor using sonar and for conservation of various things. But she also, I. Plays bass guitar in a band called The Confusion Dilemma as part of an initiative called Girls Rock London.

’cause of course, right? 

Bairbre Flood: I love it. 

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan: And she wrote a song called Pacifist Piana. And actually the last line in this poem is a line from that song.

MUSIC 

Sonar, a steady rhythm fingers. Press on thick strings, twang, boom, bass things fit together, melody and beat from the rehearsal. Room to machine screens sound tells a story.

Ping whistle squeak. Mapping the depths of us. A song is born from the sea floor, from blood, from pores, from years of swimming against the current. A have to find a way come. What may

MUSIC

Bairbre Flood: a lot of people think of, obviously, arts and science as being these dichotomies, but the spirit of curiosity I suppose, that scientists have towards the world and is this similar to what we as artists have when we’re going to create something? 

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan: Absolutely. And like a lot. Yeah. It’s a lot of it’s just based on curiosity and storytelling and, finding language for an experience and problem solving and like, all those things are serious overlaps. Besides the fact that c is an artist herself anyways, as a bass guitarist. 

Bairbre Flood: Yeah. Yeah. 

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan: And actually it was interesting ’cause preparing for this interview, thinking about queering the green.

I read this and I’m like, actually this is a queer poem, which I never realized. But yeah, it’s about swimming against the current, about trying to carve your way in about. Finding where you belong because a lot of her problems in terms of her research was that a lot of the places funding research for seabed mapping are for oil drilling.

And she did not wanna do that. She wanted to do seabed conservation, but that’s who’s funding the degrees that work on this, she struggled with it’s not belonging in these groups, trying to find. Places where she can be herself and people who actually like, understand what she’s trying to do.

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan: And eventually she ended up in Galway for a stint, and that’s where she found like the people who were working on this specific coralline algae on the seabed floor and like researching it. So I was like, yeah I’m now I’ve had some distance on the poems. I’m like, a lot of these poems are queer even though that’s not what they were directly about, but they are about pushing against.

Like the status quo, pushing back against like things being oppressed and taking stances and also just trying to find a sense of belonging, trying to find kin. And yeah, academia is a difficult place especially in these industries, so yeah, there, there are weird overlaps that I never really thought about before until I was looking for poems to read out today.

Bairbre Flood: Cool. Would you read another one from that collection? 

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan: I can. Let’s see. There are a few, 

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan: I can now. I, and I know more about it now and it is super interesting. Let’s see. 

MUSIC

Linda Hughes, she regularly mentions her academic background as a, to make a point to try and inspire more girls to pursue careers in that field. Yeah, this poem is pretty much about that.

MUSIC 

It’s called Oracle.

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan: Girls aren’t supposed to play with Storms, but I am wound around them. They’re intricacies, soft breezes and brutalities. Why wouldn’t this be a place for a girl? Surely we belong in the eye of things in the precision point of potential destruction. Haven’t we always been seer suits, sayer, truth teller, Cassandra eyes always on things that shift, that flow, that rise and fall, the patterns of the world.

Mouthpiece for foretelling numbers and statistics flowing from fingertips. All lipstick and research. I hope they see me messy Pigtails, diamond eye, lightning brain. I hope they point at the screen and ready themselves. Curiosity ignited. Prepare to step into a world of wind and blaze salted equations, dark water and sky.

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Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan: So based on this pamphlet is how I ended up doing the work I’m doing literally right now, which is working with quantum physicists and writing poems about their research journeys, which is a lot harder because quantum is wild. These are things like, yeah, I can research sonar.

That’s fine. Seabed mapping’s fine. Meteorology is really interesting. Even like nano materials. Yeah. These are things that I can grasp, like I can genuinely grasp these concepts. I can do the research and I can wrap my head around it to an extent. Quantum’s like a whole situation and yes, you can understand the concepts, but they’re all a bit wild and.

So it’s part of a program called Studio Quantum. It’s an artist residency with the Gut Institute around the world. Eight of us artists were chosen and put into different locations. So I was the Dublin artist doing the London residency with King’s College, and I got to work with King’s Quantum there.

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan: Dr. James Millon is heading that and hanging out with their researchers in their lab. There’s optical traps and laser traps and basically their specialization is like levitating things. Holding things with lasers or LEDs so that they’re easier to I guess manipulate or observe while being levitated, basically Cool.

Floating things that’s their specific thing. And yeah, trying to learn about quantum was pretty wild because the theoretical physicists. Mostly agree, but also don’t agree with experimental physicists who agree but also don’t agree with the philosophers. Who are the ones teaching the philosophy of quantum modules at Kings?

Because yeah, a lot of it is philosophy. ’cause a lot of it are such seemingly weird concepts, but you do have to hold information in your head that doesn’t feel normal to hold in your head. 

Bairbre Flood: And some of it intuitive kind of stuff. 

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan: Yeah, some of it feels counterintuitive, but some of it. My pitch was that migrant identity feels a lot like quantum concepts because there are, it’s not as easy as contradictory or layered and super position sometimes is a more accurate way of describing these identities, that they’re not just layered on each other.

That kind of all happening at the same time, but not really. And that’s how I went in and now I’ve learned a lot more things about entanglement, about but also about the researchers themselves and actually lasers, I didn’t realize how involved lasers were that, and the fact that Quantum’s been used already loads in terms of just our GPS, like time, literally time.

The main clock for just the world is powered like quantum technology so that it’s accurate, like no one knows. I 

Bairbre Flood: didn’t know that. 

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan: Yeah. No one knows how, actually quite every day. It is, it’s not publicized as much. So yeah I’m learning bits. I’m finding it really hard to grasp a lot of things because I’m still not magically good at science.

But, so what I’m doing now is, yeah, I’ve interviewed three scientists, quantum researchers, and I’m writing poems about their journeys similarly to this pamphlet, but playing with technology to find a new way to. Share those stories. And then along the way I ended up in some weird spaces.

I wrote an essay on quantum pregnancies. ’cause I’m like, surely if someone doesn’t know if they’re pregnant or not, isn’t that like an embodied experience of Schrodinger’s cat? Like it’s one thing to know something but another to feel something and how do you feel that space rather than just know it in a textbook.

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan: And there’s so many examples of that and I ended up just writing about that. So yeah, all sorts of. The interesting things. Nice. Yeah. Things I just didn’t have the head for before, and, but again, I do wanna focus on those migrant identities as so the three researchers I interviewed, I wanted them specifically to be from migrant backgrounds.

I. And just to see what happens. ’cause some of them might resonate, some of them didn’t. That’s fine. But that’s still, the pool and the discussions we had were really fascinating in terms of their migrant identity and their work as quantum researchers. I’m trying to bring that back in to my, did they new life, 

Bairbre Flood: did they feel it influenced their work?

Or was that something? 

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan: It’s more that, like when I brought it up. Then they started going, actually, I never thought about that connection, but some of them, like it’s really influenced their work. Like in terms of visas, their ability to work, their ability to live in certain countries, getting married it like me.

It’s influenced a huge amount of our decisions. Maybe not their literal research, but definitely their life. And then once I started talking about, I’m like, oh has the concepts ever resonated with your identity? They’re like, no, but now you mention it. I’m thinking about it now and it’s interesting Yeah, too.

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan: Those were just really cool discussions to be had. A lot of it is those identities have been barriers in terms of their careers or challenges in those careers, but yeah, we, when we start talking about the actual science itself. It didn’t really occur to them until I mentioned it, but when I did, they were all on board.

They’re like, actually, yeah, that, that makes sense. That maybe that is why I like that thing. So that was really fun. So yeah, that’s one of the areas I’m working in now. The other is I’ve just finished, I’m drafting a debut collection, Oh wow. Weirdly enough, like looking at all the poems, there’s a lot about nature more than I thought there would be.

So again, letting go of micro identity, being at the forefront means that, turns out my writing is more about science and dirt, which is cool. These aren’t things I would’ve, I don’t know, predicted for myself, 

Bairbre Flood: I really look forward to that. Will that be anytime in the next year or you?

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan:Hopefully next year if I get my act together. Cool. But yeah, I thought if you wanted one more poem I have, I do. ’cause I was like, let me give you at least something recent. ’cause some of these are yeah, 

Bairbre Flood: that’ll be great. 

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan: A little but I’ve been going on a lot of retreats ’cause I work best on writing retreats and I’ve been to Annaghmakerrig.

I went twice last year, which was amazing. So yeah, they’ve been a. Writing retreats have been a huge influence on my ability to actually create work in a focused way, meeting other artists, and again, supported by skiing or supported by agility awards from the Arts Council. But yeah, I’m finding that connecting with nature, being in amongst it it’s definitely, yeah, it’s opened my brain outwards and not so much about me and my life and paperwork, but more about sit like situation.

In amongst things and actually noticing what’s around. And that makes for far more interesting art a lot of the time. 

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So this is just very aptly called Annaghmakerrig.

Sidestepping pine cones, engraved faces, upturned, small, nutty rosebuds, wound tight and round. Above a gasping abundance. Endless branches laden with cones. They puck and thread against the sky. Wintry explosion of spiral and ball. A kite shrinks and trills from beyond a triumph of. Things once lost, returning a harbinger of resurrections singing to a cornucopia of seeds.

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Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan: So the poems will be there. But what I’m hoping to do is create a sort of interactive digital space where people can rummage around my research space. ’cause at the end of the day, I. No, I don’t have the best grasp of quantum. I’m trying my best, but I am not a scientist. I don’t have a PhD. I am a writer and an artist trying my best.

But what I do understand is the story of research. And I really like the idea of just the story of curiosity and the research space, like the literal desk, the office, how ideas happen, how partnerships are made, the stories of discovery, the stories of. How things get done. That’s what I understand.

That’s what I like to convey. So hopefully not, hopefully it has to get done. It will be done in a few months. This will exist. That’d be really cool. And be available for people to play with online. Yeah. Nice. If not, the poems will exist at least, and I can perform those. 

Bairbre Flood: But I like the idea of rummaging around and finding out more about the science and yeah.

That’s a really cool idea. I think it’s amazing the work you’ve been doing over the years, Chandrika, and it’s been really lovely. To see all this blossoming. It’s really cool. 

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan: Thank you. And yeah, the hope is that, we all pull people up with us and like in addition to all the writing and the work and like consulting and stuff and all the arts things, like I am working on some immigration reform work with scheme press in terms of trying to make it easier to hire non EU arts workers or just trying to.

Figure out and it’ll take years. I know lobbying and stuff just takes years. It’s a long game to try and change some of the like employment permit. Situation so that artists can live and work freely and don’t have to be like me and be like legally prevented from even doing a gig for seven years of living here.

Think of all the talent that we’re actively suppressing with these things.

Bairbre Flood: So true. 

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan: As much as I’d love to leave immigration behind me and not thinking about it, again it’s more satisfying to harness it and try to move forward with it. And I dunno. Try and do something. We just had a workshop with Safe to create and scheme press at least.

Educating the arts sector about hiring arts workers with the existing policies. So that’s another branch of things that I know is gonna be a real slow burn behind the scenes. But yeah I kind of wanna full circle the journey. Like right now I have Irish citizenship. What do I do to. To, I don’t know, try and help everyone else who is stuck in situations I was stuck in so that, good stuff can happen and we can take away, that’s one specific barrier.

There’s so many others, whatever we can do to make sure that all the good voices. Get to be heard. That’s kind of it. 

Bairbre Flood: That’s brilliant. I’m glad you’re doing that work. It’s very useful, very necessary. 

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan: It’s just a lot of Word documents. I love it. I love it. I love behind the scenes activism.

I love policy and boring stuff. I enjoy it. 

Bairbre Flood: Masochist. Look, it was lovely to chat to you today. Was there anything else that you wanted to say or anything we didn’t cover? We went through quite a lot. I had actual questions, but we didn’t, I think you covered most of the I 

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan: I think so. I think I name checked as many people as I could remember.

I was literally looking through the contents for Writing Home. I’m like, oh yeah, I didn’t mention Nidhi. She’s so cool. But it’s okay. I mentioned skiing. Oh yeah, I mentioned Nidhi and she’s a co-editor of Skein and has done incredible work. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. She’s one of the few decision makers really changing things up, which is exciting. So yeah, 

Bairbre Flood: Nidhi Aria-Zak, she’s amazing. 

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan: Yeah. I think that’s it. I think, I’ll probably think of something later, but I feel like you have enough to edit already at this point. I think it’s good.

Bairbre Flood: I think we have an hour and I don’t think I’ll be doing much editing because I think it’s all really good. But I’ll also obviously put links in, to your work and to your site, and I suppose is the best place for you Instagram for people to go to? Or what do you prefer?  

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan: Yeah it’s Instagram, like I’m on BlueSky, but Instagram is the main thing.

I just realized, I’m like, oh wait, I have a whole other branch of stuff. 

Bairbre Flood: Oh, what? 

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan:  But no, but no, I think that’s like a whole other thing. No, because like I have been focusing on these things, but No. But but a few years ago now, I like. I got assessed and it’s, now I now on paper I’m autistic with ADHD and that’s coming into work a lot more now.

But to be honest, that’s more about work processes and like I do have an essay in an anthology coming out by new Island this year called Wired Our Own Way and it’s anthology of autistic Irish writing. So Cool. That’s my, that’s. That’s my that’s true. One official way in and in fairness, in mapping the depths of us in the physics pamphlet that I made, that was, oh, that was, I didn’t mean to mention, was edited by Will Kein.

’cause I do not trust myself to just self-publish with no one else. I’m like, Will please help me fix this? And Will is an incredibly magnificent writer and a very good editor. There are poems like, I did resonate more with the stories of robotics, like the actual robots than the people.

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan: And I’m like that’s a cliche, but you know what, I think sometimes it might be a cliche for a reason. And I do write about that a little bit in the book. But yeah, I suppose that’s something that’s. I dunno. I feel like, I don’t know how much it’s, I think it’s just in the art, whether I liked it or not, and whether I knew better or not.

But it’s definitely more about work processes and understanding how to work and how to be a writer in terms of. Routine and practice and all of that. But working and hanging out with so many neurodivergent writers, which I mean, coincidentally I should have figured it out really with the amount of them that I already was hanging out with.

And I’m like, oh wait, so all of us are like this? That should have been telling. And the kind of like hearing about their work, their lives. And that’s been really interesting to be part of that. I guess it’s a new community that I am now part of. And then with this new anthology, I. Speaking to it from part of it, and like I, I do I do criticize love on the spectrum.

Bairbre Flood: I haven’t seen that. 

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan: No. It’s just talking about relationships and near divergence and things like that. So that is. My essay in there, I’m actually far more interested to see what everyone else has written. ’cause I’m like, first of all, I now have a database of autistic writers in Ireland. Hey, new friends, but also I want to know what they wrote about.

So I’m really excited to read the other essays in that collection to see, I don’t know, what was the pressing thing that they wanted to share. So I suppose that’s a new community, but in terms of direction, I think that was already part of things. I just didn’t know it. There is an awful lot of us and we all do a lot of very cool work, so it’s nice to be a part of it 

Bairbre Flood: for sure.

That’s brilliant. I look forward to reading that collection as well. What’s it called again? 

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan: Wired Our Own Way. 

Bairbre Flood: Cool. Keep an eye out first. I think the takeaway from this is I shouldn’t wait another four years to interview you because so much has happened. It’s wait, 

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan: A whole pandemic and we didn’t even, I’ve done like a few projects that connect like ecology, neurodivergence, and technology with an artist called Alan James Burns and working as like a script writer for multidisciplinary artists and like figuring out how to play with others really.

Has also been a really interesting journey. ’cause again, like us poetry can be very just you and your laptop or pen. So yeah but finding that poets have a place in other projects in terms of script writers for like dancers or visual artists. That’s really cool. And I am getting used to working with other people and I really do like it.

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan: It’s a different way of working, but, and it’s very. Like interdisciplinary and fascinating. But that is also something that I started out with, just having a new experience of, and it’s really opened my brain up and yeah, if I’m gonna play with technology, I’m not gonna just do it all myself.

Like I’m gonna work with people who know what they’re doing and be mentored or, yeah. And just nice to be in amongst all these different disciplines and sectors and. Play around and see. Yep. Play around and see what happens. Fuck around and find out basically.

Bairbre Flood: Thank you so much Chandrika for reading. Reading your poems and for 

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan: no, thank you so much. It’s been lovely.

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Bairbre Flood: A huge thank you to Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan for such a lovely chat and for sharing her poetry with us.

You can check her website – https://www.chandrika.ie/ and her instagram @chandrikanm.art 

There’s a link in the shownotes to Queering The Green, edited by Paul Maddern, and published by Lifeboat Press.

And also a link to ‘Mapping the Depths of Us: a pamphlet of physics poems’ by Chandrika – which you can download for free. 

And a link to the anthology of essays by autistic Irish writers that Chandrika also wrote for. It’s called ‘Wired Our Own Way’, published by New Island Press. 

We  just closed up the open call now for this year – thank you so much to everyone who sent in poems!

It’s been really difficult to choose the shortlist, as they were all just so beautiful, and about so many different aspects of the migration experience – 

We’ll have a very special episode with these in a couple of weeks – 

Thanks to the Arts Council of Ireland for the funding support, and thank you for listening. 

From me, Bairbre Flood, bye for now.