Bio

Shymala Dason is an editor, teacher, writer, and poet. She is a first-generation immigrant from Malaysia, a cancer survivor, and a former NASA tech. Her writing centers on belonging and unbelonging in immigrant and family life, her editing and teaching on helping other writers hone their craft and find their best stories.

Her published work ranges from literary fiction, creative non-fiction and poetry to speculative fiction. Her writing has appeared in literary magazines including The Massachusetts Review, The Margins, Hyphen, the Asian American Writers Workshop (AAWW) war anthology, Duende, The Literary Review, Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine, The Gateway Review, et al. She has been shortlisted for the Flannery O’Connor Award, the AAWW & Hyphen short fiction award, and longlisted for the Bath Novel Award and the Mslexia Novel Award. Her debut poetry chapbook, Carrying the Ocean, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.

My Backstory

I got into a plane in the tropical heat of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, when I was nineteen, and got out of another a day and a half later in the middle of a blizzard in NYC. The snowdrifts were higher than the top of my head. I was so cold I could barely wiggle my fingers. I had no way of understanding the place I found myself, or words to describe it to those I had left behind.

I started college at Bennington, and put a map of the world on the wall of my dorm room with a red arrow on it pointing to Kuala Lumpur for the classmates who didn’t know where it was, while struggling to explain Malaysia — our culture, our customs, our food — to them. I learned the paradox of belonging and unbelonging, and the challenge and bitter-sweet joy of relationships across cultural boundaries or long distances. I learned what it was to be Brown in America.

I studied Math and Physics at Bennington, despite my love of words (submitting to the Asian cultural norm of having a ‘practical’ career, and also because I enjoyed knowing how things worked), and consoled myself with a minor in Lit. Then came grad school, and NASA, where I had the great joy and privilege of supporting atmospheric research on the terrestrial and Martian atmospheres. It was a heady thing, for a girl from a small country on the other side of the world. I had the privilege of working with some extraordinary people. I learned how to think, to enjoy geeking out on details and catching holes in the logic of things, and how to write everything from corporate and technical proposals to poetry. It might not seem obvious that NASA would inspire poetry, but the images we looked at, for example on the Antarctic ozone hole or the atmosphere of Venus, were hauntingly beautiful, and the awareness of what it took to meticulously acquire the knowledge used to produce them awe-inspiring. Poetry was sometimes the only way to fully express that.

I also continued to write fiction and journal material that (mostly) explored family and the immigrant experience. Putting things on paper was my way of making sense of the world. Seeking feedback for my novels led me to the late bestselling historical novelist Beverly Swerling. I learned how to edit from her example, and she sent me my first editing clients. I continue to learn from the best, recently taking a developmental editing class hosted by Jane Friedman and taught by Allison K Williams. I also continually nurture my joy in writing and my voice by participating in several poetry communities, and I regularly lead writing workshops.

During the pandemic I had a little adventure with cancer. I credit online creative spaces like SubDrift (SubContinental Drift, a South Asian diaspora community that went online for the pandemic) and various poetry groups for helping me get through cancer without my heart and mind fragmenting.

Words matter.

Through all my editing, writing, and teaching, I carry the lesson I learned in those early days in America. We are all, always, speaking to each over a distance. Care, precision, and some poetry are needed to bridge that distance and communicate if we want our characters, our worlds, our stories, our plots, and our conclusions to be believable and engaging to each other. This is both the joy and the challenge of working with words.

For sanity and perspective, I paint. My watercolor and ink art can be purchased on Etsy.