Gina Nutt: This excerpt from your novel you’re working on, Road Women, follows Lydia, a traveling cellist who performs a show and joins an audience member, and his friends, at a local bar afterwards. This is an early look at a novel you’re working on. Could you tell us about the book’s early seeds of inspiration?
Rhea Ramakrishnan: From 2019 to 2021, I spent a lot of time driving between Maryland and New Mexico—I’m from Baltimore and went to grad school at the University of New Mexico—and I got really interested in the feeling of anonymity I got being on the road around that time. Then, in 2022, I started playing music with a Baltimore-based punk band, and we started touring around the east coast a bit. So, there was more driving involved, but also that feeling of anonymity was coupled with these short bursts of intense visibility because performing entails being observed. I wanted to explore the tension between that anonymity and visibility, and I wanted to imagine what the stakes were for a person who becomes obsessed with both of those things. It doesn’t seem that niche of a headspace to inhabit since we’re all so online now, and the Internet seems to promise both anonymity and visibility, but in kind of ominous or at least duplicitous ways. It’s cool to me to see how that plays out in the novel, where the stakes feel more obviously violent and urgent.

GN: The momentum here complements the narrative thread of life on the road. How do you approach pace on a narrative and sentence level? What happens for you as you notice those pieces coalescing?
RR: I want the book to be introspective, but still propulsive. It’s been fun playing around with where I can disrupt that balance, by adding more interiority or action. I wanted to have these meandering sentences, and then short, jarring sentences that pull you out of your head and onto the page. There are moments where Lydia is sort of entranced in her own thoughts and then is interrupted by the necessity of having to make a decision. At the sentence level, that’s probably the quality that best mimics life on the road.

GN:I’m also fascinated by the weirdness of the road, namely the Highway Siren. How does the strange work its way into your fiction? What drew you to this mythic creature?
RR: I have this almost anthropological fascination with Americana. And when I say Americana, I do mean things like cowboy imagery and baseball and diners, but also UFO sightings and 9-11 conspiracy theories. And I like how earnest roadside attractions are—like giant balls of twine and nuclear survival bunker tours. All of that is rooted in oral storytelling traditions that feel really authentic and compelling to me. And I still feel like an outsider when it comes to American nostalgia, maybe because my parents are immigrants, so it feels like I’m intruding on something that was never really intended for me. But ultimately, I think that this particular kind of “weirdness” that I’m portraying is an intrinsically American phenomenon. I’m situating the Highway Siren within that tradition, and her character gives me a vehicle to explore how expansive identity really is, as well as the ways that we tend to limit it.

GN:What’s in your creative mosaic? Books, music, restaurants, films, visual art, fashion, ephemera, architecture, anything that energizes your writing.
RR: I’ve already mentioned the Americana obsession. In terms of novels, I’ve been rereading Charles Portis, Cormac McCarthy, and early Denis Johnson. You can never get too much inspiration from old, dead white guys, as it turns out. Patricia Smith’s short stories are also very good. And recently I was floored by Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat.I’d put some movies in this mosaic, as well. Badlands (1973), Wild at Heart (1990), and The Decline of Western Civilization (1981) all contributed to my thinking about this project in various ways. And finally, the painting “Christina’s World” by Andrew Wyeth, which hung in my bedroom for many years before I accidentally tossed it into a demolition waste facility.