Skip to content
Primary Navigation Menu
Menu
  • About
  • Column :: K&TW
  • Books
    • Breakfast in Cambodia
    • Briefly in Sheffield
    • The Dive
    • Drifting into Rīga
    • The Elopement
    • Kanishka
    • Nostalgia Cà Phê
    • Step a Little Closer
    • The Years Between Us: Collected Poems
  • Talks
  • Shop
Kismuth Books

questioning

Protected: The Mirror

2016-12-22
By: Dipika Kohli
On: December 22, 2016
In: cojournal, space, vignettes, writing

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

‘Meaning is not manufactured. It is experienced. Dipika Kohli has lived these words.’

Read Clarion Content Editor Aaron Mandel‘s full review of The Elopement

‘I loved it, Dipika. You and I are different in many ways. I am not sure we would fully agree on what and where we are. But we are also are the same. I really connected with Kanishka… I really, really like your epilogue. Thanks.’

Read Raleigh News & Observer Editor Eric Frederick ‘s full review on this site’s page about Kanishka

‘‘Dipika is a[n] author who clearly has been writing for years. Her ability to illustrate a particular moment, object, or emotion is amazing. Her writing style is different than what I am accustomed to reading. Its almost poetic. As the reader you can expect to gain insight into the mind, heart and soul of a Woman who lives life passionately and purposely. Also, Dipika does a nice job at outlining the good and not so pretty reality of what it means to defy cultural norms.” —Anonymous, on The Elopement

Read full review by Anonymous, on this old Kindle Author page (KB is no longer using Amazon)

‘I look forward greatly to reading anything by this Kamal di punjabi kurri. Please support her extraordinary journey through life and be rewarded!!’

Preet Lari Magazine Editor Poonam Singh, on Kanishka. Dipika Kohli worked on the book at a writer’s residency with the magazine in Punjab in 2013. It then ran as a serial.

‘And while it might be possible to create one’s own destiny, the lesson we can learn from this book is that it is folly to try to create someone else’s.’

Read Displaced Nation Editor Kate Allison‘s full review of The Elopement

THE ELOPEMENT. Dipika Kohli’s first book was a memoir called The Elopement (Kismuth Books / 2012). ‘I typed most of it on an iPhone, which was all I had really, and it kept me focused on the writing, in a very slim column, the way I imagined people would read it on their phones.’ The story of running away to Ireland with someone her parents did not approve of as a marriage partner connected deeply with a number of readers who contacted DK to say so. A conversation in a live, on-air interview with NPR happened, too. Listen to it here.

Kismuth-Books
Dipika Kohli

NPR’s Frank Stasio interviews DK about The Elopement

 

THE DIVE. The Dive (Kismuth Books / 2012) is listed as a resource at this amazing website, A Heartbreaking Choice, which exists solely to support those who have terminated a much wanted pregnancy. The site was instrumental in helping the author come to grips with the difficult state of anxiousness in wondering, waiting, and hoping that ‘everything is going to be okay.’ Read this gripping story and follow the feelings of love, loss, and letting go.

 

S P C THE ZINE. Design Kompany is Dipika Kohli’s other project, where she is publishing a weekly mini-magazine, S P C. Some science fiction, lots of creative nonfiction, and occasional new directions to stretch and grow. Every week, an international team of members of S P C talk in the cloud to connect and co-create each 16-page PDF.

 

MISCELLANY. A few links to where you can learn more about DK’s works and her approach to the creative process of writing and completing them, are below.

Find some of Dipika Kohli’s works and reviewers’ comments on Goodreads

Dipika Kohli organized a 30-person roundtable called ‘The State of Publishing’ in her hometown of Durham NC. This was after a decade away, working for a weekly newspaper in Ireland and a daily in Seattle. What is the State of Publishing, she and others gathered to ask one another. Bloggers. Arts writers. Community news journalists who had been among the first to commission DK for photography in the 1990s (HT Urban Hiker, Independent Weekly, and the then-published Spectator Magazine). People came from the three corners of the Research Triangle to engage in the contemporary dialogue of what is going on right here, right now. It was one in a suite of such ‘mini-theaters’ that DK hosts, to learn, and share, with others also asking similar questions. (From those discussions, at State of Publishing, the awareness was clear that for Kismuth, it would be a DIY-style approach. That moment was crystallized when a guest who had run a magazine in the Czech Republic for years and been published in poetry literary journals told us, bluntly, ‘People think making a book makes you rich. But actually you’ll be lucky if you sell 5,000 copies. And if you do, most of it will go to the publishers. Think. About. It.’ Kismuth did. Full creative control? Yes, please.)

Read more about the event at this link

The State of Publishing

Copyright Dipika Kohli 2020. All rights reserved.