First-year MFA student Nikka Singh has always fully committed himself to his interests.
In high school, Singh wanted to know more about making music, so he built a recording studio in his parents' garage where he recorded hip hop and death metal. When he discovered a love for skateboarding, he built skate ramps using geometry and turned in the designs in place of his math homework. Even an interest in t-shirts expanded into printing them himself.
“Anything I ever liked I would figure out a way to make it.”
The desire to do it himself was born out of his upbringing. "We moved a lot, mostly for work, but I guess there weren't many good opportunities for my parents," he says.
So they made them. Singh watched his mother create one business after another. If she did end up having to work somewhere for a stretch, it was only a matter of time before she struck out on her own. "It was just our approach to the world."
While the skating, death metal, and t-shirts passed, one interest remained years later – telling stories.
Singh started in the profession as a journalist, then as a long-form storyteller, but he felt something was missing. For his entire professional career in narrative writing, he'd focused on telling other people's tales, but he felt like he needed to tell his own and his family's.
When Singh joined the Nonfiction Writing Program (NWP) this fall, he was scared to leave the West Coast, where most of his friends and family lived, and move to the Midwest, where he didn't know anyone.
He told himself the time apart would be an opportunity.
"I was working for other people to tell the stories they wanted. Some of them I wanted to tell, too, but I was looking to tell the stories that I wanted to tell in my voice. I didn’t know what that voice was yet, and I needed to find it.”
But he didn't think he'd find his voice in Iowa.
Answering the Call
Singh had committed to attending UC Riverside for graduate school. It was his top pick. "It was just a few miles from all the places I grew up. I felt like it was a homecoming.
When John D’Agata, NWP’s director, called, Singh picked up the phone, planning to decline his acceptance, but that is not how it went.
“When I spoke to him, it was such a transformative experience. I felt seen. He was absolutely invested in what I was working on and what I was working towards. He could see what my potential was beyond what I could see in myself at the time."
Deciding to attend Iowa turned out to be the right decision. Halfway into the fall semester, Singh had already noticed a shift in his writing process. Although he used to let his ideas sit in his brain, a class reading convinced Singh to try writing as fast as he could.
“I’ve given up on this thing where I used to noodle with things forever. A confined timespace makes it a performance. There’s a single continuity that forces its way in because you are one person who sees it from one perspective in one moment,” he says.
There were also no more rules about what writing needed to look like. At a public reading at Prairie Lights, he recalls Garth Greenwall telling him to make work that was "risking something and not just trying to be competent," and it stuck.
When he started in the NWP, Singh was committed to telling a story about his own family and their journey of migration. He initially thought that he would write a straightforward, black and white text-based book, but after hearing Greenwall's talk and with the encouragement of his workshop advisor, Professor Sarah Minor, he began to incorporate other media too.
Singh, who struggled to learn to read as a child, spent years drawing as a way to tell stories. During a lecture at his undergraduate institution, he once drew a diagram of the content instead of taking traditional notes.
The professor stood back from the podium, held it up, and told the lecture hall that she would be emailing everyone the diagram. He knew from then on that images could do something text couldn't.
He abandoned the original book idea and decided to try and combine writing with drawing, in a way that felt intuitive rather than fitting the model of a comic or essay. He made a zine about his grandmother. While some pages equally feature text and drawings, some are mostly or all visual. The zine is neither a graphic novel nor a story. It’s something in between.
At first, the lack of “rules” made Singh feel like he was doing something wrong.
“It feels like cheating because I’m not following any rules here. It's shifted for me to be like 'this is what I'm interested in,' and I'm going to tell it exactly the way I feel about it. Not the way that is correct," he says.
"It felt like being me for the first time."
Into the Unknown
Singh’s writing process can be simplified down into three steps.
“Focus on what I’m interested in. Tell it in the way that feels right, not competent or correct, and do it as quickly as possible,” he says.
The last two steps were a direct result of his time in the NWP. The changes are a testament to his decision to come to Iowa.
“This is absolutely what I need to be doing right now in my life. There's no doubt,” he says.
In just one year, the program has already exceeded the goals he'd set for himself over the three years. Every day, he finds new things to look into with the archives and libraries on campus. Beyond campus, he has found new ways to tell stories, most notably through Public Space One, an Iowa City-based arts center, where he is currently working on a residency.
Singh also mentioned several faculty members who have supported him in the time he’s been here, including D’Agata, Professor Bennett Sims, Professor Tom Lin, Professor David Wittenberg, and Professor Minor.
For Singh, the next two years are a welcome uncertainty.
“I have no sense of what I’ll be like or be writing like at the end of year three. The road from here forward all feels like a surprise.”
To see more of Nikka Singh's work, including podcasts and comics, visit his website.
