When Pardeep Toor dreamed of becoming a professional writer, he didn’t just see Flint as an option, he saw it as a destination.
Around 2007, Toor was living in Chicago and freelance writing for a few publications. He was hoping to land a full-time job as a reporter and had applied to an opening at the Flint Journal but didn’t get the job after interviewing.
“I actually begged to move to Flint,” Toor said. “I didn’t have much previous journalism experience, but I badly wanted to write. I didn’t get the job but sort of stayed friendly with the editor (Katie Bach) through email and kept telling her, ‘Hey, I’m still freelancing up here. I’m covering this, I’m covering that.’ And then an opportunity opened up and I literally begged her to take me.”
Toor moved to Flint and began a job with the Community Newspapers, a now defunct chain of eight suburban weekly papers that were at one time owned by the Journal and inserted into Sunday editions of the paper in various suburbs in Genesee County. Toor rented a barebones studio apartment in the Central Park neighborhood near downtown that didn’t have much more in it than a mattress on the floor, but he did have his first professional writing job. He initially covered local government and schools in Flint Township, then eventually shifted to covering sports in the Carman-Ainsworth and Grand Blanc districts and contributing to ‘It’s Just Sports,’ one of MLive’s earliest blogs.
“I just wanted to write, and I was begging anyone to let me do it,” said Toor, 41. “Luckily, the weekly side of the Flint Journal was willing to give me the opportunity.”
That burning desire to write has been something Toor says was almost an obsession since he was a kid growing up in Canada.
“I think it’s in my sixth grade yearbook, it says I want to write a book,” Toor said. “There was something about books, when I read them I wanted to emulate them. And it’s kind of like a curse sometimes because you read a book and rather than just enjoying it, my constant thought was like, well, how can I do this? Or how can I do something similar or try to do something better or different than what I’m reading now?”
His writing along that journey has taken shape in different forms, including journalism and working in public relations for the federal government, the state of Michigan, and the WNBA’s Tulsa Shock (formerly the Detroit Shock and currently the Dallas Wings).
“I’ve had many lives in many different fields that were all loosely tied to writing,” he said. “But telling my own stories has been an obsession for as long as I can remember.”
The Right Time
In any creative process, the destination often feels like it takes forever. Toor admits as much, saying the process of writing a book “took way longer than I thought.” But, as of April 14, he’s an officially published author. His short story collection, Hands, published by Cornerstone Press, is now available to purchase through Bookshop or Amazon.
He described this part of the journey, seeing a finished product, as “just kind of disbelief.”
“The stories are live and they’re done and they’re out there for interpretation,” Toor said. “So it’s a little bit of nerves but it’s just a dream come true. My copies came in this week and it’s an unreal experience to see something that you’ve been dreaming about and thinking about for so long and to hold that in your hands as a complete form.”
The collection follows Hans, a down-on-his luck immigrant chasing the American dream by any means necessary. Hans quits school and drives a taxi after experiencing a racist incident. An unhinged fare and unjustified arrest makes Hans question whether he belongs in this foreign land. And a toxic relationship confirms his cultural isolation within his own community. The stories show a degenerate immigrant experience littered with hope and failure, interrogating the contradiction between the ideals of assimilating in America and the sometimes brutal or cruel or even funny reality of the journey.
Toor draws from many of his own experiences in his writing. His parents immigrated from India to Canada in 1976 and moved to Michigan in 2002. Toor followed them here from Canada in 2005. Since, he’s lived all over the country, including two stints in Flint, in Lansing, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in Chicago, in New Mexico, and currently in Colorado with his wife and their two sons. His hope in telling the stories in Hands is that it helps provide context for people to better understand that immigrant experiences and desires in the United States are varied, not universal.
“A lot of times, there’s this romantic notion of the immigrant experience, like it’s almost a linear trajectory,” Toor said. “Someone goes to a new country, they work hard and, and they make it and achieve whatever success looks like for them and their family. And then generations follow. My collection is the opposite of that. It’s the unromantic immigrant story. It’s when things don’t work out as they’re supposed to, when things don’t get easier. Then characters or people are forced to take shortcuts to sort of make ends meet. I think this is more prevalent now more than ever, where there’s this sort of political disillusionment with immigrants and what it means to make a living and make it in America because it’s not as easy as it used to be, or it doesn’t feel as easy as it used to be. The stories in this collection are trying to illuminate that things are harder than ever for a number of reasons because of the way immigrants are perceived, the way labor is perceived, and what it costs and takes to make it here.”
He hopes that his writing, and the stories he shares through Hans and the characters in his book, provide more nuance and context for immigrant stories, especially in the face of a federal administration that has often been openly hostile toward immigrants and minimized their contributions to building and shaping American culture and communities.
“I want these stories to be additive to people’s understanding of the immigrant experience,” he said. “I want this to show a different side of the immigrant experience that folks might not know. And I think that perspective is so important now where the rhetoric and the image of immigrants is being portrayed by a federal government that doesn’t seem very fond of them. That’s what literature does, it completes that story. Literature rounds out the propaganda that we’re living in now to tell a more complete, fuller story about who immigrants are in America and what it sort of takes to make it here.”
Importance of Place
Although the stories in Hands are fiction, the idea of ‘place’ or geography is a vital element of Toor’s writing and the characters he tells stories through. And readers will definitely recognize the influence of Flint and Lansing in the book.
“These stories contain anecdotes that I’ve been collecting for a long time based on family, friends, geography,” Toor said. “I lived in Flint on two different occasions and the unique geography of mid-Michigan, whether it’s Flint or Lansing, definitely influences these stories and the environments that these characters are in.”
Toor’s other writing has also been influenced by place and environment. He’s published essays and stories in several prestigious publications, including Southern Humanities Review, Electric Literature, and Longreads. He also had a story appear in the Best Debut Short Stories 2021: The PEN America Dau Prize and he writes a monthly e-newsletter, which readers can subscribe to on his website.
Now that his first book is published, he’s also learned something many writers and artists do: you’re never done. He’s already writing and brainstorming future projects based on how quickly life and circumstances dramatically evolve.
“I started writing these stories so long ago, around 2015 or 2016,” he said. “I wasn’t married then and I didn’t have kids then, and now the book is coming out and I’ve been married for years, and I have two kids, so my life looks totally different (than it did when he started). I’ve been really obsessed with this idea of fatherhood lately and just what it means to be a good dad and what it means to be a good son. So I’m kind of working on a series of essays about fatherhood and not just me being a dad, but my dad. I can’t stop thinking about my kids and relating that to my own experiences, being a son of an immigrant and now raising kids who are half Colombian and half Punjabi and thinking about what their experiences will be like. So I’m working on a sort of fatherhood memoir that I’m hoping to finish up here in the next few years.”
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