Talia Lakshmi Kolluri (left) and Samina Najmi (right)

SAMINA NAJMI and TALIA LAKSHMI KOLLURI first met in 2022 after Najmi read Kolluri’s short story collection What We Fed to the Manticore and conducted her own interview for The Normal School. In that conversation, they found that not only are they practically neighbors, but they share a tremendous amount of common ground. Thus, a friendship was born. This conversation unfolded over email during Najmi’s book tour for her electric memoir-in-essays, Sing Me a Circle: Love, Loss, and a Home in Time, which spans her childhood in Pakistan and England, her first foray into the US in Boston, her family and professorial life, and Fresno, the place she now calls home. In this conversation, Kolluri and Najmi explore memory, return, the meaning of home, and the way we tell our stories.