Rishma had met with Denis DeKlerck, publisher of Mansfield Press, who had recently published her first book of poetry, The Body of My Garden, to propose an anthology of poetry by South-Asian Canadian women. The publisher liked the idea and suggested that Rishma seek me out as a co-editor.
We spent much of the lunch venting and laughing about how neither of us liked being slotted into any category: whether one of gender, ethnic or national background. So we hated the hyphen between South and Asian, we hated the term South-Asian (we both grew up calling ourselves Indian) and though we were both proud to be Canadian and to be women, we thought it was an indication of how little things in publishing had progressed that it was necessary for us to put those words on a cover for it to clearly indicate a void in the current publishing climate. We agreed that the poets and poems we would eventually select for the anthology would actively work against those categories and would showcase the exciting and innovative artistic practices of those artists outside of any prescribed labels or themes. The resulting anthology was Red Silk, and it is still being taught in schools.