“Stories will tell you how it needs to be told”- Author Reshma Joly, as she talks about her books and a new venture

The up and coming author is someone who can’t be held by the constraints of labels. Read more…

Born in 1998 in Tamil Nadu and brought up in Cochin, Reshma Joly is a force to be reckoned with. She began writing from a very young age, penning short stories and maintaining a diary. At the age of ten, she was published by Young World, a children’s supplement by The Hindu which she used to cut out as fuel to see her more of her own work in print.
At college, she founded a zine which acted as a crash course in independent publishing for the author. A toxic relationship around the same time made writing cathartic; the collection of poems she wrote at the time would later be published as her first book, ‘Salty Blues’. The illustrated book became popular among the heartbroken because it understood them and it helped them heal.

But she soon realized that people were eager to slot her as a poet when she had no interest in labels. Within two months, she wrote and published an erotica, ‘This Time’ inspired by her life in Germany. This book, the author believes, surpassed the first one in terms of numbers because of the language. The descriptions of love-making were subtle and poetic and not explicit as other erotic books tend to be. It was also real because it touched upon body hair and performance anxiety relating to sex.
And if you thought she writes only about relationships, you thought wrong because her upcoming book is inspired by Indian mythology. If you thought she can only write, you are wrong again. Because she has a YouTube channel where she serves perspectives on diverse topics. Ask her who she is and she will tell you that she is a story teller, strongly believing that a story will tell you how it needs to be told. With this in mind, she founded the company R. Joly WOR(L)DS rooted in story-telling across narrative and form.

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Through words, she hopes to create worlds in which we can either lose our self or find our self in. She calls this as her purpose in life: to be a lighthouse. A guiding light to safety.