Vanessa R. Sasson doesn't let academic life or cultural ideologies define her. How could she when most of her life she's been caught between worlds? Born and raised in Montreal in an Egyptian Jewish household, Vanessa's upbringing often left her feeling like an outsider. During the week she went to an Ashkenazi (European) Jewish school, but on the weekends, she lived her Egyptian heritage, wrapped up in its nostalgia and rosewater scented desserts.

Vanessa's desire to speak her truth and embrace the imperfect human experience has bled into her academic life and inspired a work of creative fiction, her new novel, Yasodhara and the Buddha. Always pushing past boundaries, Vanessa's novel is an alternate telling of the Buddha's classical story. In writing Yasodhara and the Buddha (her latest novel), she's climbed over the fence and has brought to life a part of the story that many scholars and Western practitioners have overlooked. Vanessa's imaginative retelling focuses on the sad and romantic tale of Yasodhara, the Buddha's wife who lost everything when her husband, the Buddha, began his existential quest to understand suffering. While the Buddha's story is about gaining, Yasodhara's story is about loss. Vanessa chose to tell Yasodhara's story because she wants people to engage with Buddhism fully, to feel and empathize with the human side of Buddhism.

Ask Vanessa what she hopes to achieve with her work and the answer is surprising. After living her life constantly straddling both sides of the fence, she has come to terms with her conflicting identities. Through her teaching and creative writing, she wants people to engage with Buddhism's messy side and embrace the flawed and imperfect experience of being human.

In today’s episode Vanessa shares what brings her joy, storytelling. She’s been enamored with stories her entire life. When Vanessa first started as an academic she thought to be a good scholar meant she had to look at stories and study them, analyze them, take them apart and reconstruct them in order to see what clues she could find underneath. When she was studying the story of the Buddha’s wife, it changed everything for her. She wrote Yasodhara and the Buddha based on all of her scholarship, and she told the story from Yasodhara’s perspective. She didn’t analyze it in an obvious way, she analyzed it and created the story for herself. Vanessa had so much fun, she was she excited to do this kind of writing and dive into her story and embody her experience. But it made her question if she was still a scholar, and instead a creative writer and author. In her head, it was either or. You’re either one or the other, but you can never be both, but over time she realized there really isn’t a separation. Scholarship can be creative, and good creative writing can be educational and scholastic. Vanessa started to realize that knowledge doesn’t have to fit into a particular box, and there isn’t a dividing line between scholarship and creativity.

“What really gives me joy today is discovering that we don’t really have to be in any boxes at all. That as I get older the boxes vanish and life gets more vast. So that one can be creative and a scholar, an author and maybe something else completely different as well. All of these boxes that we think say so much about us, maybe tell us very little. What we have at the source of it all is just ourselves, our stories, our ways of seeing the world. Maybe that’s enough.”

— Vanessa R. Sasson

Tune in on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7bZHrtjAzbksbLWNaak1NM

Tune in on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/stories-of-inspiring-joy/id1510488632

To learn more and connect with Vanessa check out her website www.vanessarsasson.com on Instagram @vanessa_r._sasson Twitter @vrsasson and Facebook https://www.facebook.com/VanessaRSasson

Stories of Inspiring Joy is a production of Seek The Joy Media and created by Sydney Weiss. To learn more and submit your story, click here.

*Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this episode are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Stories of Inspiring Joy.