Professor and scholar Vanessa R. Sasson talks with Parul Pandya about her fictionalized account of the often overlooked story of the Buddha’s wife. It is through her eyes that the reader witnesses the transformation of Siddhārtha Gautama, from pampered prince to the journey that will end in Buddhahood, all the while portraying the fabulist and magical touches that call back to the tradition of the age as well as showing the confined roles that women played “behind the scenes.” Vanessa R. Sasson is a professor of Religious Studies in the Liberal and Creative Arts and Humanities Department at Marianopolis College, Quebec. She is also a Research Fellow for the International Institute for Studies in Race, Reconciliation and Social Justice at the University of the Free State in South Africa, as well as Adjunct Professor at the Faculty of Religious Studies of McGill University, Montreal. As a scholar, her focus is on Buddhist studies, with particular emphasis on hagiography, gender and childhoods. Vanessa’s published books include The Birth of Moses and the Buddha: A Paradigm for the Comparative Study of Religions, and the edited volumes Little Buddhas: Children and Childhoods in Buddhist Texts and Traditions and imagining the Fetus: The Unborn in Myth, Religion and Culture. The host of this episode is Parul Pandya. Parul has been working in non-profit in various roles through the past decade, including as a community builder, consultant, programmer and producer. She specializes in using arts for social change. After finishing managing in community granting for the largest government funder in Canada, the Ontario Trillium Foundation, she began her own consulting practice, Community Impact Non-Profit Consulting, which enables community engagement and equitable innovation. She is also a Queer South Asian freelance writer/poet, and has worked for various activist causes for over a decade. She has a deep passion for ethics and social justice, which she also teaches at Centennial College.