Hello friends ❤️🍵
In 2014 I wrote a fragmented essay about my favorite tropes from shoujo manga, my appreciation for Loki (and Tom Hiddleston’s face), and how my Catholic schoolgirl upbringing made me and my friends poor heroines for conventional love stories. I didn’t dare hope it would be accepted when I sent it off for consideration. It was a strange piece, and I mostly tried to have fun with it. Two months later, to my delight, I received an email that Interfictions Online would love to publish my essay. The email came from Interfictions’ poetry and nonfiction editor, Sofia Samatar.
Sofia was on the Nebula Awards ballot that year, for Selkie Stories Are For Losers. I’d read it and loved it, of course. It blew my mind that I was going to have Sofia as my editor.
The Nebulas were held in San Jose that year, close to where I lived, so I decided to attend. It was only my second spec fic convention. At that point, I had one professionally published story; I barely knew anyone in the community besides my Clarion class. During the Nebulas, I was at a session where at some point the lady in front of me twisted around in her seat. She looked slightly familiar. She caught me looking, and her eyes fell to my name badge, the same time I glanced at hers. It was Sofia. She recognized my name because she’d just accepted my essay; her mouth dropped open slightly, and then she smiled and gave me a thumbs up.
It’s been six years since then, and I’ve followed Sofia’s work closely all this time. For today’s special newsletter I wanted to share some of what I love about her work—and hopefully convince you to buy a book or two, for #blackpublishingpower, this week!
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Of Sofia’s two novels, The Winged Histories is the easier one for me to talk about. It has a girl soldier on the cover; one of the characters is a poet and a dancer; there is a sad boy with wings. All of these make it a book absolutely after my own heart. But her debut, A Stranger in Olondria, is incredibly special to me. It is a ghost story, a secondary world fantasy, and the most beautiful love letter to books, writing, and stories that I have ever encountered.
I remember finishing it on a plane ride and actually crying.
This was pre-Twitter threads, AND pre the 280 word limit, so you’ll excuse me a few tweets from 2016 below.
Olondria a book that takes its time. A lot of the story is resistance, but the energy of the last section is incredible, language twisting and cutting like a knife. In this book, writing is both haunting and visitation from angels:
Yes, I called her. I asked her to come. Come, angel, I said. I called her Visible, the Ninth Wonder, Empress of Sighs. Come, I said, and I will show you magic from the north, your own words conjured into a vallon. A book, angel, a garden of spears. I will hold the pen for you, and I will weave a net to catch your voice.
I love that image: a book as a garden of spears. I love the writer as summoner.
“When I was alive, even when I was alive,” she whispered to me, “I didn’t want to live as I do now.”
How a book is a life transplanted. How by our words we keep living.
And then this absolutely wrenching section, which captures how we feel about stories we love, and the pain of knowing they must end:
Oh, was it possible to read more slowly?—No. The end approached, inexorable, at the same measured pace. The last page, the last of the shining words! And there—the end of the book. The hard cover which, when you turn it, gives you only this leather stamped with old roses and shields.
[…]
This is the grief that comes when we are abandoned by the angels: silence, in every direction, irrevocable.
These feelings, returning! This novel reminded me how writing is magic of the holiest kind; how the writer and reader are engaged in a romance of sorts, between hearts and minds.
To be honest, though, all her books are great. Maybe consider buying one?
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These days, when I read about craft, I find myself looking for validation—but of what, exactly, I struggle to articulate. It’s something along the lines of there is no right way to approach writing, or even reading.
Just like everyone else, I think I want a prescription for how to write better, or an antidote to the difficulty of the task. Someone give me an answer, please! Except when I read articles with “clear answers,” I don’t feel relieved. Instead, I often feel closed up, irritated, or anxious.
The advice that resonates most with me are those that open up writing and its possibilities. There are two essays by Sofia that I return to regularly, which do this so beautifully.
The first is On the 13 Words That Made Me A Writer, where she talks about what Gormenghast unlocked for her:
Reading this at the age of 13, I understood that fantasy, the place I was looking for, is not to be found in dragons, ghosts, or magic wands. It resides in language. Fantasy is death by owls. It’s mourning through gesture. It’s music, incantation in half-light. An inverted heart.
Why does this feel so much like validation? I don’t know exactly. Maybe because there’s something strange, borderline embarrassing, about admitting that language is so much a part of reading for me; that poetry, the beautiful sequence of words, is something I look for in my spec fic. Maybe it’s the ensuing pressure to write beautifully too. Maybe it just doesn’t fit the narrower conventions of genre, and it spirals me into that annoying literary/genre debate. Whatever it is, this essay reassures me: that’s a valid way of being a reader of the fantastic, too. You’re okay.
The second is her Guest of Honor Speech from Wiscon 2016, where she talks about how difficult it was to sell Olondria because it did not fit easy genre boxes: it was too literary to be fantasy, too fantastical to be literary. If we know the rules, she asks, then what is the point of risk?
You should read the whole speech, but I wanted to share this excerpt:
It’s worth the risk, I think, of spending years trying to get published, the risk of being a “small author,” to tell your truth. It’s worth it to make genre stretch its wings. We need pigeons, not pigeonholes; we need forms that are flexible and malleable enough to express the truth of our differences.
Every time I read those lines I feel a desire to write with bravery. I want to do this right. I want my work to be truthful. I want to stop being afraid. “Risk anything!” Sofia says, quoting Katherine Mansfield. It’s such a tall order, but as a writer, I’m proudest of myself when I come close to this.
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It is completely unfair of you to ask me to recommend just one Sofia Samatar story. Thus I’ll start with a plug for Tender, her short story collection. (Have I gotten over the fact that we share a publisher? Not really.)
A brief list of what I love about Sofia’s stories:
The sheer range of forms she plays with: Walkdog is a student’s homework; Olimpia’s Ghost is epistolary; Cities of Emerald, Deserts of Gold is numbered; Meet Me In Iram is an essay in fragments.
The blatant love of poets and their work.
She writes the most amazingly flawed, broken girls, with such tenderness. Consider the opening line of How to Get Back From the Forest: “You have to puke it up,” said Cee. Girls are gross, and she captures that so well.
The sense of place, lovingly rendered, whether the story is set in Kenya or small-town America or in a planet very far from Earth.
The sheer audacity of some lines.
The way there is sadness and hope. How she paints with such clarity the condition of persistent loneliness and its brief respites.
Now, if you forced me to pick one story, it would be The Closest Thing to Animals. It contains many of the elements I mentioned above, and also creatures called Lolly Whales, installation art pieces, and a mysterious illness. Also the dialogue is just incredible:
Once we’d sat down and ordered, I said: “You’re calmer than I am.”
“Okay.”
“See? Okay. You agree to everything! I wish I could be like that.”
“I don’t agree to everything,” she said. “I hate lots of things. Most things, in fact. Except trash. And light. And food.”
“And me,” I said. I wished she’d said it instead.
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There’s still more I could say about Sofia and her work. Because she’s not on Twitter—which I think is incredibly wise—once in a while I simply stop by her website to see if she has any new interviews. I learn something new every time there is one.
If I’ve made you hungry for more, I would highly recommend her Reddit AMA, the entirety of Monster Portraits, and this interview with the Storyological Podcast.
Writing feels so fraught all the time, but when I was pulling quotes for this email, I found the following dedication in my copy of Olondria. Enjoy the journey, she said. I’ll try. Gentle readers, I hope you can try, too!
Events and things!
The Clarion Workshop, which I sit on the board for, is hosting some free online conversations this summer. We had to cancel for the first time in our 52 year history, but we wanted to find some other ways to build community.
We have excellent writers for every discussion, but week 1 has some particular faves of mine—one of my Clarion instructors, and one of my Clarion roommates. Learn more and sign up here.
Thanks for letting me gush about one of my favorite authors! I’ll see you next week. If you liked this post, feel free to share it with others, or sign up if you haven’t yet. If you have a favorite Sofia Samatar story, leave a comment below or hit me up at yap.isabel@gmail.com.