An Interview with Writer Sofia Samatar

Sofia Samatar is the author of five books. Her most recent book is The White Mosque, a memoir that follows Samatar’s modern-day journey tracing the ancient path of a Mennonite pilgrimage from Russia into Central Asia. She has also published fantasy novels and a short story collection. 

Samatar attended Goshen College, a small Mennoite school in Indiana. She majored in English, but found herself interested in African literature. However, at her small college, there were no classes offered that focused specifically on African literature. So Samatar went on to graduate school in the Department of African Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and eventually earned her PhD in African Literature. Now, she’s a professor of world literature and creative writing at James Madison University, as well as a writer herself. 

I interviewed Samatar in her office at James Madison University to talk about craft and life as a writer. As usual, Samatar was energetic, thoughtful, and curious, taking care to vividly paint me a truthful and joyous glimpse into her journey as a writer. 

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. 

When in your life did you first start writing? 

I started writing when I was five, and I have a book that actually proves that — I wrote it when I was 5 years old. My mom was a secretary and she would bring home a lot of discarded paper. Sometimes there were papers too messed up to use and they were throwing them in the trash, and also recycling wasn’t a huge thing then, so that was my mom’s way of recycling: bringing this paper for her children to use. I would staple the paper together and make books out of it. I still have my first book, which is called Simpy and the Rat. It’s about a little girl who decides to keep a rat as a pet. So, I always loved writing stories. 

When did you know you wanted to write as a career? 

I think probably by the time I was in college I had the idea that I really wanted to write and publish a novel. The problem was, I could not finish a novel. I started many, many, many, many books and I couldn’t finish them. I wrote the first draft of my first novel when I was about 26 to 28 years old, but even that wasn’t published—I was still revising it and still working on it—until I was 40, and that’s when I was published for the first time. I had the idea and the motivation, but it just took me a long time to get there. 

So your first book took about 14 years to come to fruition — what was that process like? 

What was going on there? Well, there are a number of things that made it take that long. The first one was that the book is a fantasy, an epic fantasy. It's called A Stranger in Olondria. Olondria is the name of this made-up country. And there are two books in this series. It's a duology. I had planned it that way. From the beginning, I knew there were going to be these two Olondria books. And so after I wrote the first one, I did not try to get it published right away. Instead, I went and wrote the second one. Because I worried, what if I write the first one, I publish it, and then I find out I need to change something about this fantasy world? But if the first one is already published and the map is out, then I will be locked into what I’ve done with the first one! So I said, I don't want to do that. I want to write both complete drafts. And then I'll start trying to publish the first one.

I spent three years writing the second one. Now I was ready to publish the first one. But then that also turned out to be a really time-consuming process. I was working on getting a literary agent, which is what you're supposed to do if you have a book manuscript, because you can’t approach most publishers directly, at least not big publishers. I tried to get an agent for five years, and I couldn't get one. I never did get one through that process. A lot of agents were interested in seeing the book. And a lot of them said that they really liked it. But they also said that they could not sell it, they did not know how to sell this book, because it’s a fantasy, so that means it's not mainstream enough for the average reader. But for fantasy readers, it was too literary, is what they were saying, like it's too hard, it has too many big words. It's too complicated, it's too dense for fantasy readers. Which shows you that the publishing world has a really negative idea of people who read fantasy and basically thinks that they're dumb. And so they were like, we can't sell this. So that didn't work. 

By that time, I had moved from Egypt back to the US. I was now in graduate school, and I decided to approach a small publisher. I chose Small Beer Press, which is an awesome press. I chose them because they are run by a couple, Gavin Grant and Kelly Link, and Kelly Link is a writer, and she's amazing. I love her fiction. So because I liked Kelly's work so much,  I was like, all right, this is Kelly's press. I'm gonna send the book there. And they liked it and they took it and they wound up publishing my first three books. 

When you were in college or graduate school, did you have any creative writing classes or professors who influenced your fiction writing? 

When I was in college, I took a poetry workshop, which was a one-week intensive course during the winter break. That class was with Nick Lindsay, who has since passed away. He gave this poetry workshop every year. He was an amazing teacher. I actually took that class twice. What I loved about Nick—and this is something I would say has influenced my writing to some extent, but even more, it's influenced my teaching— is that he was just a very, very bizarre person. He would burst out singing all of a sudden. He had a huge bass voice, and he would just start singing. He had a guitar and a recorder. I don't think he could play either of them. But he would suddenly pick up this guitar and strum it madly, or blow really hard in the recorder—it would be squeaking—and he would dance and prance around and he was so weird that he actually made everybody relax. Because, you know, it can be very intimidating to go into a writing workshop and share your work, especially poetry. It's very daunting. This guy was so eccentric that it was like, nobody is going to be as ridiculous as him. No matter what we do, we cannot be as embarrassing as this teacher. And so it made everybody really relaxed. I could not be like him if I tried, but I do think that in a creative writing classroom, one of the most important things you can do as a teacher is just create the space where people feel comfortable. However you do that, whatever method you use, you've got to have people feeling very kind of loosey-goosey and relaxed and good. And that's when things can happen. 

What other writers have influenced you in your work? 

Oh, so many. One very influential book is the novel Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih. I studied that book in graduate school. I wrote my PhD dissertation on Tayeb Salih and looked at all of his work. I just think he is a beautiful, poetic novelist, an incredible writer. So he's a really big one. Other writers that I would say have been really important to me over the years are the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and novelists like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, the Brontë sisters – especially Emily Brontë because I love Wuthering Heights. And then there are other contemporary writers, people who are still alive who are writing right now: Michael Ondaatje, who's a Canadian writer. I love, love his work, love his novels. I love Bhanu Kapil, who is a poet and prose writer. She kind of does hybrid work that's in between the two. Also, Kate Zambreno and Amina Cain. These are really exciting contemporary voices to me. 

How did you become interested in writing fantasy?

Well, I wish I knew. I've always really liked this genre. But I've also had kind of a back-and-forth relationship with it. Up until I was fifteen, it was pretty much all I read. I only read fantasy and science fiction. I would just read it constantly. Why? I don't know. My brother is exactly the same. He's really into drawing monsters. He's a tattoo artist by profession, but his favorite thing to draw is monsters. We both love anything fantasy or science fiction. That's our favorite thing. Our parents were really not that into it. They had the classic fantasies — The Lord of the Rings, the Narnia books. That was it. They didn't have any science fiction. So my brother and I found it on our own. Why? I have no idea, but that was definitely our passion. And I remained that way until I was fifteen, and I had a moment where I was like, I have read everything that is good in this genre and the rest of it sucks and it's terrible. And I quit. And that's when I started reading Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Hemingway, Faulkner. And I didn't really read fantasy and science fiction again until I was in my 30s, when I started discovering people like Kelly Link, Jeff VanderMeer, Jeffrey Ford, and Catherynne M. Valente. These are all people I really admire. And they're doing incredible, interesting, experimental work in fantasy and science fiction. Once I found them, I really got back into it. 

I think it had to do with the fact that when I was fifteen, I didn't have the internet. So my only way to find fantasy and science fiction- books was on the shelf at the library or the bookstore. And that's going to be very mainstream, it's going to be the big sellers, it's not going to be niche things or books from small presses — really weird things, you're just not going to find them. So I thought that I had exhausted the genre. I didn't know this other stuff was going on. But it was later when I realized that oh, wait a second. Now there are all these ways to discover new writers that I didn't have when I was growing up. And it makes it possible for you to discover things that are pretty obscure. 

What themes do you find yourself returning to over and over again in your work? 

I think a big theme for me is storytelling itself. And writing itself. My first novel is about somebody who comes from a place that is non-literate, they don't have writing. He goes to a place where there's a literate culture, and he learns to read and write. He eventually winds up creating a writing system for his own language. And he also suffers during the course of the story, because he's haunted by a ghost who wants him to write her story. So it's all about storytelling. Who's telling the stories, and how do the stories get told?  

Do you have a writing routine? 

I like to get up at 6:30. That gives me a good two hours to write before my day starts. Those two hours are for writing, but do I write everyday? Well, yes and no. When I say I write every day, I don’t actually mean putting words on paper. That, to me, is one part of writing. But also, rewriting is writing. If I just read over what I wrote the day before, that's writing. If I read books that are inspiring me to do the writing, that’s writing. If I moved a comma, I still wrote that day. So to me, what's important is to be close to your work. If you have a project you're working on, you want to be close to that project every day. But being close to that project could be just: you're sitting on the couch, daydreaming, thinking about it, or you take a few notes for it, or you draw something that goes with it, or you know–all of those things are part of the writing process for me. So that, I do every day. 

What have you found to be the most rewarding part of being a writer?

I think writing is really its own reward. It's its own reward when you do it. When you're in the zone. When you forget where you are, you have no idea what's happening around you, because you are so engaged in the work that you're creating. That's the reward right there. 

What advice would you give to your students who are aspiring writers? 

I would say: do what you are inspired to do. In your writing, do what you feel like doing and do it now. Don't wait to do it later. If you're inspired to write something, if you have an idea, if you feel like doing it, then do it. Don't save it up. Don't be like, “Oh, I'll do it when I have time.” Or “I'll do it when I know more.” Or “I'll do it when I've read more.” Just do it now. Because the impulse and the will to do something is, I think, the most important thing about writing. It's more important than your knowledge. It's more important than your talent. More important than anything is that impulse and that desire. So if you have that, then do it and do it right now because it won't stay. Jump on it while it's there.

Learn more about Sofia Samatar and her latest writing projects at her website.