STORYO: How important for you is seeing and listening as a person and as a writer?

SOFIA: You mean like in daily life kind of walking around seeing and listening?

STORYO: Well, I meant however those words happen to hit you, but yes, I was thinking about how much you as a person, when you're interacting with people, are thinking about seeing them or thinking about listening. Listening, in particular, because I feel like so often your stories are written from the point of view of someone who is writing to someone, or written from the point of view of someone who has failed to receive a letter. Somehow their ability to be heard, or to listen, is either cut off or paramount.

SOFIA: That's very observant.

Well, of course, I think that these things are extremely important.

I mean it sounds almost banal to say, ”It's very important to listen and to look at people.”

I get a lot of practice with that because I am a teacher. And so my job involves a lot of really careful listening to students to figure out where they are and then how we can go on. Or listening carefully to what they've said so that I can see what's missing and direct them, or push them, to think a little deeper and so on. So, there's really careful listening, and there's very careful reading.

And I try to be observant in my life. I journal. But I actually, what I'm good at is reading and foreign languages. Those are the two things I'm really good at. And, unfortunately, I'm often not that great at observation in daily life. And my memory is terrible. So note-booking, journaling helps with that. It helps me to remember what happened in my life, but I really wish that I was better at being where I am and at paying attention to what's going on. I have no sense of direction. I'm the person who's always lost. I'm really not naturally observant. I have to really concentrate. It's much easier for me to just read a book.

SOFIA: It's been something that I've been a little nervous about because I get the impression that one is supposed to have a voice. And I've always been a bit concerned that I don't.

It creates anxiety because when I think of the writers that I love, each of them has a very strong voice and their work is very recognizable. So, because I love those writers, it worries me that I am such a ventriloquist, and that in these intense bouts of reading I absorb voices so much that I wouldn't say that I'm able to reproduce them—I actually don't think that that's possible—but if I read two different things that each have a very different tone, then I will write two different things that are very, very different from each other and I won’t see a whole lot of connective tissue between those things. But maybe somebody else would.

I think this is one of those cases where the writer is not necessarily the best reader of their own work. And I hope that's true in this case, and that somebody else could say: No, no. I know a Sofia Samatar story when I see one.

But I do think that I absorb language. I become saturated with it pretty deeply and that's part of what makes me good at foreign languages. I’m good at absorbing somebody else's language and living in it and giving it back. And I think I do that in writing, too.

So is that bad? I don't know. Probably.

STORYO: I can, of course, not speak exactly to your anxiety. I can say that right now I certainly know what a Sophia story is. I think I will continue to know. I also remember what a teacher told me which was that voice is what you can't help doing.

SOFIA: Yeah. That's good.

STORYO: And so you don't notice it. Over time you just couldn't help doing it, and then people look at your work and see you did this same thing over and over again. That's your voice. And then people get anxious about that: I can't stop doing this one thing.

SOFIA: Well, that's true. That would be another problem.

STORYO: You were talking about blackness and about visibility and one of the things that you talked about was jazz and how you had taken a model of jazz into that essay and you felt that the solutions you wanted for discussions of diversity were unpredictable solutions. And that was fascinating in its own right, thinking about unpredictable solutions in the world, but I wondered if that was something that you continue to carry into your own writing? If you're engaging with that idea? If there's even a way to—I don't know how you would do jazz as a writer because you're not on stage.

SOFIA: You're not on stage, but you have certain materials and you have certain parameters and you have certain constraints and you have to work within that and you have to find the solution to your problem in the material itself. So, if you're playing music and you're improvising and you're stuck and you don't know where to go, the solution to that problem, you have to find it in the chord—I mean you have to find it in in what's being played.

I think that writing is the same. When you get stuck then it's time to go back and look at what you've written already, and see where did the path fracture to the point where you lost your way in the marsh. Where’s the thread that you missed? Where is the possibility that you missed and go back and find it?

STORYO: Something else you were riffing on in that essay was about exposure. Maybe as a critic you’ve come across this, people tend to read books and want to read it as autobiography; they tend to want to read it as exposing who the author is. Yet I do feel like as a writer, I feel really powerful when I feel like I'm exposing myself through the veil of fiction in the same way that I think of jazz as being kind of scary because you're improvising, and almost in the improvisation, naturally exposing yourself because it's coming out of you a little bit uncontrollably maybe. Is that something you want as a writer? Do you want to surprise and scare yourself?

SOFIA: Absolutely. I also think the whole question of exposure that you raise is very interesting because it's one I'm thinking about more because I have a book coming out next year, called Monster Portraits which is a lot more autobiographical—although some of the stories in Tender get quite autobiographical. There's one story in there that is basically true.

The book that I'm working on now, it's not fantasy at all. It is memoir, and it is very self revealing I guess you could say. And the writing of this kind of work followed the “Skin Feeling” essay, in which I talked about my life and I talked about where I was at the time I wrote it and I talked about things that that happened to me. It was in a way the beginning of this more autobiographical trajectory in my work.

It's complicated isn't it? Because there is a desire to be real with people. And then there is also a fear, not just of reactions to that, I think, but also of being boxed in. Because whatever it is you're exposing, that’s true at that moment in time that you say or write that thing, but then on the receiving end things tend to become quite fixed, and you become the writer of this thing. And people feel like they know you now because of this thing that you said five years ago, but you're not that person anymore. There's a weird dynamic there that, I as a person who has published very little memoir at this point I'm still turning over in my mind how that works. I don't really get it.

STORYO: In the essay you discuss hyper-visibility. The idea that the more you're seen as black, or the more you're seen as something, the less you’re seen as an individual. It almost sounds like you're describing that the more that you're seen as Sofia Samatar, the less you are seen as an individual. It even sounds confusing when I say it.

SOFIA: Yeah, well, I think part of the reason it's confusing is because there are a couple of different layers of what’s going on. There's the basic level of every person who has a name is vulnerable to becoming a prisoner of that name. If I know you by name then I attach certain things to that name and then some of your complexity can disappear under that. So that's one layer.

And then there's the Ralph Ellison Invisible Man layer, which is the racial level, where the more you see the person's race the less you're able to see the person. You actually don't see the person at all, because all you do is fill up that race category with what's in your head and you actually can't see that person at all. And that one doesn't have to do with the name, that one has to do with the color. So having those things operating at the same time that gets really really complicated.