Sofia Samatar on Collage, Literary Community, and the Stunning Loneliness of Publishing

After publishing my first novel Catalina I spiraled into strange despair. Writing, for me, had always been about connection, yet I felt both disconnected from what I’d written and by how it was being received.

Had I written a noir? I hadn’t set out to. Was my protagonist unlikeable? I liked her—and no, she wasn’t me. More seasoned writers I knew had described publishing as a rollercoaster, but this was akin to that feeling of being alone in a crowd, except also naked, and I had chosen to be naked.

I joked about retiring, about fleeing to another country. Over time this feeling lessened or I got used to it. I went on to publish a second novel and went through a similar set of emotions followed by an eventual ebbing.

I expected the same when my third novel was published in 2022 except the despair or disconnect—whatever you want to call it—didn’t go away. It didn’t lessen. Friends and colleagues called it burnout. I wasn’t so sure. Work on my fourth novel stagnated to a halt. Who is a writer if she doesn’t write? By this time, I had moved from Los Angeles to Berlin. Maybe retiring wasn’t a joke.

Forgive my long introduction, but it’s important to understand that when I write that Sofia Samatar’s book Opacities came to me when I needed it most—both as a writer and as a human being—I am being earnest. It is a generous book filled with perhaps more poetic grace than we deserve.

In it, Samatar blends letters written to her friend and fellow writer Kate Zambreno that discuss the contradictions of the writing life as well as identity (both on the page and in the publishing arena), with insights pulled from literary titans, who, as it turns out, struggled with similar questions of disconnection and meaning.

The result is an impassioned exploration on the experience and practice of writing, which, for me, served as a much-needed reminder of how writing and reading connects us to a mysterious joy. One that is cause for celebration.

–Liska Jacob

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LJ: Early in Opacities you confess to being almost stunned by publishing, that it sent you into retreat. You wrote,

To disappear from the blogs, the social media, the writing for general consumption, the commentary on current events, on the scandals and debates of the publishing world, to stop being, or trying to be, in whatever small way, a public figure, to no longer keep one’s name in a place where it had a good chance of being passed around, to no longer say things in spaces where the goal was to be repeated….

Why does this happen to writers? What about “the blood-soaked arena of the publishing world” causes such psychological and spiritual distress?

SS: There’s such a strange dissonance between writing and publishing. I feel it’s beyond dissonance—as if these experiences, which appear inseparable, are in fact polar opposites. Writing is so introverted, publishing so extroverted; writing so expansive, a chaotic mingling of multiple voices, publishing geared toward reduction to a single marketable entity. It’s no wonder the publishing process makes so many writers feel deranged.

Yet the discordance continues to surprise us, especially debut authors. There’s an anticipation of community, a longing for literary kinship, that marketing structures consistently disappoint.

LJ: Publication as you said, is restrictive. This is problematic for many writers but especially for minoritized female writers. You wrote, “to be asked to speak or write as a representation of a category causes woe.” Is this something that can change, or will “the problem of being sold” always create this disparity? How does a writer navigate this?

SS: It is absolutely a problem—one of the meditations in Opacities uses the metaphor of being looked at through the glass of a tank in a restaurant, like a lobster waiting to be eaten! But I do think there is space within that structure, if you can find it.

At the moment I’m obsessed with Kevin Quashie’s Black Aliveness, which I read recently, and one of the captivating concepts in it is the idea of living as if: of being oriented toward an imagined black world. Although you have to be in the world as it is, you can be oriented toward another. As a published writer, for example, you can be oriented toward connection and collaboration, toward what feels lively to you, and away from what makes you feel dead.

To take a simple example, you can say no, I don’t want to answer a series of Five Questions for the Writer that you ask all the writers, that makes me feel like I’m taking some dreary quiz. I would rather have a genuine exchange, a conversation. Very often you can make that happen.

LJ: Some coverage can be disappointingly inane but the alternative—op-eds, personal essays—can contribute further to that feeling of being put on display.

SS: The simple answer here seems to be: Stop! Don’t do it!

A more nuanced answer, or anyway a practice I try to pursue, is to keep my own goals in mind. What do I want to be doing as a writer? Maybe there is an essay I’ve been wanting to write that will also fulfill this piece of a proposed marketing plan. If it works, I don’t see anything wrong with it. But if it’s not something I want to write, or not something I want to write now, if it takes me away from what I need to be doing—then I would say no.

LJ: Let’s go back to what you said about connections and collaborations because Opacities pulls from a lot of writers—Kafka, Roland Barthes, Clarice Lispector, Lenora Carrington, Assia Djebar, Meiko Kanai, just to name a few. You also include fictionalized moments of their life (my favorite is Rilke in Vienna lecturing on Rodin by the light of a magic lantern).

How do you see the relationship between writer and reader? Who are we when we read?

SS: I can answer that for myself. When I read I am a bliss animal—a creature at the height of contentment, lulled and fascinated, vitalized and serene. It’s what I want to be doing all the time.

But the strange thing that happens, when a book is very good, is that I can’t go on. I have to stop reading and write, take notes, compose, live in that language space in a more active way. Opacities grows out of that process of reading: notetaking, cutting up and rearranging notebooks, collaging ideas.

There’s this great line by Fernando Pessoa where he says, “Seeing is so superior to thinking, and reading so superior to writing!….What I read may depress me, but at least I’m not troubled by the thought that I wrote it.” For me, a reader is the happiest kind of writer, the writer who has been able to stop writing.

LJ: This kind of melting between reader and writer feels similar to letters between friends or confidants, which makes the form of Opacities all the more poignant. I hesitate to describe it as epistolary, yet it is written as if to a friend. How did the form manifest? Where did the sections: Tonic, Box, Copy, Night come from, and how did the “you” find its way into the text?

SS: The “you” in the text is Kate Zambreno, my friend and interlocutor for many years now, to whom the book is dedicated. Throughout Opacities, I quote from our letters, as well as my journals and notebooks of quotes from writers that have struck me. The result is a compact collage of ideas and voices. Collage was my method for putting it together: printing emails, photocopying journals, then cutting up the pieces and pasting them into a big notebook.

Slowly the book evolved. Each page of the big notebook has a title or topic—I’m looking at them now—Exile, Uncanny, Signals, Hypochondria—those are a few examples! Eventually the work coalesced into four larger sections, four expressions of the search for writing, which I called Tonic, Box, Copy, and Night.

LJ: A collage is a wonderful way to describe Opacities. It brings to mind your note on method, and how your descriptions of writers traveling are drawn from their letters, diaries, essays, poetry and fiction. Would collage be a good way to describe your process?

SS: My process shifts from book to book (I’ve never written anything quite like Opacities before). But overall, collage is a pretty good way to describe it, in that it always involves bringing diverse material together—from my reading, experiences, encounters, dreams, etc.

But collage also suggests that the bits and pieces retain their contours, which isn’t always the case. Sometimes they do, as when I quote directly. But sometimes it’s more like weaving, cooking, or combining elements in a chemistry lab. The material gets distilled, obscured, crystallized, distorted. It might turn into something unrecognizable.

LJ: I have to ask. If you’re a bliss animal when reading, what are you when you’re writing?

SS: I’m still a bit of a bliss animal—especially when it’s going well. But also a weaver, a cook, and a chemist. Sometimes other things, too—a gardener, a hunter, an architect, a subject under hypnosis, a drudge, a witch.

LJ: All solitary endeavors except for the witch, who needs her coven. This hits on something that really resonated with me while reading Opacities: the necessity of literary kinship. I loved how you drew parallels between writers across time, cultures, genders, even language, and included us in your letters to Kate Zambreno. Was this how you found your way through to produce and publish again?

SS: It’s so strange that publishing is extroverted and lonely, while writing is introverted but never isolated! I love collaborative work, which brings out the communal aspect of writing in an especially intense way. I wrote Monster Portraits, a book about monsters and the monstrous, with my brother, who’s an artist. And last year Kate and I published a book together, called Tone, a weird, playful, searching study of literary tone.

I’m drawn to these sorts of projects because I’m interested in the way all writing is collaborative. Every word you use is worn, secondhand, passed down like an heirloom. It’s a source of energy and inspiration to me—thinking of literature as a massive, wild, unpredictable group project.