Jasmine Sawers is a Kundiman fellow in fiction and a graduate of the MFA program at Indiana University. Originally from Buffalo, New York, Sawers now lives and pets dogs outside St. Louis. Sawers’s work has appeared in such publications as Ploughshares, Fairy Tale Review, and The Offing.
Twitter: @sawers
https://jasminesawers.com
You were born in New York to a Thai immigrant mother and an Irish-German-French American father, as you put in your biography. Does your cultural or geographic identity define your written work in any way?
We can’t escape who we are when we write. It’s possible to betray yourself by denying it. Samuel Beckett famously wrote in French and translated his work back into English in an effort to iron out his own Irishness—which he ultimately couldn’t do. For my own part, I spent a lot of my early years tapping only into the white side of my heritage because I didn’t want to be pigeonholed as an Asian American writer, a Thai American writer. A concept as silly as it was futile.
After leaving my white bread hometown, I was finally able to develop a very clear, healing identity as a mixed person—I am not a person in fractions, half of this, a quarter of that, I am a whole and that whole is mixed—but somehow I couldn’t do the same for my writing. My characters were largely white, struggling in desolate little suburbs, marked by the verbal tics of someone raised in Western New York. It wasn’t that this part of me was false, because I do come from the suburbs of Buffalo and I did grow up with my white extended family, it was just that it was an incomplete portrait of who I am as a writer, and it began to be conspicuous. I was hiding from myself.
These days I want to write truthfully, with the whole of myself. Not necessarily nonfiction, but with emotional truths, cultural truths, geographic truths.
How else would you define your writing?
I’m not sure that’s up to me. My job is to write what captures my imagination and not let myself be pigeonholed like I so feared when I was starting out. Being pigeonholed doesn’t only have to mean you’re hobbled by what the publishing industry thinks of your demographic; it can be a form of self-sabotage. It can mean you tell yourself, oh I don’t write sci-fi, I don’t write YA, I don’t write memoirs, so you never try those things even when the impulse strikes. I never want to be someone who puts a lid on my own creative force that way. I might wake up one day and decide to write queer Thai middle grade speculative fiction or a picture book about dinosaurs; I want to be free to do that without shutting myself down before I even get the chance. Maybe at the end of my hopefully long and fruitful career, some critics will decide to look upon my body of work and do the work of defining it for me.
You have such a unique style, prose based on stream-of-consciousness but also immaculate attention to detail. What is a published piece of yours that you’re particularly proud of? How did you go on crafting the different elements of your piece, such as the plot, language, or narrative style?
I’m really interested in the deceptive nature of fairy tales—they’re read to children, but they’re often quite bloodthirsty or tragic, because they’re imparting harsh truths about the world we live in. A strange dichotomy, especially in a society that’s so puritanical in their “won’t somebody think of the children” meltdowns. Part of why fairy tales get away with so much lies in their straightforward language, but we must not confuse straightforwardness with being simplistic or lacking depth. Because I so admire that sort of dread lurking beneath simple but lyrical language, a lot of my work draws from fairy tales. “The Weight of the Moon” may be the first original “fairy tale” I wrote—that is, a story in the style of a fairy tale, but not based on an existing one.
It’s old at this point, but “The Weight of the Moon,” which won the NANO Fiction prize in 2015, is still one of my best. There’s a fluency and cleanness to the sentence work that some might mistake for evidence of the story having been easy to write, when achieving that level of ease is actually a great labor. My approach to any writing, but especially flash, is really like whittling: after I have a first draft, I have to carve out all extraneous or redundant words and phrases without compromising character, style, music, or plot, so I can present the tightest possible narrative in a satisfying, unimpeachable shape. No trick or secret, just casting an unsentimental eye over your work and discarding everything that detracts more than it carries.
I feel like I’m still reaching for the grace I achieved in “The Weight of the Moon” in everything I write.
You have an amazing list of awards and fellowships! I was particularly interested in your experience as an exchange student at the University of Edinburgh, where you received the Certificate of Merit in Scottish Literature. Tell me about that experience.
I was an exchange student to Edinburgh my junior year of college. There’s a fairly steep learning curve in terms of the difference between university in Scotland and university in the US. Many of the classes are a year long, for example, and in many ways, you’re much more on your own, no “real adults” to hold your hand. There’s also much less, maybe no, grade inflation. In that way, your grades are much harder-won, so you feel that much more accomplished. The certificate of merit was a simple award saying I crossed some commendable grade threshold I no longer recall, but it became a sort of academic talisman for my time in Edinburgh, which was one of the best periods of my life. I loved Edinburgh, I loved traveling around Scotland, I loved studying Scottish literature and Scottish history and Scottish ethnography, and yes, even Scottish Gàidhlig, which I failed miserably. But hey, I can still spell Gàidhlig.
I noticed you’ve been on the masthead of several literary journals such as Indiana Review, Osedax Press, and Fairy Tale Review. Is being an editor and writer complementary? Does one need to be a good writer to be a good editor and vice versa?
Honestly, I don’t believe so. There are plenty of great writers who make terrible editors, and plenty of great editors who don’t strive to write their own work. Of course there’s a lot of overlap, but I think the real requirement for success in both writing and editing is reading. Do you love to read? Do you read widely, both within your preferred genre and outside of it? Do you know not only the history of your preferred genre but its current trends? Are you a careful, sensitive reader who is able to glean much of what lurks beneath and between the lines? Do you have an ear for the rhythm of a sentence? Reading is the bedrock of being a good writer and a good editor.
You’re also working on your first novel, which I’m very excited about. Could you tell me a little more about that process?
Oh boy. 2020 is not the time to ask about how people’s novels are going. Consider this my crying laughing emoji.
Novels are an endurance sport. You have to put your head down and commit to it in a way that may compromise other portions of your life—don’t work on other writing, don’t take that side gig, carve out time for writing that even your family, your spouse, your kids aren’t allowed to touch. You have to prioritize it, and no one’s going to do that for you or make you do it.
It’s easy to get stalled on a novel. It’s easy to hit a wall. It’s easy to just give up. You must find a way out of the stall, over the wall, away from the voice that tells you it’s garbage, or some other project is shinier and will surely work where this one has failed. A first novel, in particular, makes an author feel at sea. I needed support, guidance, and a community. I was privileged enough to find it in Rebecca Makkai’s Novel in a Year class through StoryStudio Chicago. Despite all the succor I took from that class, I still need a lot more time to get this novel out.
My professor Maura Stanton once told me short stories are like model planes. It may take a lot of time and work to put one together, but then you have this perfect and lovely little plane to admire. But a novel—a novel is a real airplane you’re designing, engineering, and assembling by yourself, and when you’re done it has to fly. This was Maura’s very gentle way of telling me not to write a novel at that time, and she was right.
I’m not flying yet. Like a lot of people, I’ve been smacked around by 2020. I also received word this summer that my flash collection was accepted for publication by Rose Metal Press. While it won’t be out until spring 2023, writing more stories for it and editing my manuscript has occupied a great deal of my time. At the most basic level, I couldn’t focus on that and my novel at the same time.
I’ll get back to my poor little book at some point. It’s been waiting a long time for me, but waiting a little longer won’t hurt it.
Finally, you’ve previously taught creative writing to many students. Do you have any advice for such young and emerging writers?
Read! Read lots of stuff. Read everything that even vaguely interests you. Read fiction, nonfiction, poetry, philosophy, car manuals, news sites, art criticism, plays, manifestos, zines, recipe books. Read a genre you thought you wouldn’t like based on your own biases. Read books from around the world. Read the work of authors like yourself, and read the work of authors very unlike yourself, too. Avail yourself of the library. Read online literary journals and subscribe to two or three print ones. Find living authors you love, read their past books, and pre-order their forthcoming ones.
And, I’ll give you a secret others may not: you don’t have to finish a book you don’t like. Life is too short to spend it reading bad books. There is an infinite number of books out there—go pick another one.
Reading, and studying the mechanics of what’s written, is essential to good writing.
Interviewed by Jessica Kim, edited by Lou Willmott.