Sofia Samatar, "Reflections"
It’s December 8. Sofia Samatar, author of A Stranger in Olondria, is glad she remembered to pack those seasickness tabs.
How would you describe your story?
SOFIA SAMATAR: Two letters, centuries apart, stand like a pair of mirrors, reflecting each other's obsessions with art, disappearance, and flight.
When did you write it, and how did the writing process compare to your other work?
SS: I wrote this story for the book Then Again by the artist Laura Christensen. Each of the participating writers chose a work of Laura's to respond to, and I was captivated by her piece "Reflections," because I was in the middle of a Joseph Cornell craze. She didn't give us many instructions, but she did suggest a few characters to refer to, if we liked, so that certain threads would reappear throughout the book. One of these was a little girl named Sofi who had disappeared. As her name is so close to my own, of course she had to be in my story.
What kind of research went into this story?
SS: Lots of breathless gazing at Joseph Cornell art books. My story is an homage to The Crystal Cage: Portrait of Berenice, which is about a mystical little girl who lives in a garden pagoda, conducting mysterious experiments in science and poetry.
What, to you, makes the short story a special form? What can it do that other kinds of writing can’t?
SS: I think of the short story as a laboratory: a place for poetic experiments, like Berenice's pagoda.
Where should people go to learn more about you and your work?
SS: www.sofiasamatar.com. Anybody who reads all the books on the Recommended Reading page will know me very well.
What's the best gift you've ever been given?
SS: A birthday party when I was eight or nine years old. I don't remember any of the presents I got, but I do remember the party! My birthday's in October, and my parents created a Halloween-themed party, all black and orange. The best part was that they also dressed up, my mother as a witch for the "witch's handshake" (she was wrapped in a sheet and held out a rubber glove full of water for the kids to shake), and my father as a turtle. I am not sure if they intended any real Halloween connection with the turtle, beyond its being a sort of costume. He was wrapped in a sheet (so he looked exactly like the witch, except on all fours). He had something under there, maybe a broom, which was his head, and the kids could ask him questions, and he'd nod or shake his head. It was fantastic—better than any material gift.
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