Sakinah Hofler is a fiction writer, poet, and playwright. She has won the Manchester Fiction Prize and the Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award. She has been a recipient of an Edward H. and Mary C. Kingsbury Fellowship, a Charles Phelps Taft Dissertation Fellowship, and a P.E.O. Scholar Award. Her work has appeared in Kenyon Review Online, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Mid-American Review, and elsewhere. A former chemical engineer for the US Department of Defense and hailing from the great city of Newark, NJ, she’s currently a PhD Candidate and an Albert C. Yates Fellow at the University of Cincinnati.
Q&A
Give us a brief synopsis about this piece.
My story is about a Black, Muslim teenager, Leila, meeting her half-sister from Egypt for the first time. Leila’s father had had a second, brief marriage in Egypt (without letting his first wife know) and fathered another daughter. When the half-sister, who’s now twelve, arrives to spend the summer with Leila and her family, they must confront long-buried feelings – her mother must be a mother to the other woman’s child and the sisters try to find common ground with the girl who reminds them of their father’s indiscretions.
What inspired you to write it?
I’ve had the honor and privilege of reading a number of stories with girls and women who look like me, but none with similar backgrounds. Usually, when religion is present in stories with black American characters, it involves Christianity. When American Muslims show up, it’s usually first- or second-generation Muslims who aren’t black. I wanted to write a story about African American Sunni Muslims.
Growing up in a conservative, predominantly African American Muslim community, I’ve seen it all – the good, the bad, the terrible. While I’ve always considered that community family, there were also problematic patriarchal ideas that extended to the “role(s)” of wife, husband, and family. One of the things strongly embraced in my community was polygamy, so there were men marrying second (sometimes third and fourth) wives; some of the wives were from the community, some were from abroad. I’ve always seen it as cheating or an open relationship that uses religion as a justification. None of those marriages survived. I also thought about some of my friends who aren’t Muslim but their fathers had second (sometimes third) families and how infidelity can affect break families apart.
Short story long: I recall a loving family breaking apart when the dad went overseas and married someone else and legit destroyed his family here when he did so.
Tell us about your journey as a writer.
Like most writers, I devoured books as a child – The Babysitter’s Club, Pine Street, Goosebumps, Toni Morrison. Whenever I was on punishment (which, due to my smart mouth, was often), I reread books and started rewriting endings once I got bored. I started to write my own novel with my best friend in fourth grade. But I didn’t know HOW to be a writer. No one around me was a writer. No one I’d grown up with was a writer. Or an artist. How do you become a writer?
I picked a “practical” career – chemical engineering. On my first day of my first job out of college, I signed all of this paperwork, flipped through binders of technical drawings, and gave myself five years to save and figure out how to do something else.
Luckily, I grew up twenty minutes from downtown Manhattan. I used all of my extra income (shoutout to my parents who didn’t kick me out as soon as I could afford to live on my own) to take writing classes at NYU, Gotham, and The Writers Studio. I also took acting and improv classes at NJ Actors Studio and studied French. Eventually writing wove its way back into my heart and I found myself waking up at 4:30 a.m. to write, writing instead of eating during my lunch break, and hurrying to NYC after work to take writing classes. No social life. Operating on five hours of sleep becomes unsustainable after a while and I decided to apply for an MFA. My first round, I was rejected from all eight schools I applied to. My second round, I got into a number of schools and ultimately picked FSU.
I want to add that it took me awhile to admit “I am a writer.” I often responded to the people who seemed overly concerned about how I survived on writing that I was a “former engineer.” To be honest, it was only a few years ago that I became comfortable saying “I am a writer.” I LOVE what I do and I grew tired of being embarrassed. Now, when people ask “what are you going to do with a PhD in writing” I simply say “write.” It’s my life and I don’t have to explain my choices to anyone.
Is there someone whose writing style influences you?
Heck, yes. I love how Toni Cade Bambara uses language. I love the way Toni Morrison plays with narration. I love Edward P. Jones’ ability to condense someone’s entire world into a few sentences. I also turn to Octavia Butler, Zora Neale Hurston, Lucille Clifton, Ralph Ellison, Raymond Bradbury, Margaret Atwood, Ted Chiang, Jose Saramago, Allen Ginsberg, and Zadie Smith.
Are there books you return to when thinking about craft?
Yes! First, I use books as craft. So I’ll study the way Toni Morrison or Edward P. Jones have crafted a passage and type up that passage to see where they make certain narrative choices. If I like how a first sentence hooks a reader, I’ll take apart the passage to see why it works. I struggle with sentences and so when I see a long sentence working in a novel, I’ll write it down, word for word, to understand how the sentence was put together.
In terms of craft-craft books, I’ve found The Art of Perspective by Christopher Castellani helpful for narration, The Poet’s Companion helpful for figuring out poetry works, and The Art of Subtext helpful for being less direct in fiction.
In terms of craft-life books, Julia Cameron’s The Artist Way was helpful for me to embrace a creative life. Samuel Adoquei’s How Successful Artists Study helped me navigate and differentiate the real world from the MFA world. Angela Duckworth’s Grit is good for life in general, in terms of building resilience and tenacity.
What does it mean to be a writer during a global crisis? Has your writing life or your work been affected or influenced by the events of 2020?
I find this time to be challenging. The pandemic hit America right after I took my preliminary exams. I’d been excited to start writing again, but the pandemic hit, I found out I was pregnant, and waves of people that I knew started dying (I currently live in Ohio, but both my husband and I were born and raised in NJ, and most of our families live there, and we didn’t know what to expect each day – I would have to sit down and make a list of people who we know that passed from this. It’s crazy.).
I became a blob for two months – barely showering, doom scrolling. In the beginning, I questioned what the world would become, if family would survive, if writing would survive. However, after being asked by two places to submit work – one for a poem about these times and one for a monologue on hope, I threw myself into those two projects. For the poem, I started keeping daily track of my pregnancy and the pandemic. In a way, it allowed me to write my fears and get back to writing again. The monologue of hope forced me out of my comfort zone because I rarely write about hope. I’d also never written a monologue so I watched dozens of hours of monologues and read another dozen. Immersing myself in that different genre freed me to reenter fiction.
Then George Floyd.
It’s overwhelming. I try to direct my anger and frustration into my writing. Even as I answer these questions, the video of Jacob Blake’s shooting is circling the Internet. I feel like I was placed on this earth to capture our world, the good and the bad. Books, art, photographs have saved us from revisionist history. And it’s our job to make sure those who want to rewrite what’s happening, who want to erase, who want to change the narrative, can’t. We must capture the world as it really is.
The odd thing is that I LOVE writing and reading post-apocalyptic and dystopian fiction. Right now, it’s too real. In the last month, I’ve found putting my phone on airplane mode allows me to get work done. If I let the world in too early in the morning, I won’t be able to write.
What advice would you give aspiring writers?
Write what you love. I’ve found that BIPOC writers are often placed in a position where they are expected to write a certain thing. Write what feels real to you. Write. Fail. Repeat. Eventually that L will become a success. Be resilient. Rejection is overwhelming. It’s not going anywhere. You have to believe in your work. And surround yourself with those who inspire and uplift you.