IN CONVERSATION
SABRINA USWAK
Sabrina has worked as a prose editor for Loft on Eighth press, FreeFall, and filling Station magazines. Her poetry was featured in the “This Might Help,” project by Calgary's 5th Poet Laureate, Natalie Meisner. Sabrina won New Forum Magazine’s 2020 inaugural flash fiction contest and had some of her short fiction selected for the Tap Press Read 1-3-5 anthology (2020). Currently, her flash story “Medusa’s Murder in the Piazza Della Signoria” (Funicular) is nominated for a 2024 Alberta Magazine Publishers Association Award.
She holds an MSc with distinction in creative writing from the University of Edinburgh and MA with distinction in digital publishing from Oxford Brookes University. Sabrina lives and works in Calgary. All the Night Gone is her first book.
Check out Sabrina's website here.
For the last couple of hours, I've been sitting with your writing and listening to you read excerpts of your prose and poetry. I must thank you for your gorgeous writing and reading - it has calmed my chaotic mind and brought me to a Proustian space of existence. I'm now dwelling on what's still, what remains, what's here. So, I thought I'll start this interview with a wee Proustian Questionnaire for you to answer!
Thank you so much for taking the time and your kind words – it never ceases to feel like an unexpected gift when someone says they’ve read and connected with your work. Writing can feel like quietly tapping onto invisible walls, all by yourself. It’s nice when someone taps back.
What is your current state of mind?
Content.
What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
Good grief. I had to look up the virtues. Does that signal wickedness on my part? Instead of the Heavenly Seven™️ I’m going to assume Monsieur Proust was referring to Aristotle’s Twelve™️ since he was intellectual and scholarly and hosted fancy salons over a century ago and twelve is more than seven and he seems to like a list.
(Also, does ‘virtue’ sound decidedly unmodern now? Like a 19th century English narrator is wagging their finger at us? Did ‘values’ displace ‘virtues’ in modern social and corporate parlance? Should I cringe if asked this at a dinner party? Will ‘values,’ too, one day sound outdated?)
Anyway, this one: “wit, or pleasure in group discussions”(1). Finding joy in banter, fulfilment from being truly present with people, and making a point of having real good conversations. That’s the stuff of a life being well lived (2).
(1) I've done zero scholarly research to confirm if this is actually one of Aristotle’s 12 virtues. Forgive me.
(2) “Virtue? Pah!” (Maybe that should have been my short answer for Proust.)
What is your most treasured possession?
Not one ‘thing’ comes to mind. I treasure time and connection with family and friends, sharing experiences—which I wouldn’t/couldn’t call ‘possessions.’ But, for M. Proust: my car keys. They enable connection, independence, and adventure on a dime. A car is also a luxury and necessity out here.
(My mobile phone is a close second. Though, more often I want to toss it into the sea.)
Who are your favorite writers?
Chants: I am not going to overthink this!
Inhales: Anne Michaels, Helen Oyeyemi, Esi Edugyan, Miriam Toews, Elena Ferrante, Yaa Gyasi, Patrick deWitt, George Saunders, Elif Batuman, Ottessa Moshfegh, Toni Morrison, Ocean Vuong, Anthony Doerr, Alistair McLeod, Salley Rooney, Lisa Moore, Claire Keegan.
—And still, there are more books by authors I’ve read for the first time this year who I think of like, YES! and!—(andthenwhatabout all the names on the to-read list)—
Today, as I write you, those names rise to the memory surface. Their work changed how I look at storytelling and language.
Listening to you read an excerpt from your novel All the Night Gone, I couldn't help but be drawn into the landscapes you were describing. Of Alberta. Saskatchewan. I did a road trip last year to Alberta from BC, and many of the sights you describe felt super familiar. A sense of nostalgia. Emptiness. Paths leading somewhere, nowhere. Unexpected beauty. Tell me about how this novel came to be - did landscape lead you into the storyworld? Did you dwell on the linearity of time while you wrote it? There is a profound sense of silence and surreality in your words.
"Silence settles comfortably. I open my window a bit and hear air rushing over the glass, smelling cool earth. The clouds are drifting leviathans. I study their contours, memorize their shape."
Ah, thank you. I’m also glad you had the chance to do a long drive between those provinces – fantastic scenery.
The novel (which I truly didn’t think would be one, at the time) unspooled from a single image: a young woman just making it to an auto shop, car finished, two brothers (similarly aged) still there at close, no one else around to help. And: the setting summer prairie sun, the hills, horizon that goes on and on. And: yearning.
I was sitting in The Meadows in Edinburgh with two friends when those three appeared, also working on an entirely different writing project. But Dill, Ben, and Charlie posed a question I wanted to know how to answer. It was like a haunting. There is something about how the land you hail from (and all it has sowed) calls when you’ve moved away, demanding attention. I’d been spending most years living away, too—Nova Scotia, Scotland. All places by the water, not a landlocked, mountain-skirted prairie. So, yes, the landscape was very much the way in and through—definitely felt/is as central to the book as the three main characters. I wrote most of sitting at a library desk facing North Sea.
Time! A great question. I don’t think I was dwelling on it or its linearity purposefully as I was writing. Time is a presence. Its relentlessness shapes the psychic vibe of the novel. How the young characters grapple with its manifestations, the adults bend with them; how grief shapes our relationship with time. The landscape, too—seemingly immutable, but realistically, has evolved drastically over millennia. Tuned to a timescale bigger and older than a human lifespan or evolutionary presence.
As an aside, lately, I think of time… all the time. Its passing, how we register it, engage with it; why our consideration of and how we measure it changes as we age—our mortality. Existential crisis! You know the movie adaptation of tick, tick... Boom!? There’s a constant ticking sound throughout as a motif, mimicking the heart, a metronome, a timer signalling something should be ready, and so on—it was a brilliant device on many levels. And I thought wow, yes, exactly that—that relentlessness. A small sound that appears instantly when you think about things that matter.
Tell me about Tour Mont Blanc. You just got back from your trip. Did you enjoy the mountain air? Before you left, we'd briefly discussed what it means to write, and about what it means to succeed, to be published, and how all this impedes the actual writing. You spoke of how it then becomes a matter of finding one's way back to writing. Tell me, did you find any answers up on the mountains, or in the rivers? Did the silence help? Did you find your way back to writing?
It was incredible. Yes—the mountains, wind, rivers, snow bridges, wildflowers. Such varying scenery, day to day, more so than hikes at home. Rusted WWII bunkers. Refuges on ridges where you can face two different countries. Cows with bells! Everything, absolutely everything about it. A trip that left a mark, in a small but important way. Still in awe it happened. I haven’t quite collected all my words for how to describe the TMB.
And to the rest of your questions, yes—I think so. I hope so.
I will say, finding the way back has required reflection and asking:
What do I keep focusing on, really?
Where am I spending my time, really?
Why am I moving in this direction?
Sometimes you wake up, unaware you’ve been riding passenger side in a car you’ve been meant to be driving this whole time. And no one’s in that seat, just air through the window. The accompanying adrenaline shot is vivifying.
Also: Do I care, really? [About [writing]]? Why?
Also: What else matters?
Also: tick tick tick
Your flash fiction piece 'Replay' - which was the winner of the New Forum’s 2020 inaugural flash fiction contest - has such vivid imagery. Do you like writing flash fiction? What is it about this form of writing that draws you to it? Here's a small excerpt of the imagery I enjoyed imagining.
"Glass muttering under her feet as she pushes aside yellow black tape. The floor shattered dishes. Half a bowl tells her to stop staring—It’s just plain rude, sister. A whimper from the window sets her quickening, swallowing. There: inside the blackened ashtray, Alice. Curled. Lily can barely see her. But Lily has a special eye. She reaches into her mouth to remove it, weighty in her palm. She can see luminescent on the floor a smudged fishbowl, water half sloping to its lip. And, inside, the youngest boy—swimming in circles, mouth open."
I really enjoy it. It was a welcome creative window thrown open by a class I was taking with Rosemary Nixon (an incredible teacher and writer) during the pandemic. I was quite stuck for a long time with writing; flash was one of the first ways to try and find my way back.
With short forms, you can really experiment—styles, approaches. Capture a world in a line, explore a whole story arc in paragraph. Finish something because the form leaves most off page, with the reader. Refer to stories like idea cards to explore later. And, from a sheer craft exercise standpoint, dig into the challenge and practice (and sometimes even joy!) of focusing on selecting each individual word.
Writing is hard.
Finally, since we met for the first time in Italy, and because this piece is set in Italy, we must talk about it. 'Medusa’s Murder in the Piazza Della Signoria' was nominated for the AMPA award. Tell me what inspired you to write this. What interests you about Italy, Medusa, bodies, and the Italian language? -- Also, here's an excerpt I liked.
"When the mind stutters to process shock, continuity issues will surface-especially for the retelling. You will obsess over bodies in many unhelpful ways. With the last swallow of wine we will tear a baguette into breadcrumbs, get distracted by our smudged reflections in the window; you will say, she was punished; I will say, she was sleeping; you will say, if only, and we will look at each other, willing ourselves to turn into stone."
What a trip. I think of it fondly. At the time, I was definitely on a Natalie Haynes podcast kick (highly recommend) and generally enjoying a lot of literature that kept asking us to reflect on how female figures have been rendered and served up and codified over the centuries. (Even now.)
Everything about those topics you listed—Italy, characters from classical mythology, bodies, language—all of it interests me, continues to. Language fails us, connects us. An imperfect but powerful tool. Also, Italy drawing from Greece (they were rather heavy-handed with it back in the day)—where half of my family is from. Years of visiting old stones with young eyes, filling in gaps of very short placards with a reader’s imagination.
Where to even begin to answer this fully? I’m not sure if I can! More words to chase down. I want(ed) to explore how history, art, myth—mostly the human themes they explore—can continue cycles. Capture a thought, render it as truth, muddle until it endures in a kind of false certainty. How stories can take you back in time, at a remove—a curious observer. Or firmly jerk you wide awake into the present.
Inspiration for me isn’t usually a defined set of threads I can name and pull apart. Mostly it's a well that when you peer into, goes on and on. Full of, well, All of It.
So, I bend down to listen. See what taps back.
Photo credit: Britt Staddon