Women Reading Women: Sophie Jai
Welcome to Women Reading Women — a series featuring women writers, and the women writers they love.
Sophie Jai’s debut novel WILD FIRES will be published by HarperCollins Canada, UK, and Australia in May/July 2022. The novel was longlisted for the 2019 Bridport Prize Peggy Chapman-Andrews Award, and she was a 2020 Writer-in-Residence and Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford. She is an alumna of the Humber School for Writers in Toronto where she studied under Olive Senior. She was born and raised in Trinidad, and grew up in Toronto. She currently splits her time between London and Toronto.
What is a book you would recommend to any woman writer?
A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa. It’s described as a “true original”, and it is. The book follows Ní Ghríofa’s journey into the life of 18th century poetess Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill’an. It mediates upon motherhood and women writing throughout time. I can’t relate to the former, but I can relate to literary obsession and how my every act of creation, whether it be words or non-words, is a female text. Ní Ghríofa writes some of the most powerful words I’ve ever read:
“Remember this lesson: in every page there are undrawn women, each waiting in her own particular silence.”
“...in the untranslatable pale space between stanzas, where I sense a female breath lingering on the stairs, still present, somehow, long after the body has hurried onwards to breathe elsewhere.”
“This is a female text, composed by folding someone else's clothes. My mind holds it close, and it grows, tender and slow, while my hands perform innumerable chores. This is a female text, born of guilt and desire, stitched to a soundtrack of nursery rhymes.”
What’s your top book written by a woman?
The Vegetarian by Han Kang and I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem by Maryse Condé. I love wild women bordering on wry rabidity.
And Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan; there is a space of objectivity between the author and text that I’ve never experienced before. I can’t put my finger on it.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
“Please don’t give up. Please keep writing.”
What should every aspiring writer do/know/try/fear/run towards?
Do keep a mantra nearby.
Know that rejection in the writing journey, post-publication included, doesn’t stop.
Try writing with a pen.
Fear laziness and imitation.
Run towards a community and celebration.
Why do you think books by women are important?
To mark that we were here in all our roles, both self- and otherwise assigned.
Quick-fire Questions
City you were born in versus city your heart belongs to?
Both belong to my hometown of Tunapuna, Trinidad.
A piece of art that inspires you?
Mass-produced tokens that can fit in the palm of my hand indicative of something I want to achieve. I keep it on my desk until I have reached that goal or given up.
Fill in the blank: ___ helps stimulate my creativity.
Conversation.
Describe your writing in three words.
Wry, melancholic, padded.
What’s an assumption about you that you don’t think is true?
That I am a happy-go-lucky, obedient Indian girl. And that I am very lucky (vs. a hard worker).
Name a book that you wish you wrote.
Ah - I wrote it. ■
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