My friend (and incredible accomplished artist) Krista Franklin, told me that I needed to write the book however it was coming, even if I needed to cross things out or erase or scribble. This was an incredibly difficult book to write and quite honestly one of the hardest artistic projects that I have undertaken. What led to that choice? Could verse accomplish something prose could not?
Those forms are a lot newer to me, they’re constantly surprising me and showing me what is possible.Īs for how do I know what is what? I listen.Ģ.In When We Were Sisters you make use of poetic devices and verse throughout the novel. I’ve only had a relationship to fiction for four years, when I first started writing When We Were Sisters. I trust my relationship to poetry even as it ebbs and flows-is the baseline of love where my writing stems from, and it is what allows me to explore other genres. Whereas that might have thrown me into an identity crisis a few years ago, right now I just feel comfortable in that relationship and how it’s revealing itself to me. For example, in the last two years I think I’ve written less than seven poem drafts. I feel now my relationship to poetry is one I know is there, that I can depend on, but where I also see the poems coming slower to me. Right now, I’m noticing that my relationship to poetry is very different from my relationship to it when we first started-when I was honeymooned by it and completely obsessed. So I’ve been in a relationship with poems for eleven years. For example, I’ve been writing poems for fifteen years now, and probably more seriously for eleven years. I think that, like everything, my idea of form is relational. You are a poet, a director, a screenwriter, and a novelist – how do you know when a story requires a certain form? Do you find one form more natural than the others? Fatimah will be on a national book tour starting October 17th.ġ.
This week, PEN America’s Associate Director, World Voices Festival and Literary Programs, Sabir Sultan speaks with Fatimah Asghar, author of When We Were Sisters (One World, 2022).
The PEN Ten is PEN America’s weekly interview series.
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