The work of author SJ Sindu cannot be locked into one genre. A reader can expect her writing to lean into the best flourishes of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, and often blur them together.
Her hybrid fiction and nonfiction chapbook, I Once Met You But You Were Dead, won the Turnbuckle Chapbook Contest and was published by Split/Lip Press in 2016. Her first novel, Marriage of a Thousand Lies, published by Soho Press in 2017, won Publishing Triangle’s Edmund White Award and was a Stonewall Honor Book and finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. And her hybrid chapbook, Dominant Genes, won the 2020 Black River Chapbook Competition and was published by Black Lawrence Press in 2022.
She is on tour for her latest novel Blue-Skinned Gods.. Out with Soho Press, it is the story of a young boy, Kalki Sami, living with his parents in Tamil Nadu, India, in an ashram his father has set up. Kalki is believed to be the tenth human incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu. He has blue skin and must face three trials to confirm this identity, which his father heralds as an opportunity for Kalki to become an internationally famous healer.
I had the opportunity to speak with Sindu about the novel, her pedagogy, and her approaches towards writing with wonder and from a place of inquiry.
Nicholas Howard: I would like to ask you to speak to the role of blank space on the page. How has your relationship with it changed throughout your career?
SJ Sindu: I used to be so scared of the blank page. At least when it came to my original writing. In high school, I wrote a lot of fanfiction, and I had no problem with the blank page. Fanfiction was joyous for me, while original writing was more tortured. But that all changed in university. Once I entered the creative writing classroom, I started to get more and more excited about the possibilities of the blank page. The joy of my original work slowly replaced all the fanfiction. I only find more and more joy in the blank page as the years go on, and I hope that never changes.
Howard: In 2017, you wrote that you “believe writers should have a childlike sense of wonder about the world,” and you detailed your practice of going to the aquarium so as to be “taken wholly out of [your] own life and put into a space that is foreign and wondrous, a space full of life but entirely inaccessible to you otherwise.”
Are you still going to the aquarium? How can writers come to know their own place to rediscover wonder?
Sindu: It’s obviously been hard to go during the pandemic — especially in Canada, where nearly everything indoors was closed for over a year. But I do try and go whenever I can, wherever I am. For me, there’s also an element of the water. I spent my early childhood in coastal towns, and much of the writing of Blue-Skinned Gods took place in Florida. I’m drawn to the water, and being around water helps me work out my writing snafus.
I think it’s important for writers to rediscover wonder. But that wonder looks different for everyone. Without wonder, writing becomes stagnant and preachy. If you haven’t found your place of wonder yet, think about the kinds of spaces that make you ask questions, that make you see in a new way.
Howard: What type of community should writers in a graduate program aim to cultivate, and how can they continue to grow it after graduation?
Sindu: Strive to create a community with a tradition of excellence and celebration. Excellence in that everyone you’re interacting with is brilliant and producing amazing work themselves. Celebration in that you all celebrate each other’s successes, support when support is needed, and show up for each other in the ways that matter. Competition can turn toxic. Drama can be stressful. So besides excellence and celebration, you should aim for a community of kindness.
After graduation, continue to celebrate each other. Signal boost on social media. As physical visits become an option again, get together with your closest friends. Make a writing group from the people in workshop who gave you the best feedback. Have happy hour (virtually) with your friends to stay in touch. We may all be scattered, but we’re going to be swimming in the same small literary ponds for most of our lives, so maintain community.
And never, ever approach community building with the intention of “networking.” Make genuine friendships with an open hand and heart. Make your primary friendships with your peers. Don’t just seek to brownnose successful writers. Eventually, you’ll be in a position where your peers and close friends are successful themselves, and you’ll be surprised how big your network can grow if you approach it with the right intentions.
Howard: When you do a virtual author visit, are there any special objects, books, or photographs you keep close for inspiration?
Sindu: No. I do sit at the same place — my desk in the office I share with my partner, the poet Geoff Bouvier. I have my bookshelves behind me, and a stack of my current reads and teaching books beside me. It’s the space more than any object that grounds me.
Howard: You currently teach at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Could you share some tenants of your pedagogy that other teacher-writers could bring into their classrooms and workshops?
Sindu: I love teaching writing. And that’s the first part of my pedagogy — passion. It makes a difference, in my view, when teachers are passionate writers themselves, navigating through the murky waters of the publishing industry. We give our students access to that knowledge and expertise.
I think it’s also important to recognize that every writer’s process is different. Every writer’s relationship to their work is different, and to make space in our pedagogical approaches for the ways in which our students are approaching the writing process differently. I also try my hardest to teach contemporary writers, both established and emerging. It’s important for students to learn that literature lives and breathes and changes.
Howard: Along those lines, your website has a section specifically labeled “For Teachers.” Why is it important for writers to think about how their work can reach classrooms and workshops and how they can support teachers?
Sindu: I don’t think all writers need to think about their work in classrooms, but for enterprising writers, especially those who write literary or hybrid genres, or those who write for younger audiences, or writers with multiple marginalized identities, the classroom presents an opportunity to reach farther than we might otherwise. Mainstream books by white people still are the norm, and finding alternative ways to get your book in front of readers can be (to some) an important part of the writing life.
Howard: Fairly early on in Blue-Skinned Gods, the main character Kalki Sami outlines how he visualizes within his mind his healing ability. It is a powerful moment because it speaks to how many of us (speaking of myself) in the disability community come up with visual representations of our non-physical, lived experiences that we know on an intimate level.
When you were crafting that description, were you thinking of a connection to the disability community and the work we do to describe the almost indescribable?
Sindu: I was certainly thinking about my own experience of PTSD, depression, and anxiety. These kinds of visualizations of our non-physical lived experiences were enormously helpful for me in my healing journey, and I think some of that has come out in my writing.
Howard: Also in the story you balance speaking from Kalki’s perspective as a child and his life as an adult. What was maintaining that balance like and what opportunities did having multiple timelines provide?
Sindu: I definitely like to write linearly, so I didn’t really use the timelines to step away from one to the other. But the timelines have gone through extreme shifts as I worked on the book. At one point, the story had a braided timeline — one in the present in New York, and one in the past at the ashram. But the balance just wasn’t working. At every point, it seemed like one timeline either had more stakes, or was pulling more emotional weight. So while I resisted the linear timeline, I did end up deciding it was the best way to tell the story. But some of that retrospective remained.
I think it’s also hard, on a craft level, to write purely from a child’s perspective without the adult narrator. When you have an adult narrator, you as a writer have access to their knowledge, their vocabulary, their voice, their memories. For me, and for this story, a child narrator would’ve been too limiting.
Howard: You’ve shared that Blue-Skinned Gods started out as a short story that you then lengthened into a novel. Considering your other short stories, are there any that you would be curious about trying to grow into a novella or even full-length novel?
Sindu: Yes! I’m actually doing that right now. I wrote three flash pieces over the past many years: “Take the Boy”; “Yellow School Buses”; and “Fundraising.” Right now, I’m working on my third literary novel, War Child, which is based on these flash pieces and also incorporates some lyric essays as autofiction elements. War Child is about Tamil immigrants and refugees living in Scarborough, Ontario, and explores the lasting psychological effects of the Sri Lankan civil war.
Howard: On the origin of Blue-Skinned Gods, you said that the idea for the story came out of a writing prompt while you were in Boston. Do you have a favorite writing prompt?
Sindu: I love getting story ideas from headlines. One of my favorite writing prompts is to scroll through and make a list of ten headlines that sound interesting. Then, combine two or three of those headlines to make a story idea.
Howard: Every writer has to deal with rejection. Do you have any rituals for responding to it? Has your reaction changed over time?
Sindu: I think at this point I’m just used to it! I was lucky enough in my early years as a writer that I had mentors who told me that all writers get rejected at all stages of their careers and to learn to not take it personally. That insight was essential in me seeing rejection not as a reflection of me but as a mundanity in the writing life. Don’t get me wrong. It still stings sometimes. But my approach has been to not be glued to my phone or computer, to not check my email all the time, and to always have multiple pots on the stove. If I’m working on multiple projects, there’s always hope when one gets rejected.
I was also lucky enough to work at literary magazines and judge for prizes early on. These experiences taught me what it’s like being the one who rejects — how hard it can be emotionally to reject someone, and how razor-thin the line between acceptance and rejection can be. Rejection is most often just a function of not being a good fit. Sometimes other structural or power things — like racism, heterosexism, etc. — can play a part. But much of the time, there are mountains of submissions and a tiny amount of spots.
Howard: You’ve said that you prefer to write from a place of inquiry. Could you say a little bit more about that?
Sindu: I think writing is more expansive and beautiful when we write toward questions rather than answers. If I already know the answers before I start writing, my words become carbonized and pedantic. If I write from a place of inquiry, seeking out more questions, then my words have space to flow poetic and philosophical, and enough leaps and gaps in between them to invite the reader to participate in meaning making.
My advice to writers seeking to write this way is to jettison the answers you think you know, and discover the questions that burn inside you, then write toward more questions. Write toward discovery, in other words.
SJ Sindu is a Tamil diaspora author of two literary novels, two hybrid chapbooks, and two forthcoming graphic novels. Her first novel, Marriage of a Thousand Lies, won Publishing Triangle’s Edmund White Award, and her second novel, Blue-Skinned Gods, was published in November 2021. A 2013 Lambda Literary Fellow, Sindu holds a Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing from Florida State University. Sindu teaches at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Sindu’s newest work, a hybrid chapbook titled Dominant Genes, was published by Black Lawrence Press in February 2022. Twitter | Instagram
Nicholas Howard is a graduate student at Bridgewater State University and a writer living in Southeastern Massachusetts. He is an English teacher who aims to say, “could you kindly please” at least twenty five times a day. His work is forthcoming or has appeared in Wild Roof Journal, on Hunger Mountain’s Online Only page, and in The Hopper. When not reading or writing, he can be found cooking (mostly) from scratch, sitting around a fire pit, or listening to local radio. A good day involves all three. Twitter
Photo by sarah bodri