Mining the Personal
Updated: Sep 3
with Samina Najmi
Interviewed by Dylan Sessoms
" It lets me step outside myself and gives me access to other parts of my consciousness. I guess that’s what poetry does that’s so different from realistic prose."
I am thrilled to have the opportunity to share this interview with Samina Najmi as she talks about her new book, Sing Me a Circle: Love, Loss, and a Home in Time.
Her book, which won the 2024 Aurora Polaris Prize in creative nonfiction, and is a finalist for the Northern California Book Award in Creative Nonfiction, was a wonderful read, and I encourage readers to order a copy here on her publisher's website. In this interview, she muses on why she chose to move into the personal essay, engages with questions of form, function, channeling voice, and shares a glimpse into how she sees the landscape of academic writing shifting.
To read a bit of Najmi’s writing click here to find “First Thanksgiving Without Them” and “Applause,” published by SugarSugarSalt Magazine.
Samina Najmi teaches multiethnic US literature at California State University, Fresno. Her memoir-in-essays, Sing Me a Circle: Love, Loss, and a Home in Time, won the Aurora Polaris Award in Creative Nonfiction and was published by Trio House Press in 2025. The book is a finalist for the Northern California Book Award in Creative Nonfiction. Daughter of multigenerational migrations, Samina grew up in Pakistan and England, and has called Fresno home since 2006. Here she’s watched with wonder her children, her students, and her citrus grow.
More information about her writing can be found on her website www.saminanajmi.com.
What would you say you discovered about yourself while writing this book?
The self-discovery is multifaceted and ongoing. Initially, I had to learn to see myself as a creative writer, to trust my intuitions even before I was clear on all the terms—the distinctions and overlap among “memoir,” “personal essay,” and “creative nonfiction,” for instance. Over the course of ten years, it became clear to me that the personal essay is the form most congenial to me. It’s expansive and can accommodate whatever thought preoccupies me and demands engagement on the page. I’ve discovered that the habit of reflection fosters and enables me to identify patterns in my life—which is to say that I’ve learned to identify the aesthetic dimensions of my experiences, however hard or ephemeral they are. And that is deeply satisfying.
What role have literary magazines like Chautauqua played in your writing history?
Essential as air. I’m especially indebted to the literary magazines—Chautauqua Journal among them—that published me in the early days. They were vital in affirming that I had something to say that might be meaningful to others. But reading literary magazines has been just as crucial in my writing history. Both as a reader and as a writer, I seek out magazines that have an ethos I can look up to. (You can glean a lot from mission statements and the kinds of writing editors give space to.) That’s how I find my people.
Is there anything that's surprised you about readers' reactions to Sing Me A Circle since its publication?
Such a great question! Readers surprise me all the time with their insights into Sing Me a Circle. At every reading, in every review, readers focus on different aspects of the book—not just themes and characters, but some image or detail that spoke to them: the Burma teakwood bookshelf, in one case, and a Dutch Bros in another. It’s extraordinary when something small from my past in Pakistan or my present in California becomes a shared experience like that. In some cases, I learn from readers how to read my own book. That surprised me at first, but, of course, as a person trained in the reading and critique of literary works, I’ve always known that we create meaning collaboratively. It’s a three-way process involving text, author, and reader. I’m very grateful for it.
Where were you when you decided that you needed to tell this story?
I had just gotten tenure at Fresno State when my dean at the time, Dr. Vida Samiian, suggested I take a two-week creative writing workshop at CSU Summer Arts, which Fresno State was hosting. I balked at the idea because I had promised my children that once I had tenure, they’d never have to do zoo camp in Fresno’s hot summers again. But Dr. Samiian convinced me, and the workshop opened up a different world, not only in my writing, but in how I move through life’s experiences.
How does your creative nonfiction differentiate itself from your scholarship in your writing practice?
The primary difference in writing practice would be the order in which I do research. For scholarly essays, I tend to do much of the research up front. I think this is because I want to determine my theoretical frame and position my essay in relation to other scholarship on the subject. My personal essays originate in some urgency of the mind—I’m preoccupied with a thought or feeling and need to process it on the page. Most of my creative nonfiction involves research, too, but it’s usually as a result of curiosity about something that comes up as I’m writing.
Did you find yourself battling with your academic voice during your writing process?
Surprisingly, no. That first CSU Summer Arts course I took was coordinated by the writer Doug Rice, and he told me later that he had wondered whether my academic voice would intrude on the rhythm of my sentences, but apparently he was relieved that wasn’t the case! Perhaps part of the reason is that for me academic essays were never about opaque and abstract prose. Scholarly prose can be theoretical and lucid at the same time; there’s no reason why a thought couched in scholarly language should be unbeautiful. It’s a matter of aesthetic as well as ethical principle to aim for accessibility in academic writing.
Why did you choose to express your feelings surrounding Rubina in poetic form rather than as prose?
I love this question and want to thank you for asking it. It’s startling and wonderful to hear you speak Rubina’s name. You know, I had just turned 22 when she opted out of life, and my entire adult life has formed in the shadow of that loss. There’s been pain, horror, and guilt associated with it. So, I used to think I could never write about Rubina—and if I couldn’t write about Rubina and her place in our family, I couldn’t do life writing with any real authenticity. The first breakthrough was “Triptych,” which engages with that loss obliquely. It poses the question of accountability through images, but not in a direct and personal manner. I needed to find a way to do that without crumbling at the mere thought of it. I didn’t set out to write poetry, but the apostrophe or direct address was a poetical choice. It cut out all the noise around her, around us, and allowed me to focus on my relationship with her. It was a reckoning. I had to use italics to even begin. There’s something about that shift in font that I find productively dissociative. It lets me step outside myself and gives me access to other parts of my consciousness. I guess that’s what poetry does that’s so different from realistic prose.
The war narratives you research sometimes resurface in your memoir writing—when do you know that something from your academic research needs to appear in a personal essay as well?
Another great question, which nobody has asked me before! I don’t know that it happens quite so intentionally, but looking back on my scholarship of the past two decades, it’s clear I was drawn to war narratives set in various eras and places because wars have determined the course of my family history. Colonization inflicts its own kind of violence, but then there was Partition in the aftermath, and then military conflict with India and what became Bangladesh. In my adult, American life, 9/11 and the so-called War on Terror has felt deeply personal. (We seem to be reliving some version of it now.) In fact, that’s how I began writing personal essays. I was asked to contribute an essay on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, and while it was grounded in scholarship, I found myself unable to write it in the form I was accustomed to.
Do you find the opposite true? Do you find your memoir voice ever creeping into your academic writing?
If it means writing with an ear attuned to how a sentence sounds, yes. But as I was saying, the line between these two genres of nonfiction is more porous for me. And I’m seeing a shift in academic writing, a movement away from the distant and depersonalized voice. In recent years, I’ve been giving my literature students the option to write bibliomemoir alongside literary analysis essays. It allows them to tell their own story through their reading of a literary text. In that sense, it invites a melding of their memoir and academic voices.
What was the publication process like for Sing Me A Circle, and how did it vary from the process of your academic publications?
It was very different, but the one thing that was similar was that I published both my personal essays and my scholarly essays individually first. Later they found their way into a collection of some kind. My scholarly essays appear in critical collections, a few of which I’ve coedited. By contrast, I wrote the essays in Sing Me a Circle over a period of ten years. It took three years to find a home for them, and another year for Trio House to publish it.
In the same vein, would you say that you enjoy the editing process? If so, what do you find most compelling about it?
Individual essays usually take shape pretty quickly, but I can tinker with the details for literally years. In the case of Sing Me a Circle, I had written so many essays over the course of a decade that the editing was mostly about which essays to include and how to sequence them. It wasn’t easy, especially since I didn’t think a linear memoir would work for me, but at some point you realize that you have to give yourself a deadline and stick to it. In the case of a memoir-in-essays, you also have to decide where to end it while you go on living.
If you had the opportunity, what is one thing you would ask of a reader after they read your work?
I hope some lines linger in your mind for their beauty. And if they do, let me know!
Just for fun, book-wise, who are you reading right now?
I happen to be re-reading Palestinian American poet Naomi Shihab Nye’s 2005 collection You & Yours. That’s appropriate in light of our conversation about war and language and beauty, and about the confluence of my creative and critical energies. I’ve written about You & Yours as a scholar, but I felt the need to return to it at this historical moment in time. So, I assigned it in a literature course this semester, and it’s a joy to rediscover it with my students.