Interview with 2024 Q3 Creative Nonfiction Runner Up, Sayantani Roy

Sayantani Roy grew up in small-town India and writes from the Seattle area. Her work has found home in Alan Squire Publishing Bulletin, Ekphrastic Review, Emerge Literary Journal, Gone Lawn, Heavy Feather Review, The Hooghly Review, TIMBER, West Trestle Review (forthcoming), and elsewhere. This season, she is participating as a mentee in the AWP Writer to Writer Mentorship program. Say hello on Instagram or X @sayan_tani_r.

--interview by Marcia Peterson

WOW: Congratulations on placing as a runner up in our Q3 2024 Creative Nonfiction essay competition! What prompted you to enter the contest?

Sayantani: I came across WOW on social media and saw many of my favorite writers featured there—either as contest winners or as expert interviewees. I knew I had to enter!

WOW: “Longing, Belonging” is a poignant essay and the way you formatted it worked
well here. What inspired you to write this particular piece?

Sayantani: I wrote this in a class with writer Paige Towers, and she encouraged us to use a slightly offbeat form. I chose vignettes for this flash essay because I could cover several decades of my life and also leave readers to ponder over what was left unsaid. I was definitely influenced by Julie
Marie Wade and Brenda Miller’s book of essays, Telephone, which I was reading at that time. It
is a collaborative work of intertwined vignettes, and the style had a powerful effect on me.

WOW: Are you working on any writing projects right now? What’s next for you?

Sayantani: I am polishing a couple of old and new poems and flash pieces. I am also working on a slightly longer short story right now, which I am workshopping as part of the AWP (Association of
Writers & Writing Programs ) Writer to Writer mentorship program. I am so fortunate to have as
my mentor the writer Jennifer Savran Kelly, whose debut novel Endpapers was nominated for a
2024 Lambda Literary Award.

WOW: What are you reading right now, and why did you choose to read it?

Sayantani: I am reading “The Wheeling Year—A Poet’s Field Book” by former United States poet laureate Ted Kooser. It is a year-long chronicle of observations and insights. These are akin to short
journal entries that are “sketches and landscape studies made out of words,” as he puts it.
Some of these have appeared in magazines, but many are raw observations that make me
catch my breath. For example, the last entry in January is this—"In the long, low, ivory shafts of

January light, a crow, alone on the melting ice of the river, follows its shadow, pecking at it,
drinking it in.” How lovely is that? Kooser has filled six decades’ worth of such workbooks, and
these undoubtedly give shape to his poems. I picked it up to draw inspiration from it—to learn
how to look at mundane things because they are anything but.

WOW: You've gotten me interested in Ted Kooser's work! Thanks so much for chatting with us today, Sayantani. Before you go, can you share a favorite writing tip or piece of advice?

Sayantani: Thank you so much for this opportunity. It’s a great honor.

A writing tip that has worked for me is to write a relatively strong first draft. I suppose it depends
on what you call it, but my first draft is the one where I begin writing seriously. The famous
“shitty first draft” to me is what happens in the freewriting stage. I let it all out and then sit down
to write the real thing. I may take portions of the freewrite, but at this point, I am writing afresh
from memory. I hardly look at the freewrite anymore. I don’t stop every now and then to look at
grammar and diction for the first draft, but I do write in a structured way keeping in mind its final
shape. That’s not to say that I don’t shift things around or I can create a flawless structure from
the get-go. I do revise extensively. But, if my first draft is totally different than what I have
envisioned as the final form of the piece, or if it is very rough, it takes me ages to polish it, and I
lose momentum.

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