SJ Sindu on Poetic Sensibility, Navigating Trauma, & Healing

Novelist SJ Sindu reads an original piece and discusses bringing poetic sensibility to prose writing, self-healing and establishing boundaries, and navigating femmephobia as a femme writer.

SJ Sindu was born in Sri Lanka and raised in Massachusetts. Sindu’s first novel, Marriage of a Thousand Lies, won the Publishing Triangle Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and the Golden Crown Literary Society Award for Debut Fiction, was selected by the American Library Association as a Stonewall Honor Book, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the VCU First Novelist Award. Sindu is also the author of the hybrid fiction and nonfiction chapbook, I Once Met You But You Were Dead, which won the Split Lip Press Turnbuckle Chapbook Contest. An Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, Sindu holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a PhD in Creative Writing from Florida State University. Sindu’s second novel, Blue-Skinned Gods, is forthcoming from Soho Press.

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[thepoetryvlog]

Comment below: what pieces of yourself have you had to cut off or put away because of femmephobia?

[gbem]

An incredible discussion and grateful for hearing SJ Sindu's thoughts--including the chat on writing about trauma when going through/still processing trauma.


My response might be slightly different than what the prompt suggests or is leaning toward. As a white cisgender hetero male, I often have to face moments in my writing where the "femme" (in quotes because of its many iterations) is met with a lot of bias and antagonism. I have had many experiences where I will block femininity and principles of the feminine due to this antagonism. It seems like there could be pieces of myself that are "cut off" as a result. Critically, it's curious to look at ambitions to be more inclusive, more holistic in representation, when it comes to writing, but the barriers form before the conversation (with myself) is formed. I've found a strong practice to remediate is actively engaging more with representations of the femme done well by other artists, and connecting with more people outside of art, generally. This level of intentional connection seems to provide some rewiring on how I interpret and consider the feminine unconsciously.