A Glowing Conversation with Zak Salih

Photo Credit: Emily Poland

Zak Salih is an American writer who resides in Washington, D.C. and he earned his BA in English and Journalism from James Madison University and his MA in English from the University of Virginia. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Foglifter, Epiphany, Crazyhorse, The Florida Review, The Chattahoochee Review, The Millions, Apogee Journal, Kenyon Review Online, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other publications. Let's Get Back to the Party is his debut novel. I got the pleasure of asking Zak about his path to becoming a writer, finding his style, what is his writing process, and his experience writing about being both queer and biracial in his debut novel, Let’s Get Back to the Party.

UZOMAH: What does society get wrong about what it’s like being queer? How can literature written by queer writers change that?

ZAK: I suppose what society misunderstands about what it’s like being gay, or queer, is what society misunderstands about most marginalized groups: that it’s a monolith. The danger in this way of thinking is that, as soon as one announces one’s identity as “gay” or “queer,” one has to bear the incredible weight of so many assumptions about who you are, what you value, and how you live your life. This is where I find the varieties of personal experience set down in literature by queer writers can be most helpful: in illuminating the truth that there is no one way to “be” gay or queer. That it’s all thrilling and boring and contradictory and hypocritical—and, in being so, beautiful.

U: How has writing about being queer and biracial in the form of fiction in your debut novel, Let’s Get Back to the Party help you address issues that you have or had personally with your own sexuality?

Z: With Let’s Get Back to the Party, what I was trying to do on some level was articulate through fiction my experience not with coming out but coming in—to a community with a history that was equal parts painful and resilient, to a culture that felt both foreign and familiar to me. How does one balance the project of individuality with the responsibilities one has to a community (and especially to its dead)? In terms of being biracial, I made a conscious decision early in the drafting to focus on sexual identity instead of racial identity. Some people have taken issue with this, and that’s fine. But I felt no reason to whitewash the character of Sebastian Mote (who is a mixed-race like me) simply because I didn’t want to make his race the driving engine of the novel.  

U: What makes a piece of writing, whether a poem, short story, essay, or novel, impactful for you and relatable to your experience?

Z: I’ve always thought of relatability with a particular character or story or experience to be a happy coincidence—not something I actively seek out. I’m less interested in stories that speak to my own direct experiences and more in stories that don’t, or that manage to forge some link with me that’s all the more beautiful for being unexpected. To put it another way, I find relating more to a character’s emotions more essential than relating to a character’s identity.

U: What was the path like for you as a writer to find your own style and your authentic voice in your writing?

Z: Like a lot of writers, I’m plagued by self-doubt. For a good ten years of my life, this self-doubt was such that I wouldn’t write any fiction at all. It’s only been in the past five years that I’ve managed to overcome this long enough to catch up on all the work I feel I missed during that fallow decade. The path for me as a writer was as simple as getting down to work, and embracing the messiness that comes with writing: the pages and pages of sh&t, the days when you wonder what the hell you’re doing and why. And somewhere in all the sh&t and self-doubt and reading, reading, reading, you manage to cultivate a way of telling a story that seems something like your own.

U: Words can be as vivid as how painters use colors to describe what they see on canvas. How do you use language to bring life stories to your readers so they feel a part of them?

Z: A good work of fiction, like a good painting, is possessed of its own style. Something that roots you to the spot, that narrows your attention. Something admittedly inexplicable. You’re painting with language, not oils. This doesn’t always mean being overly descriptive or throwing adjective after adjective at the wall. A modest sentence can, in some ways, paint more of an image than a sentence burdened by subordinate clause after subordinate clause. The trick, the skill, is knowing what kind of sentence to use. And when.

U: What is something your readers would not know about you from your bio or writings that would surprise them?

Z: That I’m mildly allergic to whitefish and avocado.

U: Can you describe your writing process?

Z: As someone with a full-time job, I have to compartmentalize my fiction writing in the first few hours after I get up. (Which is not to say, of course, that I’m not thinking about my current projects throughout the day—thinking, being a very important part of writing.) I tend to write all the way through a story or novel, print it out, and retype it from the beginning, making revisions along the way. (This is also why I write on a computer and not by hand.) The filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson describes writing as akin to ironing: going forward, then going back to smooth things out, then going forward a little more. I find this image not only an accurate one for the way I work but a pleasant one. Crisp dress shirts, crisp bed sheets, and crisp fiction.

U: If you could interview any writer that is alive or who has passed, who would it be and why?

Z: Toni Morrison. My reasons for choosing her are unsurprising: her intellect, her imagination, her compassion, her candor. Who wouldn’t want to spend time in the company of such a force of nature, of humanity?

For more information about Zak’s writing please visit his site, and to find out more about his debut novel please visit here. You can also follow Zak on Twitter and Instagram.