A conversation with Jasmine Sealy, author of The Island of Forgetting, about writing, reading, mentoring, parenting, and forgetting what’s in your own book…
This post first appeared on The Waited on Substack.
Jasmine Sealy, the award-winning author of The Island of Forgetting, judges prestigious literary prizes, speaks at sold-out events and teaches at the world-renowned University of British Columbia.
But perhaps her most noteworthy distinction is the fact that, as you will hear in our interview, she was the first person to tell me about Heated Rivalry (we recorded this back in December! I have not been living under a rock!).
In the very first episode of The Waited podcast, we talk about the magic of getting encouragement at just the right time. In fact, it was a conversation with the novelist Alix Ohlin that prompted Jasmine to turn a short story she’d written for her MFA into her novel.
(If you’re in Vancouver, Alix Ohlin is going to be interviewing the great George Saunders at a Writers Festival event this coming Friday and you can grab tickets here.)
We talk about the logistics of creative work when you have young kids. “You carve out these windows,” she says. “The little one’s napping for an hour and a half and so, ‘Okay: Go!’”
We discuss trying to follow up your first book when everything in your life has changed. “It’s scary,” she says. “Because when you sit down to do it again, you’re like, ‘I don’t even remember how I did that. So how am I supposed to do it again?’”
We talk about her guilty pleasure: romance novels; specifically, how easy they are to read and how hard they are to write. “I’ve sat down and tried and I can’t do it,” she says. “I could write like an All Fours kind of dark, edgy romance, but the earnestness that goes into writing a happily ever after, particularly like a comedy or like a rom-com, they are so hard to write.”
And we talk about the bane of her existence: crafting. “Do you know how difficult it is to be a mother of young children when you hate crafts?!”
Watch/listen on Substack.
Thanks, y’all! And thank you, Jasmine, most of all!
Kelsey
P.S. If you’re a writer in Vancouver, you can register for Jasmine’s workshop at the Vancouver Public Library How to Begin: Inspiration as Process on Wednesday, February 4th right here. (I took one of her workshops in the summer and let me tell you: it was manuscript-changing!)
P.P.S. Pick up The Island of Forgetting, a modern literary Odyssey-inspired beach read—we read it for our book club (before Jasmine joined!) and it was a mega hit.
