Sing Me a Circle: Love, Loss, and a Home in Time (Trio House Press, October) by Samina Najmi, an intergenerational and sweeping collection of personal essays that orbits around a Pakistani American professor and mother as she writes into and through time, centering her family, their stories, and the places that have informed her identity and her exploration of home. Agent: None. Editors: Kris Bigalk and Cynthia Via. First Lines: “Someone who identifies as darksoulofdeath2 has a post on Yahoo! Answers asking what a fan belt is. The post has elicited responses ranging from mirth to indignation, as well as a couple of patient attempts to engage with the query seriously.” (Author photo: Azfar Najmi)
In a California State University (CSU) Summer Arts workshop led by novelist Bushra Rehman at Fresno State last year, we were prompted to write from the perspective of an animal we identified with. I immediately thought of snails. I may not welcome them in my garden, but I respect their focus, how they make their slow and patient way toward what they desire, oblivious to the sound and fury around them. I read my snail piece aloud to the group, ending with the line “Speed doesn’t define me.” As often happens when we are in communion with other writers, that was the first time I had fully acknowledged and embraced a fundamental reality about myself and my writing process.
Sing Me a Circle took a slow, surprising, scenic route into being. In 2011, I had just gotten tenure as a literature professor. I loved writing scholarly essays. But two things happened in 2011 that had me writing a different kind of nonfiction. First, I was asked to contribute an essay to a special issue of the Asian American Literary Review that marked the tenth anniversary of 9/11. I knew that essay had to be personal. And second, I took a two-week CSU Summer Arts workshop in creative writing, coordinated by author and photographer Doug Rice. At forty-eight, I had discovered my medium.
Here’s the paradox of the personal essay as a form: It’s both expansive and narrowly focused on a truth. There’s no buffer between the writer and the reader, no fictional character or image to hide behind. You need nerve to look yourself in the eye—and then create art from what you see.
This work is akin to sculpting. You take the formless mass of experiences that make up a life and give it shape. I wrote to make sense of the raw material of my days—as a mother, a professor, an immigrant of Muslim background, a South Asian enmeshed in the legacies of colonialism, a person with thoughts about things. And I discovered along the way that publication was meaningful to me. Especially when the subject was heavy, publishing an essay and knowing that it could mean something to someone else eased the weight I had carried alone until then.
Although most of the essays in Sing Me a Circle were first published individually, for many years I didn’t see myself as writing a book—at least not this one. That book was a memoir of my coming of age under a military dictatorship in Pakistan. On the side I was writing about my present California life as it was unfolding. Clear-eyed developmental editor Theo Pauline Nestor helped me see that, with some reshaping, these two manuscripts belonged together.
I wrote the essays in my debut book over a period of ten years, and it took another three to find a home for the collection. Having worked with university presses as a scholar, I first aimed for those. But the more I read nonfiction from independent presses, the more I knew my book belonged with one of them. I had some encouraging rejections before I won Trio House Press’s 2024 Aurora Polaris Award—which I’d first learned of in Poets & Writers Magazine. Before signing the contract, I reached out to the poet Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, whose work I’d long admired and who published Kaan and Her Sisters with Trio House in 2023. I liked what Lena shared of her publishing experience. Trio House Press has absolutely proved to be the right home for my scattered essays. As the Urdu expression goes: “Arrive late, but arrive right.”
There’s no way to rush the relationship between time and consciousness in our writing. The pace varies for each of us. With a snail’s focus, we must keep writing, without looking over our shoulder to compare our speed or volume with that of others. In my experience, we have to wear both “success” and “failure” lightly. For nonfiction sculptors, the beauty that each of us carves out of the amorphous clays of a life is its own justification.
An excerpt from Sing Me a Circle: Love, Loss, and a Home in Time
One hot and sticky day in Pakistan’s coastal city of Karachi, the girls of the Cambridge section at St. Joseph’s are filing back into their classrooms after recess. Exhausted from the Herculean endeavor to push through the mob of girls outside Abdullah’s or Mrs. Velo’s snack bars clamoring for chili chips, Ice Cream Soda, or milk toffees, we collapse on the wooden benches of our eighth-grade classroom, envying those whose seats are directly beneath the ceiling fans. Our forty-odd pairs of hands reach for water bottles even if the water in them is already tepid. The air circulated by the ceiling fans is much too warm, but in time it will work its magic: our uniforms will unglue from our backs, the semicircle of sweat beneath our short sleeves will fade, and the rivers edging our temples and hairlines will begin to evaporate.
It’s time for Senior Miss Fikree’s geography class. Through the haze of humidity and the pungent odor emanating from the semicircled sleeves—an odor whipped around the room by the ceiling fans—we will our minds to grasp how high and low pressure systems develop in the atmosphere.
Suddenly a sparrow swoops in through the open door, sending the girls aflutter. What on earth is the little bird doing here, among us? How disruptive, how foolish! Was it tempted indoors by the relative cool of our high colonial ceilings or overpowered by a freak, exploratory impulse? Doesn’t it know that some risks are not worth taking, some curiosities and yearnings best buried within us?
Within seconds the sparrow has realized its mistake. But unable to see its way out despite multiple possibilities of escape, it becomes a winged frenzy. It darts from one end of the classroom to the other in blinding flashes, to the gasps of the girls, who duck their heads, cover their ears, shut their eyes. Nobody wants to witness this degree of desperation. We all know it doesn’t have to be this way. But none of us knows what to do about it, not even Miss Fikree, and in any case, it all happens so fast. Next thing we know the intruding bird—so small, so afraid, so out of place—has fluttered straight into a ceiling fan and sliced itself between the blades that continue in their own circular frenzy. Down comes the sparrow, a bloodied pulp on the classroom floor. It lies as still now as it had pulsated with frantic life a moment before. An ounce of flesh and feathers at our feet.
I wonder now why we hadn’t all jumped to switch the fans off the moment the sparrow flew in among us. We might have saved its life. Could our own physical comfort have made us indifferent to the threat it faced? Perhaps the spectacle of the bird’s vulnerability simply paralyzed us. Or did the danger fail to register because we failed to imagine it?
I think about the sparrow’s flight and fall, its impetuous, audacious venture into our world. I wonder if it had a moment’s regret. Decades later, I can hear the desperate flapping of its tiny wings. But I have no memory of its cry.
Reprinted by permission of Trio House Press and the author.
