Making A Book | She
"This forced me to merge [the] two writers in me": Radhia Rameez on her ultimate childhood dream, writing community, and giving voice to women's experiences
Greetings subscribers, minions, and other hangers-on,
This interview is the last in the Making A Book series for 2023. As school gets busier, I have less time and energy to dedicate to this project. The series will continue in early 2024.
You can expect some longform essays, reflections, and cheeky short fiction from me for the rest of 2023 (when I can get around to it). There may also be some collaborations with other newsletters.
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In the series “Making A Book” we delve into the experiences of students who published a book through the course WRI420: Making A Book.
WRI420: Making A Book is an advanced 12-week course in the Professional Writing and Communications (PWC) program at the University of Toronto Mississauga. The course examines principles, procedures and practices in book publishing. Students, working collaboratively, collect material for, design, edit, typeset, print and assemble books. Students consider the philosophical, aesthetic, and economic factors that guide publishing, editing and design decisions. The course culminates in each student publishing a book.
Radhia Rameez took WRI420 in the winter semester of 2023 (January—early April). She published her collection She on April 12, 2023. A young woman revisits a childhood nightmare; a little boy tries to piece together the shards of his mother’s heart; a child crouches by the banisters in a pool of shadows, wishing she could grow up faster; an old tea-plucker gazes at the wheeling stars, dreaming lost dreams. She is a heart-wrenching collection of short stories and poems that lifts the veil from the lives of different women, giving you a glimpse into their dreams and nightmares, their heartbreak and hope.
Radhia was born and raised in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where she worked as a writer before moving to Canada in 2019. She double majored in Biology for Health Sciences and Professional Writing at the University of Toronto, where she wrote and edited for various campus projects. Radhia still misses the year-round greenery of the tropics but is learning to like (or at least tolerate) the Toronto winters.
W. V. Buluma: Why did you want to make a book? First, why did you want to write a book, and second, why publish it through the course?
Radhia Rameez: I’ll address the first question first: why did I want to write a book?
Because that was the ultimate childhood dream. And I think this is probably true of many many people.
As a child, I was a voracious reader, and I grew up surrounded by books and poetry and well-read friends. For most of my childhood, I tramped through Middle Earth, solved mysteries with the Famous Five, kept trysts in the Secret Garden, and made friends with the Big Friendly Giant. And I admired authors very much indeed; who were these strange, superhuman beings that could open such doors and create such worlds? How did they craft this marvellous magic with just ink and paper? And I would scribble shamelessly plagiarized, badly written stories in brown-paper covered exercise books, dreaming of the day when I too would master this craft and “become a famous writer.”
To me the dream is not yet realized—that would only happen the day a publishing house accepts a manuscript from me—but this book is still something ten-year old Radhia would be proud of.
For the second question: why did I publish it through the course?
Simply because it was the chance of a lifetime. How often do you get an opportunity to publish a book in three months and get university credit for it?
In my very first year at university, I made it a goal to take this course before I graduated. I didn’t know what I was going to write; the stories I had in my head were still mere skeletons, not yet fleshed out. But I was determined to have something to publish by my last semester, and finish my undergraduate [degree] with a bang. It certainly was a nice climax to graduate and launch a book within a few days of each other!
If you were to create a genealogy of your collection, what would you include? Think of She as a complex, ancient organism—where does it begin to evolve?
She is basically a collection of stories which I wrote throughout my first three years as a PWC student.
Unlike many of my peers, I did not come into the course with a novel I’d been incubating for years, or a nicely rounded up cohesive collection of stories. When my last semester came around, I realized that I had one last chance to enroll in WRI420 before I graduated, but still did not have anything to publish. Since many of my previous creative non-fiction portfolios focused on stories about women from Sri Lanka, I decided to compile my work, fictionalize the stories, and publish them.
In terms of how the stories themselves were born, I feel like this excerpt from the book’s Foreword could help to answer this question:
Like most works of fiction, the heart of these narratives contains pieces of the writer, of myself. They are, in many ways, my truths, attempts at soul searching, at making sense of experiences, at solidifying abstraction into the coherence of letters and words. But most importantly, they are a consecration of the stories of the women I have met and loved, known and passed by, strong women, kind women, fiery women, empty women.
The empty women are what break my heart the most.
I grew up in a society full of them, women trapped in chauvinistic systems, women bent-backed under the weight of expectation and abuse, women who were sturdy and clever and beautiful, but so ingrained with culturally prescribed chauvinism that they simply bowed to their fate and never thought to question it. I have seen too many empty women in my short life.
These narratives are my attempt to tell their truths.
Could you share how your background as a journalist in Sri Lanka influenced She?
I have been writing for time out of mind, but the writer in me has always been of two kinds. There is the journalist kind, the part of me that chased down stories, constantly facing up to the challenge—and terror—of the empty page, constantly battling deadlines and failed interviews and reluctant contacts. The other is the dreamy kind, the surviving remnant of my childhood self who wrote (very bad) poetry and whimsical little stories, and saw writing as a means of escapist pleasure. These two writers were always very separate beings, and I felt like one could not exist while the other did.
Then I started my undergraduate degree and decided to major in PWC as well as biology. I realized that a large part of PWC involved writing creative nonfiction, and somehow, this forced me to merge these two writers in me. I had to tell the truth, without the trappings and trimmings of fiction. Two of my portfolios focused on the stories of women from back home in Sri Lanka; my own stories, stories of women in my life—and stories of women I’d met while I was a journalist. For example, “A Tale of Two Tea-Pluckers” tells the tale of two very different women I’d met in the hills while covering a feature on the living conditions of tea-estate workers.
What was your writing workflow—how did you outline, draft, and edit?
My writing process is a bit haphazard; I have no fixed writing workflow. Sometimes—very rarely—the stories practically write themselves, to coin a cliche. But mostly, a piece would start off as a wisp of an abstract idea … a tune, a memory, a thought, a phrase, a goal, an emotion. The goal is always to capture this and shape this abstraction into a solid story.
I usually start off by just mapping things out in my head with a notebook or screen in front of me. I might randomly scribble lines or words or elements I would like included. I think I tend to spend far too long in this phase; that act of writing the first line on a blank page is always incredibly daunting. That said, writing under the pressure of deadlines for university puts a spoke in the wheel of a writer’s natural writing process, so my stories spent far less time in my head than I would have liked in these last four years!
Once I have done some brainstorming, I usually get right down to writing. I rarely draft rough outlines; I like to start writing and polishing from the very first sentence. I’m also a very slow writer, so when writing portfolios for university, I make sure to leave myself plenty of time to meet deadlines.
Once I have finished a piece, I like to let it sit for a few days, or a week, before looking at it again and making any tweaks and edits. Again, writing under deadlines doesn’t usually leave much room for this!
Every writer has a different workflow. My advice would be to discover your own ideal writing process and stick to what works best for you.
I can relate to this more free-flowing writing practice. I often start with a singular sharp image, and discover the story as I write it.
What surprised you as you went through the publication process? What’s the most valuable thing you took away from this experience?
WRI420 made me see books in a whole different light! To me, a book used to be a means of escapist pleasure rather than an object. But in WRI420, we learned about the elements of a book as an object: spine, recto, verso, title page, half-title page, and so on. A book was more than just its contents; it had to be typeset and created. We created our books from scratch, chose the font, designed the layout, and adjusted kerning and margins and spacing. We hired copy editors and graphic designers. We didn’t just write the content. We literally made a book!
The most valuable takeaway from this experience was the little WRI420 writing community I got to know and love. Writing had always been a deeply personal, solitary pursuit to me. However, my peers were invaluable in this writing journey. We celebrated our book launch together, tore our hair out over InDesign dilemmas together, lamented assignments and celebrated small wins together. I’m proud to have worked with such talented writers!
I can certainly relate to finding community among the writers in the PWC program.
What's one thing you learned after publication that you wished you knew before you started?
Publication is not the end of the journey; it’s just the end of one chapter.
To be quite honest, I stopped marketing my book after the first month. I’m happy I went on this journey, and happy that I have a real live book with my name on it, but this is not my best work, and not the content I would have published if I was doing this on my own outside of university. So I’m quite happy to have my month of celebrating and marketing, and then quietly leaving it alone.
However, if you want to keep the book “alive” so to speak, you will need to figure out a marketing strategy to avoid the post-publication blues. Hitting “publish” won’t magically mean you’ll have sales. In fact, it can be pretty anti-climatic unless you’re actively doing some marketing. I must say some of my WRI420 peers are doing an amazing job with marketing their books, and I’m very proud of them!
Is there anything else you'd like to add, or an answer you'd like to give to a question that you wish I had asked?
Yes I would! A little piece of advice: if you are thinking of taking WRI420, remember that once your book is published, it’s more or less a done deal. Be very sure that you would be comfortable with these stories being out there in the wide world, especially if you’re writing creative non-fiction. Are you writing about real people? Will there be consequences? Is your heart at peace with the idea of your stories being in print? Ask yourself these questions.
Second piece of advice: keep in mind that there are additional costs associated with this course on top of the tuition fee. For example, you will need to hire a copy editor, subscribe to Adobe Creative Suite so you can use InDesign, and maybe even hire a graphic designer if you opt for one.
What are you currently working on or looking forward to working on?
To be quite honest—nothing! I have a few stories sort of incubating in the dusty recesses of my mind, but none of them are quite ready to be told. Right now, I’m busy with my new job as a medical writer (which is a nice intersection of my two majors) and dealing with existential questions about career paths and so on. But perhaps some day, I will be ready to dust off one of those stories and go on this writing journey once more.
Read the rest of the Making A Book series here.