Following the release of her craft chapbook, An Expansive Place, Mahreen Sohail spoke with Sundress intern Aylli Cortez about how her daily preoccupations morph into creative ones. By questioning the dilemma to “stay or stray” from motifs in her work, Mahreen dwells on the process of expanding an idea organically—turning writing roadblocks into pools of generative reflection.
Through personal anecdotes, close readings, and provocative prompts, this book invites writers to embrace new chapters in their lives and approach long-budding interests from multiple angles. Here, Mahreen shows us that placing oneself on the page can bring relief rather than restriction.
An Expansive Place is part of Sundress Publications’s 2025 Craft Chaps Series.
Aylli Cortez: At the beginning of the book, you mentioned a rejection that drew your attention to “what feels like the one story [you’re] grappling with”—the subject of women as daughters first. Would you mind sharing the significance of this subject in your writing?
Mahreen Sohail: I’m drawn to this topic because it’s an entry point to many other relationships and modes of being – daughters as carers of parents, as siblings, as women who hold the family together, who learn from their mothers, or who want to be the opposite of their mothers. I’m also interested in the place daughters hold in the family they’re born into because how they function in that family and in that relationship continues to influence them in the future and how and who they form ties with. In general, I want to understand how women accomplish the act of moving away, growing up and away from the family they grew up in. Many women in Pakistan move from their parent’s house to their in-laws house. They go, almost overnight, from being daughters to daughters-in-law. Isn’t that crazy? It’s always interesting to me that women can do this apparently so seamlessly, but I think there is a level of sacrifice of the self involved. So, you can explore the topic of daughters from different angles, and these angles always reveal something new about women and their agency in society.
AC: In citing Amy Hempel’s two types of narrative pressure, you opened the conversation to the need to hide vis-a-vis the need to tell. How did this mantra shape or echo across your process of assembling this book?
MS: I don’t really think about the types of narrative pressure when I’m generating a draft, that only comes later during the revision process. So much of the original draft depends on instinct and just feeling your way through a narrative. But once I could see the shape of the craft chapbook, I saw that its arc could include my pregnancy, the postpartum period, my concerns about my writing and how these orbited Ernaux’s work. I thought about that in the revision process, how what I was saying in the chapbook about myself could be underscored but what I had learned from Ernaux. And of course you can’t say all of the things, all at once. So much of my time postpartum was about parsing through what I was experiencing slowly and I wanted the essay to read that way too. And a lot of the credit also goes to Sohini Basak who edited the chapbook, and is just such an amazing, astute reader. She did a great job asking the right questions, telling me what needed to be expanded, or what could be cut.
AC: Place is a recurring preoccupation. Some locations seem to come with weight (e.g., the country you resided in while writing Pakistani characters) while others relieve weight (e.g., the pool you swam in postpartum). As you navigated pregnancy and giving birth, how did your perception of moving to a more expansive place in your writing change? Was “getting there” a heavy concern that remained throughout?
MS: What a great question. I think the answer to this changes depending on the stage of my life. When I wrote this essay, I had just given birth a few months ago, and I think I felt like I was in a sort of a limbo. The pool, and swimming in general, helped me come back to my body and remember what my body used to be capable of pre-baby. I was concerned back then about ‘coming back to myself,’ returning to who I used to be (in body and in mind) and maybe subconsciously I thought of myself as a place. Now I have a toddler who I love more and more everyday, and I’m realising that there’s no returning to who I used to be. The version of me that existed pre-baby has changed, and as a result my writing has changed. Place doesn’t feel like a heavy concern anymore, which is maybe why it doesn’t feel so restrictive anymore. In caring less, I may have moved to a more expansive place? I don’t know.
AC: The book includes excerpts from two of Annie Ernaux’s works, which you mentioned reading methodically. In articulating your craft concerns, what made it necessary to include your close reading/s of her books?
MS: I read her start to finish and in order while I was pregnant. It felt transformative for my mind, during a time when my body was going through a transformation too. I talk a little bit about this in the essay, but I think Ernaux helped me see that I could have a baby, and continue to be an artist. I’m always amazed to read an artist and a writer’s body of work because it shows me that the arc of a writer’s vision can be long and short at the same time. They can care about the same thing over the course of their life and yet write books that are so wonderfully different. The Years and A Woman’s Story are very different books but are also both about women, about motherhood, and daughterhood, and culture and the family you come from. I thought my experience of reading her would stand well next to that current moment of my life as a writer, a soon-to-mother, and then a mother.
AC: Each anecdote is followed by a writing prompt that reflects on the experience of being rejected, of running into impediments that stall writing. What do these prompts encourage readers to discover?
MS: I hope the prompts will encourage writers to pause and think about their process. What makes them slow down? What is a hang-up that is actually an interest in disguise? What are the things they are interested in and do these appear regularly in their writing? How can they examine these in different ways? The last prompt is my favorite. I love swimming because it doesn’t allow you to do anything but be present for your body. You can’t listen to music, you can’t talk, you can’t podcast anything. I am never as fully present as I am when I’m in the water, and I think being fully present for at least some part of the day is a prerequisite to being an artist. Lynne Steger Strong has this wonderful newsletter where she talks about how “Attention, is not something you do, but something in which you participate.” Swimming helps me do that. It helps me be attentive to just myself and my surroundings (the pool). I hope these prompts help readers become more attuned to themselves, and the topics that make their writing theirs.
An Expansive Place is available to download for free from Sundress Publications
Mahreen Sohail has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College where she studied as a Fulbright scholar. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Granta, Pushcart Prize Anthology (XLII), A Public Space, and elsewhere. She was previously a Charles Pick Fellow at the University of East Anglia in Norwich (UK), and is a recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo and Hedgebrook. Her first collection of short stories is forthcoming from A Public Space.
Aylli Cortez is a transmasc Filipino poet and creative writing graduate of Ateneo de Manila University, where he received a DALISAYAN Award in the Arts for Poetry in 2024. His debut chapbook Unabandon was a winner of the Gacha Press Chapbook Contest and will be published in 2025. His work has appeared in VERDANT Journal, en*gendered lit, Bullshit Lit, and HAD, among others. Based in Metro Manila, he is currently a poetry reader for ANMLY and a member of the Ateneo Press Review Crew. Find him online @1159cowboy or visit his website.