Interview with Shifa Saltagi Safadi, Author of Sisters Alone
Welcome to Smack Dab, Shifa! Tell us about Sisters Alone.
Thank you for having me!
Sisters Alone is a tale of two sisters, Rama and Leena, who are stuck home alone as a blizzard strikes their rural home near Chicago…and their journey of trying to heal the fractures in their relationship and navigate their grief to survive!
You've said the book started as a solo survival story. Just one girl in a blizzard. What made you realize the story needed both sisters to function?
I love this question! Honestly, I drafted the story with only the survival elements happening to one girl, but the story felt missing, like it was only half of a tale, and I kept wondering why my instincts told me it felt incomplete. From the very beginning, one sister was the reason her sister got stuck. After sharing with a few trusted critique partners, one of their questions stuck out in particular to me: and it was a why. Why did one sister want her sister to be stuck behind?
And in trying to figure out the answer, I discovered a whole unwritten story waiting to be told…and that led me to uncovering another whole pov. A sister who very adamantly wanted her story told!!
And this uncovered the heart of my survival story, that storms are best survived when you have your sister on your side!
Rama and Leena are described as fire and ice: one is battling intrusive thoughts, and one is numbed by grief and guilt. How did you go about creating such different inner worlds?
I struggled a lot with this, truthfully!
It was a journey and I kept brainstorming with my editor until these two girls were finally crafted to what I felt was their real personalities. I dug deep into revisions to learn their voices and characterizations enough to distinguish the two girls in this book, and one way was thinking how they would each react differently to their mother’s death. After all, grief is so difficult, but we also all face it so differently. Leena gets sad and numb and clings to the past by crafting a scrapbook, while Rama boils with emotion and anger and anxiety about the future - and the different motifs for the two girls of fire and ice symbolizes their emotional journeys to each step toward each other and find peace in the present space where they are able to share space together.
You've written about rewriting Sisters Alone so many times that the draft your editor saw at submission was vastly different from the one she eventually accepted as final. What was the hardest thing to get right across all those drafts?
Voice!
Although the plot did change numerous times, it was the girls’ voices that I kept feeling myself struggle to figure out. With my first book (and my upcoming third novel currently with my editor), voice was the first thing I nailed down, and so to struggle so much in this novel surprised me. I kept having to trust the process and remind myself that these two elusive girls would finally reveal who they are to me! And they did! In the final draft, things finally clicked, and so their personalities and characters felt fully realized, and thus I could adjust the plot to be decisions and emotional moments that made sense for them. And the whole story felt more real because of that.
Novels in verse do emotional intensity so well. Was there ever a moment during drafting where things almost got too intense for you as the author?
Absolutely. I do not hide the fact that writing for me feels like opening my heart and veins, and spilling blood onto the page. I write with complete and utter emotional truthfulness and personal honesty in the stories I create, and so my characters and stories are so very close to my heart. This means I can feel them so viscerally and write verse with emotion, but it also means I cry a lot while writing, and I also occasionally get scared that I am being too honest about my life! Writing Rama’s intrusive thoughts was particularly difficult because it felt like I was seeing my own mind and thoughts on the page…and I still don’t know how I feel about being so raw. But it is the only way I know how to write, and I hope that feeling so much while writing helps readers feel the emotion too while they read.
After all, in my opinion, the most important part of poetry is feeling.
You're a former middle school ELA teacher and were born in Syria before immigrating to the US as a child. How does your background (both as an educator and as someone who navigated a new country) shape the kinds of stories you feel are important to tell?
My background of being an English language learner when I was a young Syrian immigrant is exactly what made me fall in love with literature in the first place. Because reading is what helped me learn English!
This made me love books, and then decide to become an educator with a passion for having kids love books too.
In the pages of a book, I always felt like I was a main character, and I could just fall into the story and belong…and yet, I never saw my own identity in books. I wrote poems and stories constantly while I was young, but the main characters hardly ever reflected me. And while teaching, I felt this lack of Muslim rep in the stories I taught too.
And so when I finally saw a book with a Muslim main character, I broke down into tears. And I realized what I wanted to do, which was write.
Now, I make it my mission to write both Arab and Muslim American rep in my stories, the missing rep on the bookshelf I never saw, and make sure these stories are nuanced, beautiful, and real. And most importantly, after teaching middle school readers, I know that these books need to also be exciting and drama filled!
And I hope that I continue to be able to do so for a very long time, because there are so many more stories I want to tell!
The blizzard is almost a character itself in this book. (I’m a Missouri girl, so I know all about tough winters.) How did living near Chicago inform how you wrote the storm??
YESSS!! Thank you for mentioning this, because the blizzard is ABSOLUTELY alive in this book, and the weather is a symbol for the emotional turmoil of the girls, as well as an antagonist itself.
Living near Chicago means we experience frequent harsh winters, and this helped me bring the cold blizzard to life in Sisters Alone. One of the ways I intentionally used description was to try and vary the words for snow and ice, and I remember opening a note in my notes app just to keep a list of descriptions and metaphors I tried to come up with for the blizzard.
I actually stood outside in the freezing snowstorms multiple times in order to use my full five senses to come up with the best words, and it was very fruitful (and really cold!!)
What do you most want readers to carry with them after turning that last pate?
I hope readers feel hope. That even with all the bad things the girls had to survive, all the storms this world threw at them, all the grief and sadness they felt, and all the struggles that were not completely perfectly resolved—readers see and know that Rama and Leena can face it all by leaning on each other.
With love, anything is possible!
What’s next?
I have a picture book titled THE KAABAH CAT coming out in January 2027, a few more Amina Bananas in the works, ANDDD another middle grade novel in verse, one I hope to announce on my social media soon!
Where can we find you?
You can find me on my website shifasafadi.com or my Instagram @shifasaltagisafadi !
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