Sofia Samatar, associate professor of English at James Madison University and renowned author of “The White Mosque,” among other works, visited Goshen College and hosted a writing workshop from Friday, March 14, to Sunday, March 16, as well as an S.A. Yoder lecture at Rieth Recital Hall.

Samatar, a GC alumna, has established herself as a highly regarded author, winning awards such as the British Fantasy Award’s “Best Novel” for her book “A Stranger in Olondria,” as well as the 2023 Bernard J. Brommel Award for Biography & Memoir for “The White Mosque.” Her connections to the Goshen community, including her mother’s presence at Greencroft, made her visit a “win-win,” according to Jessica Baldanzi, chair of the English department.

“She’s one of the most awarded and high-profile GC graduates out there,” Baldanzi said. “When we’re looking for an S.A. Yoder lecture, we’re looking for our literary stars … It was fabulous that she’s so multitalented that she was able to do a really successful writing workshop and then transition into this high-profile talk.”

“It was a workshop on world building and fantasy and science fiction,” Samatar said. “My intent was to think about not just writing stories, but the background of the story.”

The workshop gave students a chance to develop building blocks for their own stories, participate in exercises and share their work with the class.

“So what does it take to create a fantasy world that feels real,” Samatar said, “and what has to go into that world? We worked on writing imaginary religious texts and imaginary letters and imaginary history, and it was super fun. I had an amazing group of students and they worked really hard and yeah, they created some really fantastic things.”

Egypt Boyd, a first-year writing and film production double major, spoke to the workshop’s usefulness, even for those who may not be primarily fiction writers. “I do know there’s a couple of people who don’t really typically write fiction, so that was an interesting [opportunity] for them. But whether or not you’re writing about wizards or magical powers, I do think it was a lot of good takeaways … to learn how to build a sustainable world within writing.”

Boyd also mentioned an exercise where students put together a map out of rice. “There were no stakes to it,” she said. “We could be ourselves and have fun. There [were] a lot of collaborative things where we got to comment on each other’s pieces and give each other feedback. It was a good opportunity to hear and learn different perspectives that I know I wouldn’t have been able to encounter.”

Samatar’s S.A. Yoder lecture, with 160 people in attendance, focused on the building blocks of epic narrative. She started the talk by mentioning her five elements of the epic: abstraction, reduction, compression, combination and digression. She proceeded to expand upon each of these elements, providing examples from J.R.R. Tolkien to Noah’s Ark to “One Piece,” and many others. 

“Because writing is my favorite thing to do,” Samatar said. “I always want to do it better … I always want more from it. And so, I’m very interested in how writing happens, especially because the process is very strange to me; there doesn’t seem to be a formula to make this happen.”

Samatar’s most recent book, “Opacities,” is a book about “writing, publishing and friendship,” according to her website, and is rooted in an epistolary relationship with another author and friend of hers.