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 Yaddo and Hedgebrook. Her debut short story collection Small Scale Sinners was published by A Public Space in September 2025. Q&A Editor Gauri Awasthi conducted the interview.
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Gauri Awasthi: In the first story of Small-Scale Sinners, “Our School Year,” I am most intrigued by the use of the first-person plural to create a sense of mob mentality or collective agreement about a particular kind of ethical system. Could you speak to that choice?
Mahreen Sohail: I think that was the story I enjoyed writing the most. By the end of the story, I wanted the reader to feel a little hypnotised and feel the unease of sitting inside a situation where she thinks she knows what happened but enough people are saying something else to make her question herself, kind of mirroring how the girls in the class are living out the timeline of the story too.
Whenever I read first-person plural (Stephen Millhauser’s The Knife Thrower is an excellent example), the longer the voice carries on, the more implicated I feel, and I hope Our School Year achieves that feeling too.
GA: There is an implication and a discomfort, but there is also a sense of watching. One other story that evoked a similar feeling, given the complexity of the characters, was “Basic Training,” the story that the book draws its title from: “small-scale sinners.” The sheer cruelty of the act, despite the speaker’s confession that “My sister and I were only small-scale sinners,” took me back to the question of power struggles within fiction. How did you approach this subject while writing?
MS: My editor suggested the title of the collection and I immediately loved it. The magnitude of the sins perpetuated by the protagonists of the stories is determined by the societies the characters live in, and so there is a sense of cognitive dissonance running through the collection – the women know, or can feel, that they should be entitled to certain basic rights and privileges but society disagrees. The amount of power the protagonists of these stories have compared to other characters varies across stories – and this sense of shifting power dynamics opened up the space for me to play with elements of the absurd. I enjoyed that, I think. It really did feel like anything could happen.
GA: The absurd and bizarre are really apparent, especially in stories like” The Man Who Could Fly.” There is a sense of the everyday that is bizarrely cruel yet normalised. When those lines become blurred, what responsibility do you feel to prevent an outsider gaze onto the characters? I was wondering how those dichotomies of where you write from, and who you write towards, and where it’s published, and who reads it — all play out in the making of a story for you?
MS: I think first and foremost, the characters and their relationships to each other have to feel true to me. I recently read Elena Ferrante’s Frantumaglia and went back to some of her interviews where she talks about authenticity versus verisimilitude, “…a text that skilfully gives an impression of truth is no longer convincing to me, as it used to be. Our world is based increasingly on effects of truth and less and less on truth.” I think about that a lot when I’m revising a story: whether the piece is just giving the effect of truth, or if I’ve done my best to be as truthful as possible to the emotions of characters. It’s important to me that the characters are not caricatures, that they are not leaning too far either way towards “good” or “evil.” If I keep that in mind and feel I have been faithful to the story, I feel absolved of my responsibilities.
GA: Throughout the collection, a deep sense of loss shapes the characters. Like the narrator says, “This is also more bearable than watching her lie awake and worry about dying.” How does loss shape the writing process?
MS: The women in these stories—and in some way many of us in real life—are wrestling with the question of how to be the best version of ourselves in our relationships as sisters, brothers, wives, husbands, aunts, mothers, while still maintaining our independence. How do you keep some of yourself for yourself and what is lost in the process? I’ve always been interested in that question and tried to write into it while I was putting this collection together.
GA: I totally evaluated what is left after intense caretaking in relationships. I was further moved by how experimentation with form brought some of this feeling to the surface. Especially in the stories “Sisters” where we get vignettes each beginning in repeated “Sadia as (an impending disaster), or Sadi as (playmate)”, and in “A List of Places My Mother Was Old”, where through moments like “3. My mother is old at the butcher’s, walking through flies buzzing around hanging carcasses, a prophet in the wrong part of town.” This might be a chicken-and-egg question, but does the form appear before the story for you or vice versa?
MS: I’m not sure. I wrote “Sisters” as a traditional short story but something felt like it was missing. It was boring, so I went through the exercise of only keeping the lines that startled me. I ended up with only a handful of sentences, and I built the story back up around those. With “A List of Places My Mother Was Old,” I was more interested in if I would be able to tell a story via a list format, so the format came first. The list format in particular is limiting in terms of word count, but also it allows you to quickly jump through time and tenses and scenes. I found that really liberating.
GA: I admire the way you weave the myth of the “churail” into the telling of “The Park”, where we learn about domestic violence. Can you speak to that choice?
MS: I grew up with stories of churails, and was particularly fascinated/horrified by the idea of “backwards feet” being a way of marking out these mythical creatures. It turns out the stories I’d heard in my childhood just weren’t that interesting when put on paper. I started to think about how to complicate the myth while keeping some basic, recognizable elements (backwards feet!). The relationship between mother and daughter, what constitutes free will, who has rights and who doesn’t all came into play when I started to think about churails as women who had power that no one else did and pitted that power against something else that was evil in the world.
GA: Where are you in your writing now? What is inspiring you and what is brewing after the publication of this book?
MS: I am currently working on edits for another novel that I will send on to my agent in the coming months. Beyond that, it’s often a win just to be writing and reading these days. I have a full-time unrelated-to-writing job and a toddler at home so I count the small blessings!
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