Meet Mac grad and best-selling author Sarah Olutola

Sarah Olutola graduated from the department of English and Cultural Studies with her PhD in 2017. After completing a postdoctoral appointment at the University of Ottawa following her time at McMaster, she is now an assistant professor of writing at Lakehead University.

Olutola is the author of several young adult fantasy novels, including the best-selling Effigies series and the recently released The Bones of Ruin. She publishes her fiction under the pen name Sarah Raughley.

We chatted with her about her research, how she balances her academic and creative writing, and the challenges of being a Black researcher and fiction writer in spaces that are still predominantly white.

Every good fantasy character, superhero and villain needs an origin story – what’s yours?

I always had the idea that I was going to be a medical doctor. That’s why I first came to McMaster. I was accepted into Honours Biology, and I did that whole program while doing an English minor. I was never fully invested in the idea of medicine, though – so after graduating from undergrad, I tried to figure out what else I should do.

I tried a bunch of different things: I tried pharmacy. I took the LSATS.

Then, I got an encouraging letter from the English and Cultural Studies department because of a TA who suggested me for the program. I already had a minor, so I went back and completed a major – and as I was working on that, I rediscovered my love for writing: not just creative writing, but academic writing and thinking. It really clicked with me, so I went on to graduate school – and that love of writing also then led to my being hired as an assistant professor of writing at Lakehead.

Did your creative writing influence your academic writing? Or the other way around?

I think the creative writing helped me think beyond the normal frameworks when it comes to academia, and bring a little of my own voice into my academic writing. Creative writing helped me be true to my own voice and be confident in using it.

On the other side of things, I brought a lot of the theories and discussion that I learned in grad school to my creative writing. I was mostly looking at post-colonial and critical race theory, and my current book, The Bones of Ruin, owes a lot to that post-colonial thinking – it looks at imperialism in the 19^th century and tries to re-populate Victorian London with non-white bodies.

The Effigy trilogy is set in a very international context – could you talk about that a little?

When I first tried to get a novel set in Toronto published, I was told that it wouldn’t sell because it was set in Canada – there was this idea that people wouldn’t relate to it if it wasn’t set in America. I want to keep challenging that and not have things be so Ameri-centric.

It’s not just American girls that matter, though, and America isn’t the locus of everything. In the Effigies trilogy, the girls come from different places and backgrounds, but they’re all dealing with the similar pressure of being girls with powers who are in the public eye – that’s not just an American experience.

As a Black Canadian, I sometimes feel trapped by the expectations of the American publishing industry that might see Blackness as “American” – as if African-American experiences ARE the Black experience. There’s the expectation that as a Black author, you have to be writing so-called “Black” stories – they have to be within an African-American context, or within a fantastical African setting.

I’m trying to break that expectation apart and challenge it.

Tell me about your new book, The Bones of Ruin.

It came out in September, so it’s available everywhere and in all different formats.

I like to call it a 19^th-century supernatural Hunger Games. The main character is an African girl named Iris, and she’s embroiled in this tournament where supernatural characters are fighting to the death on behalf of wealthy patrons. Iris’s main power is that she can’t die – and throughout the first book, she’s trying to find out who she is. The big reveal comes at the end, and the rest of the series revolves around her dealing with the fallout.

What are you working on right now in your academic work?

I’m finishing up my monograph about transnational adoption. My next academic book will be about African youth and the representations of African youth in children’s novels, which is an offshoot of my previous work. It will take the ideas of agency and identity of African youth and bring them into the world of children’s novels.

The idea of representation factors largely in your academic work and your creative writing. How do you see representation playing out in your own life?

I don’t think I’ve ever had a Black teacher – Black TAs, yes. Black professors, no. I was thankful to have had Chandrima Chakraborty as my supervisor – she’s South Asian, and as a brown woman she understood a lot of what I was going through and what I was trying to do with my work.

When you’re the only Black person in a largely white space can feel isolating – and you feel that at any point someone could say something that plays into stereotypes, like talking about “angry Black women” in a class discussion and not recognizing it as a harmful stereotype. I had to push back against that, but that places me in a really vulnerable position.

There just need to be more Black hires – not just for the students, but for the professors. There was a lot of hiring of Black professors after last summer and the Black Lives Matter protests – but it shouldn’t take someone’s death and the enormous national and international responses before the academy decides it’s something important.

Bringing in more Black people, not just as teachers but as students as well, and giving them the means to have that education and that employment is something academic institutions still need to look at and move forward with.

Any last thoughts?

I’m really thankful to Mac for getting me this far – there are always issues with any academy, but there are a lot of great people as well: Daniel Coleman, who was also on my committee, Don Goellnicht, who has now passed away and is greatly missed, and Lorraine York, and her work with Daniel Coleman on the Centre for Community-Engaged Narrative Arts where I worked as a research assistant.

I had so many experiences at Mac, from living in the dorms all the way to getting my PhD. McMaster will always be a part of my life.