interview with Sarp Sozdinler

Sarp Sozdinler is a writer from Philadelphia and Amsterdam. His work has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Wigleaf, HAD, Hobart, X-R-A-Y, Pithead Chapel, and Maudlin House, among other journals. His stories have been selected as finalists for the Los Angeles Review Short Fiction Prize and the Passages North Waasnode Short Fiction Prize​. He serves as the editor of The Bulb Region​.

Sarp Sozdinler's nonfiction writing occupies the strange, exhilarating space where confession, comedy, and cultural criticism converge. With a voice that is at once self-deprecating and startlingly incisive, he transforms the overlooked rituals of everyday life into meditations on identity, memory, and performance. His work revels in unconventional forms like lists, fragments, false histories, and pop-cultural detours, not as formal experiments alone, but as ways of exposing the beautiful absurdity of being human. Beneath the jokes and the nostalgia lies an unmistakable tenderness, one that insists our embarrassments, contradictions, and private mythologies are worthy of both laughter and careful attention.

We interviewed Sarp about his piece, Confessional, published in The Palisades Review. Read that story hereand read his interview below.

TPR: Confessional is built almost entirely out of short, declarative statements. What drew you to that structure rather than a more traditional narrative?

Sarp: They were simply just born out of these little admissions, things even I myself have discovered during writing, some stupid, some embarrassing, some downright ugly, and putting them all on an even ground, in the same blunt grammatical register, with no definitive start or finish, felt like the right form to mold whatever this thing is into. The form inevitably likens to anaphora a little, a narrative device I like playing around with in most of my other pieces too. That’s probably also why it reads more like a diary entry than a story in the end, which, in my opinion, adds a layer of intimacy that would have otherwise been difficult to convey. A more traditional narrative would have created a legible hierarchy (and therefore a semblance of a character arc), which would have undermined what I'm trying to accomplish with the punchiness of this little piece. There are no payoffs or no grand takeaways here. There's no start or finish that we can conventionally speak of. I just wanted the piece to go on until either it or I run out of breath.

TPR: The piece moves quickly between humor, discomfort, and vulnerability. How intentional was that tonal balance as you were writing?

Sarp: To be frank, the individual lines came pretty quickly and intuitively, almost in one sitting, but the ordering was intentional and took a lot of time. The only thing I knew from the start was that the funny stuff had to provide more than comic relief. It had to lower the reader’s defenses a little to let more emotional air in. You’re reading about such mundane things as fingerless gloves and clogged office toilets, and maybe a queer confession here and there too, but then the nastier stuff keeps slipping through the spaces these vectors triangulate. Perhaps that's why, by the time the last sentence lands, the reader has hopefully become accustomed to the uneasiness of oscillating between feeling humored and feeling a little bad about it. I guess that’s about close to how shame works for me on a personal level, anyway. It's almost never one thing. I usually find myself laughing at my own worst moments either during the act or in hindsight. The humiliating and the devastating can overlap at any moment in life, just like it does in this piece. Sometimes the thing I’m most willing to admit comes out awkwardly on the page while the thing I absolutely don’t want to discuss gets delivered in the plainest sentiment possible.

TPR: Confessional really resists explanation. There’s no clear resolution or framing. What do you hope lingers with the reader after they finish it?

Sarp: Maybe not much other than that uncomfortable, frustrating sensation of having to sit through another person talk and talk in front of you and probably say more than they should, and you are left with the burden of it all afterward. Incoherence is a natural side effect for this type of one-way interaction as all these seemingly irrelevant lines come at the reader at a ruthless pace and are often near impossible to parse. Still, I hope everyone finds a modicum of truth that they can relate to somewhere down the line, one way or another. It's full of human emotions in their rawest form. It's all about expulsion and juxtaposition. That’s also why, once you reach the last line, the earlier admissions start to appear in a different light. That dreaded not-knowing whether all you've "heard" was true or whether you've given the appropriate reactions to any of it. Maybe I've been planting all these fragmentary truths to avoid the actual source of that guilt. Maybe they are mere decoys, in that sense. I don’t necessarily know the answer myself, and as a writer, I'm not interested in providing any resolutions. One funny thing to mention, however, would be that I wrote this piece right after I'd parted ways with my therapist of five years, so maybe it offered some sense of closure for me after all.

TPR: Do you typically start with a form—like a list, fragments, notes—or does the structure emerge from the material?

Sarp: Usually the latter, unless I'm fixated on a particular narrative form and try to tailor a structure around it. With Confessional, the list was there almost immediately because the statements had already assumed a shape of their own. There was no other way around it. Likewise, the form in Cleaning Out My Notes App (forthcoming in The Palisades Review)was obviously built into the source material itself. It's literally made of notes I've taken over a long period of time, things I've stumbled upon, quotes, stray sentences, observations, things I apparently found profound in certain moments. But finding the narrative device isn’t the same as having a finished piece of literature, however you choose to define it. The actual work starts when you tinker with the curation, when you try and decide which notes to string together and how.

TPR: How do you know when a line is “doing enough” to earn its place in a piece?

Sarp: Good question. I don't believe there's any steadfast rule around this and each case should be judged on its own merit. In both pieces, what was important is that each line should first and foremost work within a whole rather than on an individual level. A line like “Arms are really good to have” is stupid on one hand, but it also becomes oddly sad, or even ominous, depending on the other lines that surround it. In a way, each line must open another little trapdoor beneath itself. It often needs to create some kind of second current. My design education might have also contributed to figuring out all these vectors that help in striking a balance. Writing a shortform piece isn't necessarily so different from designing, say, a poster in certain ways. If you disassemble a poster, all you end up with is a nondescript pile of shapes but each element starts to make sense once placed in a composition. Yet conversely, if the same composition works without a particular element just fine, then that thing probably doesn’t even belong there in the first place.

TPR: There’s a real sense of compression in your work, very little wasted space. What does your editing process look like?

Sarp: With pieces like these two, most of the editing involves selection and arrangement rather than shrinking giant lines or paragraphs into smaller ones. I accumulate far more notes than I use in my daily life, and I sometimes feel more like a collector than a writer in that sense. I usually start by typing everything going through my mind without much thought, then start removing anything that blocks the way. In most cases, there's a lot of deadweight that needs sloughing off, some surplus material that clutters the impact and flow of sentences. I'm one of those writers who can't write as they speak as I say a lot of unnecessary things in speech, things I often regret later on. So I find something soothing in collecting my thoughts in this very controlled environment. It's also redemptive in the sense that I get to do the very thing on paper (editing) that I can't in real life. And it's a big comfort, I'm not going to lie.

Sequencing, to me, is usually the more maddening part. Moving one sentence can dramatically change the meaning and impact of five others, and it's a very sensitive balance to maintain. You can’t arrange anything too neatly, or at least in a way that the reader sees your fingerprints. This is also a part of my design education where we've been repeatedly told, if not indoctrinated, that the best design is often the quietest one. So I spend an unreasonable amount of time moving tiny language fragments up and down a document, which probably looks absolutely like nothing to anyone observing from outside.

TPR: Are there writers or artists who have influenced your approach to brevity or fragmentation? Do you draw more from literature, or from other forms like film, artwork, and/or conversation?

Sarp: As a film buff, short films are a huge inspiration. Regardless of the medium, it's important to observe how others deal with compression and condensation. You have to be very economical in what you choose to portray, and more importantly how you portray it within the given constraints. It’s perhaps fair to claim short-form is mostly about negative space, about what's left outside rather than put in. Film format helps mainly because it deals with juxtaposition in ways that literature often can’t. The entire showing-telling polarity is reversely wired. “Cinematic” doesn’t always make sense in the domain of literature but it’s still important to observe why that's the case. (And how it uses imagery to convey meaning.) My lines aren’t always logically connected, exactly, but some emotional current still passes between them. Conversation does that constantly, too. People move from a stupid joke to the worst event of their life without providing a discernible transition. That feels much more truthful to me than the kind of prose in which every emotional development has been professionally worked and reworked.

TPR: Do you think about how a reader will connect the dots between fragments, or do you prefer to leave that open?

Sarp: Certainly the latter but this type of stuff almost never occurs to me in the process. I almost never consciously consider any of these things. There is a famous line by the Dutch artist Rudy VanderLans and I believe it can be applied to pretty much anything: "If you can't read something—never mind, it probably wasn't written for you." We all navigate language differently and eventually find what works for us best. A piece of literature, in my regard, is never stronger or weaker in relation to the breadth of its audience. I don’t need every reader to arrive at the same interpretation as mine in order to evaluate its nominal success. Of course, that's not to say that I don't wish the piece would find its right audience or that the reader can build something out of them, if not consciously then by osmosis. No writer would want the reader to feel completely detached from it and that the piece remains as this deeply introspective thing. If it's out there, it's probably meant for others to see. But who exactly those witnesses are is probably just a matter of chance.

TPR: The title, Cleaning Out My Notes App, suggests a kind of cleansing process. Did putting this piece together feel like an act of organizing, or letting go, or something else entirely?

Sarp: The title is a little dishonest because almost nothing was positively cleaned out. At least not in any practical sense of the word. A lot of the notes were preserved by being sprinkled into the piece, and I probably generated more notes while editing it. So, as a decluttering effort, it was a humiliating failure. My Notes app is still the same battlefield that contains the debris of all my now-dead intentions… stories I once planned to write, things I was meant to remember but couldn't, lines that once seemed urgent and now make absolutely no sense to me. Organizing them was a way of looking at those abandoned versions of myself and seeing what they still had in common today. So in a way, this piece does dispose of the notes in one sense, but it also ironically gives them a more permanent home. So perhaps it's less a cleansing than a relocation?

Cleaning Out My Notes App will be published in The Palisades Review on July 17th, 2026.

Sarp Sozdinler