[citation needed] Sonik was educated at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, and at the University of British Columbia, where she earned a doctorate for a thesis that explored the application of Jungian principles to the creative writing process.

Her novel Arms was described by The Globe and Mail as a "verbal heartache, a bravura performance of language and perverse imagination".

Sonik was among 10 authors longlisted for the 2012 BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction.

The nomination was for Afflictions & Departures, which illustrates an experimental nonfiction genre Sonik has termed a "fracture".

"A fracture is a series of short, linked memoir pieces that uses techniques of hard-boiled journalism and literary fiction, and self-consciously disrupts or fractures conceptions of linear time.