Sara Henning is the author of the
poetry collections Burn (Southern Illinois University Press, 2024), a
2022 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Editor’s Selection; Terra Incognita
(Ohio University Press, 2022), winner of the 2021 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize;
and View from True North (Southern Illinois University Press, 2018),
winner of the 2017 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award and the
2019 High Plains Book Award. She is an assistant professor of creative writing
at Marshall University. Please visit her at https://www.sarahenningpoet.com.
1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent
work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I’d like to begin by chatting about View From True North, the
collection of poetry which co-won the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry’s Open
Competition Award (with the late Monica Berlin) in 2017. When I was sending that manuscript around to
contests, I was fresh out of graduate school, my mother had recently lost her
battle with cancer, and I was at a
crossroads in my life in every sense of that word: I was dating my future
husband long-distance; I was sometimes-succeeding, mostly-failing to manage my
late mother’s affairs from states away (I finally got her home sold in 2019); I
was lucky enough to be employed as a visiting assistant professor for the year
after failing to obtain a tenure-track job in my field, but I had no future
prospects. The truth was, I didn’t believe in myself as an artist or as a
person. Grief and the difficulties of the academic job market had obliterated
that for me. When I got the call from the late Jon Tribble that my book had
co-won such a prestigious award, I was baffled: I was out crane-watching in
Nebraska, had crappy cell reception, and I had pulled off at a Casey’s gas
station to talk. It was in that moment that my life as a poet and as a human
being changed. I felt acknowledged, celebrated even. I loved every minute of
working with Jon and later with Southern Illinois University Press. Once the
book was published, going on book tour was an exciting rebirth for someone who had
lost so much of herself when her mother died. My mother, a counselor who
largely worked with dual-diagnosis patients, used to tell me about the gift of
the struggle. It was a metaphor she used with her clients to talk about
survival. She said that a caterpillar had to fight its way out of its chrysalis
to gain the strength to use its wings. In the most emotionally honest way
possible, View From True North helped me find my wings. I have been
lucky to have had some literary success since 2018, when that book came out. I
won the 2021 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize and my collection of poems, Terra
Incognita, was published by Ohio University Press in 2022. My newest
collection of poems, Burn, is forthcoming from Southern Illinois
University Press later this month as a Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Editor’s
Selection. I’m still doing what I advise my students to do—to write with an
open mind and an open heart, to use emotional honesty as a writing tool. I am
still writing about my journey as a human being, both elegizing and eulogizing
my experiences. I am still celebrating and finding joy in small, tender
moments. I am still taking risks in both form and function; however, my
experiential knowledge of working with two thriving university presses and a
wonderful publicist, Kelly Forsythe, transformed what I believed was possible
both in my writing and in my publication journeys. My role, as I see it, is to continue to publish and to help guide a new
generation of poets in my role as the tenure-track poet at Marshall University
in Huntington, WV. I am joyful every moment I get the pleasure of helping them bring
their own artistic goals to fruition.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or
non-fiction?
Honestly? When was an undergraduate, I was a pre-med major studying
genetics. I thought it would be fun to take an introductory creative writing
class in-between my science pre-requisites. At first, I fell in love with
fiction, and I wanted to take another fiction class that fall. Unfortunately,
all of them were full! However, a poetry class had spots still open with the
professor who would become my first mentor, Brian Henry, who now teaches at the
University of Richmond. His seminar became my favorite class, and during that
time, I fell in love with poetry. Though I came to poetry second, it became my
enduring love.
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does
your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts
appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of
copious notes?
This is a tough question! I’m a planner, which means I spend the bulk of
my time researching my way into a new project’s architectural framework, then
considering how individual poems could work to negotiate the project’s
craft-based strategies. Then I proceed to write those poems, slowly at first,
and generally around the crests and troughs of an academic semester. Summers
are glorious. I think it is important to say this: I give myself time to
process the emptiness of completing a manuscript. It may sound ironic, because
publishing a book is joyous, yes? Yes, it is! However, when a collection of
poems goes to press, it stops being mine and enters the canon of contemporary
poetry—and that’s a bittersweet combination of both celebration and loss. I
become filled with questions: What is the next project? Will I be able to write
it? Can I approach it with an open mind and an open heart, writing from a place
of emotional honesty? What do I need to do and how do I need to prepare myself
to say what I need to say? That last question made me laugh (at myself): if
only one could see my notebooks. Copious would be one way to describe my
note-taking process, well, and messy (I am left-handed in every stereotypical
way possible)! First drafts look nothing like their final shape, usually, and I
find the real work of writing exists in how I revise my way toward what the
poem is trying to do and say, not necessarily what I want it to do and say. I
am frankly jealous of other writers whom I talk to who write a poem when called
to do so, poets who wait until enough poems are written in this way, and then
look for how the poems talk to each other. There is something truly organic and
beautiful about going about writing in this way, but to put myself in that
position? Just thinking about it gives me hives. Maybe the next lesson I need
to learn is to take a deep breath, let go, and let the words take over.
4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short
pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a
"book" from the very beginning?
Oh, I’m that poet working on a “book” from the very beginning. I don’t
know how else to work, and I say that to let it be known I wish I had facility
to work in other ways. I certainly do not think my method is the good or the
right way, it is just my way for now. This is how I teach my students: find your
writing schedule, find your way into a poem, find the conversation you
are joining, find your perfect writing schedule and space. I refuse to
chastise myself (or my students!) with destructive, misogynistic, classist, and
ableist myths—if you don’t get up at 5 am every day to write, then you are not
a writer, etc. etc. However, poems usually emerge for me out of abundant
amounts of research, and then I find myself lost in regard to how to wade
through it. My saving grace? I often turn to prompts written by people smarter
than I am. I am a huge fan of Kim Addonizio’s Ordinary Genius; Maria
Mazziotti Gillan’s Writing Poetry to Save Your Life, and Nickole Brown
and Jessica Jacobs’ Write It!: 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire. There are
other prompts and books I have not listed here, enough to fill a whole lifetime
of drafting. I look forward to discovering (and sharing) as many as I can!
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are
you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Oh, I love doing readings. I love doing them because they allow me to
connect with other writers. I have a confession—I’m an extrovert—which I know
can be a bit of a rarity among writers and those interested in reading/writing
studies. But because I am a poet who believes so much in community, I believe
in contributing to that community any way I can: holding workshops at public
libraries and community organizations dedicated to serving literary interests,
giving readings at local bookstores to support them, giving readings at
universities to show students that they too can be on stage, sharing the work
which defines them as writers and artists. Loving doing readings doesn’t mean
that I don’t find them nerve-wracking at times! LOL. I guess there is a part of
me that is always scared I’ll be the girl who invites everyone to her birthday
party and no one shows up. But you know what? That’s never happened. When we
pledge to show up for each other, to support one another and to promote each
other’s work, we are practicing community. I’ll never stop showing up for
others, no matter how many people are (or are not) in any given audience of
mine. However, I must say that writing and performing are two different
processes with very different goals, and I think it is wise to differentiate
the type of rhetorical function (and the sort of emotional energy) each one of
them requires. One needs to prepare for spending hours alone at the desk or
spending hours on the road or among an audience of eager listeners. And like anything else, practice makes one
better at doing the things that are both inside and outside of our comfort
zones.
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds
of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think
the current questions are?
I do. My last three books—View From True North, Terra Incognita,
and now Burn—are all elegies, but not in the way that one might think. View
From True North, written in the wake of my grandfather’s death, explores
sexual erasure, the emotional damage of living a double life, and how overlapping
traumas have the capacity to lock a family system into a toxic dance. I grew up
a second-generation child of an alcoholic. I was born into a family in which
people loved each other deeply, but were afraid to embrace the truths of their
own lives. The members of my family—my aunts, uncles, grandparents, mother—were
deeply unhappy in their own ways, but no one was ready (willing? able?) to
break the cycle but me. I guess I could say that View From True North
was how I learned to find myself apart from my family, how I learned to honor
and to love both myself and those who made me. Terra Incognita is a very
intentional elegy for my mother, who lost her battle to colon cancer in 2016.
As the only child of a single mother, her death shook me in ways I never
thought possible. And while I wanted this collection to explore the very real
effects of how grief and love connect us to each other, I wanted even more to
explore the other side of grief. I wanted to explore how after grief, there can
be moments of deep joy. Perhaps after deep grief, joy becomes a bit sweeter.
How does one know the ecstasy of light without tasting darkness, after all? In
my current collection, Burn, I am interested in how time functions as the
compass we use to navigate life’s beautiful and often difficult moments. In it,
I am really exploring the moments which make us. If, according to scientists,
time has no actual meaning, if time is something that humans have adapted to
create order and continuity in their lives, I wanted to interrogate time and
what it taught me in the wake of my mother’s death. If Delmore Schwartz is
correct that time is the fire in which we burn, if we are forever burning in
time’s fire, the fire of our own creation, I wanted to question the different
connotations time could take on: pain and pleasure, agony and ecstasy. A story:
when my mother died, time stopped making sense. I would think a day passed by
and it had been three weeks. I would be washing dishes for thirty minutes and
it felt like hours. When my mother died, I lost my compass, my frame of
reference, and it made me question time as a metric to capture and to
understand human experience. I read a lot of philosophy and physics books at
that time, but it was a poem by Delmore Schwartz—“Calmly We Walk through This April’s Day”—which finally put things into perspective for me. We may burn in
time’s fire, but I am convinced we get to, in some part, decide how. Do we
combust? Do we burn with love and desire? Do we light the path for others? Do
we, like a phoenix, rise up through flame? Poet Nicole Cooley said of my book
that in it, fire causes damage but reveals a new language. I agree with her. As
we move through the world, time becomes a new language, a new perspective, the
way in which we evolve, adapt, fall apart, and learn to love again. Time is the
metric for resilience.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger
culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should
be?
Other poets far wiser than I have answered this question in ways far
better than I can. I’ll quote two strong, female poets whom I love and continue
to learn from every day.
Sharon Olds: “I am doing something I learned early to do, I
am / paying attention to small beauties, / whatever I have—as if it were our duty / to find things to love, to bind ourselves to this
world.”
Patricia
Smith, one of the best poets who will ever live: “Poetry doesn't cure grief—but it understands.”
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult
or essential (or both)?
I find that having an outside editor forces me to get out of my own head,
which is often quite rewarding. Writing poetry can give you myopia, and I don’t
just mean the type you have to go to the eye doctor for. As poets, it is very
easy to spend too much time in our own heads and when we do, our work can
become personally-coded in ways which are difficult for an outside reader to
translate into the language of their own lives. This is why I find it essential
to not only work with an editor when it is time for a book to go to press, but
also to find a writing community with whom to share my work. The best writing
communities are generous and emotionally honest: you may experience praise, but
the best moments are those tough love moments which come out of deep care, those
interventions which help you to interrogate your writing goals and ask yourself
“what am I really trying to say?”
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given
to you directly)?
“Just do it scared.” This piece of advice changed my life. If I don’t do
whatever “it” is (submitting to a top-tier journal, giving a reading at a
prestigious university, talking to a famous poet, submitting a book manuscript
to the press of my dreams), then I don’t give anyone outside of myself the
chance to say yes. Through the action of not doing, I am telling myself no. But
if I do “it” scared, whatever “it” is, I’m confronting the power my own fear
has over me. That is a kind of lesson, a kind of winning, in and of itself. While
doing it scared does not ensure success, like everything else, it abides by the
law of numbers: the more you risk putting yourself and your writing out there,
the more yeses you will receive. It is simple math.
10 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for
lack of a better word) inspiration?
When my writing gets stalled, I read. And honestly, I will always choose
reading over writing. That was the way I was taught to write (read everything
you can get your hands on, then write), and that’s the way I write to this day.
Why? Because books are the best way to open your mind, open your heart, get you
thinking, let you know what the possibilities are, let you know where you might
frame the next possibility. Reading is the best way to get you to question your
thinking, your unintentional bias, and your limitations. Reading makes you have
conversations in your head with other writers and their experiences, and before
you know it, you are writing to continue that conversation, graft yourself to
the communities of writers you care about. It is a well-known scientific fact
that books excite our mirror neurons, which affect the way we think and exist
in the world around us. Hands down, books are my best tonic for writer’s block,
writing fatigue, and they often refill “my empty bucket,” which I think is just
a code word for my soul.
11 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Honeysuckles in June. Magnolia blossoms stunning the air with their sweet
fire.
12 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are
there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science
or visual art?
As a species, we are intersectional. I dare anyone to tell me otherwise.
I attribute my ability to understand a poem’s rhythm and music to my mother
insisting I play piano for many years of my childhood (I loved to play it, but
she forced me to practice, and every time she’d set a metronome on the piano to
tick-tick-tick at me. I still dream about throwing that darn thing across the
room). If I didn’t become a virologist or a poet, I would have become an art
historian. I could live in an art museum, sleeping on those little fussy
couches and sneaking granola bars out of my pockets. I attribute my interest in
metaphor to spending most of my days outside as a Montessori school student,
watching bugs and eating the meat of a pecan right out of its owl-shaped shell.
Rhetorician I.A. Richards once called metaphor a “transaction between
contexts.” It is impossible to understand things without understanding them in
relationship to other things. I attribute my ability to navigate a poem to my
facility of navigating science lab when I was still pre-med. I am often testing
a poem using the tenets of the scientific method: what do I think I am trying
to say? What am I saying? With time, I learned I can change the chemistry of
words to change a poem in fundamental ways which may cohere with or break the
laws of science. How cool is that?
13 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or
simply your life outside of your work?
This question is too difficult for me to answer with any methodical
grace. Therefore, I am going to just mention a few books which have changed my
life: Carlo Rovelli’s Seven Brief Lessons on Physics. Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score. David
Kessler’s Finding Meaning: the Sixth Stage of Grief. Cheryl Strayed’s Wild.
Meghan O’Rourke’s The Long Goodbye. Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History
of Time. Mark Doty’s Heaven’s Coast. Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Toni
Morrison’s Beloved. Willa Cather’s My Antonia. Everything written
by the following poets: Patricia Smith, Jericho Brown, Terrance Hayes, Lee Ann Roripaugh, Mary Oliver, Joy Harjo, Sylvia Plath, Anne Carson, Lucille Clifton,
Natalie Diaz, Federico García Lorca, John Keats, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Rumi.
14 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be?
Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not
been a writer?
I would have been a medical doctor, a nurse practitioner, or a high
school English teacher.
15 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Recently, poet Nickole Brown visited Marshall University as part of our
visiting writers series. During a class visit, she said (I am paraphrasing
here) that one of the beauties of poetry is that it doesn’t have to answer
questions. I take that to mean that poetry doesn’t have to have the answers
which mesmerize human existence. I take that to mean that poetry has the
capacity to contain the multitudes of human experience without diagnosing them
(like a scientist does), creating a narrative out of them (history), or
fetishizing them (philosophy). I think that’s why I am hooked.
16 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Carter Sickels’ The Prettiest Star was the last great book I read.
It was a re-reading, but I stayed up all night to read it again like I did the
first time: all in one sitting.
17 - What are you currently working on?
I am working on an ekphrastic collection of poems which addresses
Vincent van Gogh's life and art produced during his time at the Saint-Paul
Asylum in Saint-Rémy, then in Auvers, where he died from complications related
to a suicide attempt. During this time, he produced many of his most famous
paintings, including The Olive Trees
(1889), Irises (1889),
and The Starry Night (1889). While exploring van Gogh’s work, I am also exploring the myth of artistic
madness, a myth which has damaging repercussions for contemporary artists, and
my own family’s relationship with mental illness, specifically bipolar
disorder.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
