Sara Henning is the author of thepoetry collections Burn (Southern Illinois University Press, 2024), a2022 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 the2019 High Plains Book Award. She is an assistant professor of creative writingat Marshall University. Please visit her at https://www.sarahenningpoet.com.
1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recentwork compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I’d like to begin by chatting about View From True North, thecollection of poetry which co-won the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry’s OpenCompetition Award (with the late Monica Berlin) in 2017. When I was sending that manuscript around tocontests, I was fresh out of graduate school, my mother had recently lost herbattle with cancer, and I was at acrossroads in my life in every sense of that word: I was dating my futurehusband long-distance; I was sometimes-succeeding, mostly-failing to manage mylate mother’s affairs from states away (I finally got her home sold in 2019); Iwas lucky enough to be employed as a visiting assistant professor for the yearafter failing to obtain a tenure-track job in my field, but I had no futureprospects. The truth was, I didn’t believe in myself as an artist or as aperson. Grief and the difficulties of the academic job market had obliteratedthat for me. When I got the call from the late Jon Tribble that my book hadco-won such a prestigious award, I was baffled: I was out crane-watching inNebraska, had crappy cell reception, and I had pulled off at a Casey’s gasstation to talk. It was in that moment that my life as a poet and as a humanbeing changed. I felt acknowledged, celebrated even. I loved every minute ofworking with Jon and later with Southern Illinois University Press. Once thebook was published, going on book tour was an exciting rebirth for someone who hadlost so much of herself when her mother died. My mother, a counselor wholargely worked with dual-diagnosis patients, used to tell me about the gift ofthe struggle. It was a metaphor she used with her clients to talk aboutsurvival. She said that a caterpillar had to fight its way out of its chrysalisto gain the strength to use its wings. In the most emotionally honest waypossible, View From True North helped me find my wings. I have beenlucky to have had some literary success since 2018, when that book came out. Iwon the 2021 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize and my collection of poems, TerraIncognita, was published by Ohio University Press in 2022. My newestcollection of poems, Burn, is forthcoming from Southern IllinoisUniversity Press later this month as a Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Editor’sSelection. I’m still doing what I advise my students to do—to write with anopen mind and an open heart, to use emotional honesty as a writing tool. I amstill writing about my journey as a human being, both elegizing and eulogizingmy experiences. I am still celebrating and finding joy in small, tendermoments. I am still taking risks in both form and function; however, myexperiential knowledge of working with two thriving university presses and awonderful publicist, Kelly Forsythe, transformed what I believed was possibleboth in my writing and in my publication journeys. My role, as I see it, is to continue to publish and to help guide a newgeneration of poets in my role as the tenure-track poet at Marshall Universityin Huntington, WV. I am joyful every moment I get the pleasure of helping them bringtheir own artistic goals to fruition.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction ornon-fiction?
Honestly? When was an undergraduate, I was a pre-med major studyinggenetics. I thought it would be fun to take an introductory creative writingclass in-between my science pre-requisites. At first, I fell in love withfiction, 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 theprofessor who would become my first mentor, Brian Henry, who now teaches at theUniversity of Richmond. His seminar became my favorite class, and during thattime, I fell in love with poetry. Though I came to poetry second, it became myenduring love.
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Doesyour writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first draftsappear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out ofcopious notes?
This is a tough question! I’m a planner, which means I spend the bulk ofmy time researching my way into a new project’s architectural framework, thenconsidering how individual poems could work to negotiate the project’scraft-based strategies. Then I proceed to write those poems, slowly at first,and generally around the crests and troughs of an academic semester. Summersare glorious. I think it is important to say this: I give myself time toprocess the emptiness of completing a manuscript. It may sound ironic, becausepublishing a book is joyous, yes? Yes, it is! However, when a collection ofpoems goes to press, it stops being mine and enters the canon of contemporarypoetry—and that’s a bittersweet combination of both celebration and loss. Ibecome filled with questions: What is the next project? Will I be able to writeit? Can I approach it with an open mind and an open heart, writing from a placeof emotional honesty? What do I need to do and how do I need to prepare myselfto say what I need to say? That last question made me laugh (at myself): ifonly one could see my notebooks. Copious would be one way to describe mynote-taking process, well, and messy (I am left-handed in every stereotypicalway possible)! First drafts look nothing like their final shape, usually, and Ifind the real work of writing exists in how I revise my way toward what thepoem is trying to do and say, not necessarily what I want it to do and say. Iam frankly jealous of other writers whom I talk to who write a poem when calledto do so, poets who wait until enough poems are written in this way, and thenlook for how the poems talk to each other. There is something truly organic andbeautiful about going about writing in this way, but to put myself in thatposition? Just thinking about it gives me hives. Maybe the next lesson I needto 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 shortpieces 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’tknow how else to work, and I say that to let it be known I wish I had facilityto work in other ways. I certainly do not think my method is the good or theright way, it is just my way for now. This is how I teach my students: find yourwriting schedule, find your way into a poem, find the conversation youare joining, find your perfect writing schedule and space. I refuse tochastise myself (or my students!) with destructive, misogynistic, classist, andableist myths—if you don’t get up at 5 am every day to write, then you are nota writer, etc. etc. However, poems usually emerge for me out of abundantamounts of research, and then I find myself lost in regard to how to wadethrough it. My saving grace? I often turn to prompts written by people smarterthan I am. I am a huge fan of Kim Addonizio’s Ordinary Genius; MariaMazziotti Gillan’s Writing Poetry to Save Your Life, and Nickole Brownand Jessica Jacobs’ Write It!: 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire. There areother prompts and books I have not listed here, enough to fill a whole lifetimeof 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? Areyou the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Oh, I love doing readings. I love doing them because they allow me toconnect with other writers. I have a confession—I’m an extrovert—which I knowcan be a bit of a rarity among writers and those interested in reading/writingstudies. But because I am a poet who believes so much in community, I believein contributing to that community any way I can: holding workshops at publiclibraries and community organizations dedicated to serving literary interests,giving readings at local bookstores to support them, giving readings atuniversities to show students that they too can be on stage, sharing the workwhich defines them as writers and artists. Loving doing readings doesn’t meanthat I don’t find them nerve-wracking at times! LOL. I guess there is a part ofme that is always scared I’ll be the girl who invites everyone to her birthdayparty and no one shows up. But you know what? That’s never happened. When wepledge to show up for each other, to support one another and to promote eachother’s work, we are practicing community. I’ll never stop showing up forothers, no matter how many people are (or are not) in any given audience ofmine. However, I must say that writing and performing are two differentprocesses with very different goals, and I think it is wise to differentiatethe type of rhetorical function (and the sort of emotional energy) each one ofthem requires. One needs to prepare for spending hours alone at the desk orspending hours on the road or among an audience of eager listeners. And like anything else, practice makes onebetter at doing the things that are both inside and outside of our comfortzones.
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kindsof questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even thinkthe 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. ViewFrom True North, written in the wake of my grandfather’s death, exploressexual erasure, the emotional damage of living a double life, and how overlappingtraumas have the capacity to lock a family system into a toxic dance. I grew upa second-generation child of an alcoholic. I was born into a family in whichpeople loved each other deeply, but were afraid to embrace the truths of theirown lives. The members of my family—my aunts, uncles, grandparents, mother—weredeeply unhappy in their own ways, but no one was ready (willing? able?) tobreak the cycle but me. I guess I could say that View From True Northwas how I learned to find myself apart from my family, how I learned to honorand to love both myself and those who made me. Terra Incognita is a veryintentional 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 neverthought possible. And while I wanted this collection to explore the very realeffects of how grief and love connect us to each other, I wanted even more toexplore the other side of grief. I wanted to explore how after grief, there canbe 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? Inmy current collection, Burn, I am interested in how time functions as thecompass 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 tocreate order and continuity in their lives, I wanted to interrogate time andwhat it taught me in the wake of my mother’s death. If Delmore Schwartz iscorrect that time is the fire in which we burn, if we are forever burning intime’s fire, the fire of our own creation, I wanted to question the differentconnotations 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 byand it had been three weeks. I would be washing dishes for thirty minutes andit felt like hours. When my mother died, I lost my compass, my frame ofreference, and it made me question time as a metric to capture and tounderstand human experience. I read a lot of philosophy and physics books atthat 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 intime’s fire, but I am convinced we get to, in some part, decide how. Do wecombust? Do we burn with love and desire? Do we light the path for others? Dowe, like a phoenix, rise up through flame? Poet Nicole Cooley said of my bookthat in it, fire causes damage but reveals a new language. I agree with her. Aswe move through the world, time becomes a new language, a new perspective, theway in which we evolve, adapt, fall apart, and learn to love again. Time is themetric for resilience.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in largerculture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer shouldbe?
Other poets far wiser than I have answered this question in ways farbetter than I can. I’ll quote two strong, female poets whom I love and continueto learn from every day.
Sharon Olds: “I am doing something I learned early to do, Iam / paying attention to small beauties, / whatever I have—as if it were our duty / to find things to love, to bind ourselves to thisworld.”
PatriciaSmith, 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 difficultor 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’tjust mean the type you have to go to the eye doctor for. As poets, it is veryeasy to spend too much time in our own heads and when we do, our work canbecome personally-coded in ways which are difficult for an outside reader totranslate into the language of their own lives. This is why I find it essentialto not only work with an editor when it is time for a book to go to press, butalso to find a writing community with whom to share my work. The best writingcommunities are generous and emotionally honest: you may experience praise, butthe best moments are those tough love moments which come out of deep care, thoseinterventions 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 givento you directly)?
“Just do it scared.” This piece of advice changed my life. If I don’t dowhatever “it” is (submitting to a top-tier journal, giving a reading at aprestigious university, talking to a famous poet, submitting a book manuscriptto the press of my dreams), then I don’t give anyone outside of myself thechance to say yes. Through the action of not doing, I am telling myself no. Butif I do “it” scared, whatever “it” is, I’m confronting the power my own fearhas over me. That is a kind of lesson, a kind of winning, in and of itself. Whiledoing it scared does not ensure success, like everything else, it abides by thelaw 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 (forlack of a better word) inspiration?
When my writing gets stalled, I read. And honestly, I will always choosereading over writing. That was the way I was taught to write (read everythingyou 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 youthinking, let you know what the possibilities are, let you know where you mightframe the next possibility. Reading is the best way to get you to question yourthinking, your unintentional bias, and your limitations. Reading makes you haveconversations in your head with other writers and their experiences, and beforeyou know it, you are writing to continue that conversation, graft yourself tothe communities of writers you care about. It is a well-known scientific factthat books excite our mirror neurons, which affect the way we think and existin 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 justa code word for my soul.
11 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Honeysuckles in June. Magnolia blossoms stunning the air with their sweetfire.
12 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but arethere any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, scienceor 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 motherinsisting I play piano for many years of my childhood (I loved to play it, butshe forced me to practice, and every time she’d set a metronome on the piano totick-tick-tick at me. I still dream about throwing that darn thing across theroom). If I didn’t become a virologist or a poet, I would have become an arthistorian. I could live in an art museum, sleeping on those little fussycouches and sneaking granola bars out of my pockets. I attribute my interest inmetaphor 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 betweencontexts.” It is impossible to understand things without understanding them inrelationship to other things. I attribute my ability to navigate a poem to myfacility of navigating science lab when I was still pre-med. I am often testinga poem using the tenets of the scientific method: what do I think I am tryingto say? What am I saying? With time, I learned I can change the chemistry ofwords to change a poem in fundamental ways which may cohere with or break thelaws of science. How cool is that?
13 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, orsimply your life outside of your work?
This question is too difficult for me to answer with any methodicalgrace. Therefore, I am going to just mention a few books which have changed mylife: Carlo Rovelli’s Seven Brief Lessons on Physics. Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score. DavidKessler’s Finding Meaning: the Sixth Stage of Grief. Cheryl Strayed’s Wild.Meghan O’Rourke’s The Long Goodbye. Stephen Hawking’s A Brief Historyof Time. Mark Doty’s Heaven’s Coast. Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. ToniMorrison’s Beloved. Willa Cather’s My Antonia. Everything writtenby 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 notbeen a writer?
I would have been a medical doctor, a nurse practitioner, or a highschool English teacher.
15 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Recently, poet Nickole Brown visited Marshall University as part of ourvisiting writers series. During a class visit, she said (I am paraphrasinghere) that one of the beauties of poetry is that it doesn’t have to answerquestions. I take that to mean that poetry doesn’t have to have the answerswhich mesmerize human existence. I take that to mean that poetry has thecapacity to contain the multitudes of human experience without diagnosing them(like a scientist does), creating a narrative out of them (history), orfetishizing 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 thefirst time: all in one sitting.
17- What are you currently working on?
I am working on an ekphrastic collection of poems which addressesVincent van Gogh's life and art produced during his time at the Saint-PaulAsylum in Saint-Rémy, then in Auvers, where he died from complications relatedto a suicide attempt. During this time, he produced many of his most famouspaintings, including The Olive Trees(1889), Irises (1889),andThe Starry Night (1889). While exploring van Gogh’s work, I am also exploring the myth of artisticmadness, a myth which has damaging repercussions for contemporary artists, andmy own family’s relationship with mental illness, specifically bipolardisorder.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
