New England Review

Behind the Byline

Sarah Fawn Montgomery

NER Nonfiction Editor J. M. Tyree talks with Sarah Fawn Montgomery about mirroring form and content, the dialectic of hope and despair in her essay “Doomscroll” (NER 43.2), and her forthcoming lyric essay collection, Halfway from Home.

J. M. Tyree: Your essay starts with an account of your student’s overdose and your sister’s addiction. But it expands from there to encompass so much of what I’ve felt and thought during the past few years about . . . well . . . everything. This is a historical moment in which it seems like everything that could go wrong has gone wrong. We have seen the proverbial hundred-year flood every year. Or every week! How would you summarize the essay and how did the creative process work in threading between the personal and the collective?

Sarah Fawn Montgomery: “Doomscroll” is a collage about our collective sense of drowning in disaster and the overwhelming grief that comes from feeling unable to do anything on a personal level to counter social, political, and environmental upheaval. As you mention, the essay braids many threads together, connected by images of flood, blood, and the shifting of seasons. I begin with my student’s overdose and my sister’s addiction to explore the hopelessness many young people feel about trying to build a future when the end of the world seems certain. I juxtapose this with my aging grandparents and my parents’ financial struggles, as well as with the uncertainty I face in deciding whether or not to bring children into a broken world. I also explore how gender impacts our response to disaster, women expected to perform much of the invisible labor during the pandemic and climate crisis. And finally, the essay explores the collective grief we feel over climate change as we witness mass extinction, storms, and fires, all furthering a growing disconnection between human and natural life.

Perhaps the most universal aspect of contemporary life is the feeling of being isolated, so it was important that the form mirror this. As a result, the essay is comprised of seemingly disparate sections—some personal, some collective—surrounded by blank space, that thread together through a repeating image, line, or emotion, and build meaning through the process of accumulation. I wrote this during the early days of the pandemic, so the form replicates the disjointed way the world received news during this time, as well as my own fragmented thought process. For me, essays work best when form and structure mirror the experience the writer is trying to convey, so I wanted this essay to have the same sense of collective chaos, of overwhelming grief as each section layers on top of the next to reveal emotional and environmental collapse. I’m especially interested in mosaics and weaving as a means of contemporary storytelling because they capture the collective voice so well.

JMT: How does this essay connect with the rest of your forthcoming collection?

SFM: Halfway from Home is a lyric essay collection about nostalgia, longing, and searching for home during emotional and environmental collapse. Throughout my life, I’ve always felt a sense of restlessness, and I’ve chased it across the country, claiming various homes on the West Coast, in the Midwest, and now on the East Coast. This book is about movement, but also about the challenges of moving forward when you long for the past, especially when your family, your country, and the natural world are under attack. Turning to nostalgia as a way to grieve a rapidly-changing world, this collection blends lyric memoir with lamenting cultural critique, searching for how to build a home when human connection is disappearing, and how we can live meaningfully when our sense of self is uncertain in a fractured world.

Similar to “Doomscroll,” many of the essays, as well as the overall collection, incorporate a layered structure to weave various times, locations, and perspectives, collaging the personal with the collective. Many of the essays also explore climate change, collective grief, and family upheaval, examining how the various places I’ve called home have been impacted in recent years, becoming increasingly unrecognizable landscapes and unstable places to live. I’m particularly interested in human concepts of and reactions to time—we fail to learn from history, we turn to nostalgia for comfort, we share uncertainty about our future—so playing with chronology is also an important part of the collection.

JMT: Your essay is both poetic and devastating. It goes into places that are raw, with brilliant and unflinching honesty, from your sister’s nearly-fatal struggles with drugs to the contemplation of collapsing ecosystems. But would I be wrong to think about this project also as a document of endurance in which the prose itself carries some of the vitality and even the hope implied by making poetic connections? There’s this false idea out there that writing must be nice or cozy in order to convey hope . . . Would you be interested in sharing any thoughts about this whole problem of resisting despair, either as a writer or a teacher, or both?

SFM: Much of the despair of contemporary living comes from being silenced. What is unspoken, ignored, or erased is a painful burden to carry, and it is maddening when even truth is under attack. Conventional means of storytelling like history, the news, and science are failing us, and our collective trauma compounds when truth about the environment, the nation, and the future are actively suppressed. Sharing our stories—especially those of despair—is a means of survival. There is power in vulnerability and hope in finding alternative ways of storytelling like poetry, art, and protest.

This essay and book are a way to speak the stories contemporary America would silence. Stories about collective grief, environmental injustice, and what it means to carry on in a culture convinced of its own destruction are essential to tell when the world seems broken. While we may doomscroll eager to find a distraction, the emphasis on resisting despair actually prevents us from the real work of finding solutions that allow us to endure the hardships that are happening and the challenges still yet to come.

JMT: I love the interplay between the subject matter and the rhythm of the sentences. It’s daring in an intellectual sense while allowing a reader to experience a subtle aesthetic distance that only increases the poignancy of the stories you are telling. I’m not sure I have said that exactly right but I’d love to hear your thoughts on style. Do you see your prose connected to poetry in specific ways?

SFM: Absolutely. Poetry is essential to my prose. Nonfiction derives value from its strict adherence to truth, but poetry creates emotional undercurrents and transports the reader into the author’s way of perceiving the world. Image, sound, syntax, rhythm, and pacing are all essential to how we comprehend our lives, and embracing these poetic devices allows nonfiction writers to move away from verifiable fact and towards emotional experience. This doesn’t mean that I’m not concerned with veracity—fact-checking and research play significantly into my work—but I’m more interested in disrupting the aesthetic expectations readers have for the genre in order to provide them an emotional experience that encourages them to reflect on their own experience, ideas, and values.

JMT: What do you think makes an essay work, on the most fundamental level, and what’s on your reading list right now?

SFM: What makes an essay work on the most fundamental level is using the personal in service of the political. We share our stories with others hoping to uncover larger truths about the human condition. Essays that fail to move beyond the writer’s ego simply don’t work. The best essays also dwell in uncertainty. Though nonfiction is a genre of truth, essays don’t exist in order to prove an experience or to justify a writer’s existence. We read essays to experience the mind of the writer and there is nothing more human than accepting the uncertainties of the world, the flaws of a narrator, the ambiguities that arise when we try to write about our truths. I’m less interested in essays that end happily or resolve entirely than I am in essays that explore complex experiences and ideas and provide examples for how I can continue that exploration on my own.

As for my reading list, The Invisible Kingdom, Meghan O’Rourke’s necessary nonfiction book about invisible illness, currently sits on my nightstand next to Crying in the Bathroom, Erika L. Sánchez’s latest essay collection. I recently finished You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty, Akwaeke Amezi’s gorgeous new novel, and Babe, Dorothy Chan’s latest poetry collection, which is a queer tour de force. And I’m eagerly counting down to the fall release of Alive at the End of the World, the new poetry collection by Saeed Jones, and Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency, the new poetry collection by Chen Chen.

JMT: Thank you, and congratulations on your new book! Where can readers find your book and learn more about your work?

SFM: Thank you! Halfway from Home—the collection of lyric essays where “Doomscroll” appears—is available from Split/Lip Press and other places books are sold. Excerpts from the book, along with more of my fiction, nonfiction, and poetry are linked on my website. And I tweet about writing, higher education, climate change, and other doomscroll topics at @SF_Montgomery.

J. M. Tyree edits nonfiction and dramatic writing for NER. He is the coauthor of three books, Our Secret Life in the Movies (with Michael McGriff, A Strange Object/Deep Vellum), BFI Film Classics: The Big Lebowski (with Ben Walters, British Film Institute/Bloomsbury), and Wonder, Horror, Mystery (with Morgan Meis, punctum books). He is also the author of three books, The Counterforce – Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice(Fiction Advocate), Vanishing Streets – Journeys in London (Stanford University Press), and BFI Film Classics: Salesman (BFI/Bloomsbury).

Behind the Byline

Carmen Giménez

Photo by Jason Gardner

Staff reader Nico Amador talks with poet and editor Carmen Giménez about anti-ekphrasis, the sublime, and her exciting new appointment at Graywolf Press.

Nico Amador: In the most recent issue of NER, you have two poems from a longer series entitled, “A Painting I Can’t Remember.” I interpret these poems as a kind of anti-ekphrasis, subverting the form by giving more rigorous attention to the self than the art that may have prompted each piece of writing. What can you share about the genesis of this series? As you worked on it, were there particular conventions that you found yourself engaging or resisting?

Carmen Giménez: Anti-ekphrasis is definitely how I think about it, though I don’t feel it’s an antagonistic relationship to it but rather an expansion or reframing of what it means to experience a work of art. The first poem I wrote began organically from a text conversation about a painting I couldn’t remember with a friend of mine who’s an art historian. I described details of the painting, but I mostly could remember how I felt and where my body was, how my body felt. I remembered the effect the painting had on my consciousness, maybe edges and faces. After that, I mined the archives of paintings or bits of paintings that stayed with me and attempted to conjure circumstances and autobiography. The series has evolved a little more generally to consider what it means to love visual art and to have a life informed by it. I was lucky that my mother took us to museums normalizing access and relation to a world that sometimes feels forbidding or belonging to someone else. I have also written poems that consider what it is to be an admirer and think about the painter as author/creator.

Sometimes ekphrastic poetry is like a transcript of seeing, so that’s always been an active point of resistance. I’ve done a bit of retrospective visiting to museums, but then only captured small sections of paintings that most captured me. Like you see a face that you love, but it’s not just the whole face you love but rather different elements so that the eyes bewitch and the mouth makes you feel at home, so it’s a resistance to that descriptive: there’s a dog in the corner with a carrot in its mouth which represents my desire, etc.

A challenge I haven’t quite wrapped my mind around is the ubiquity of European and American white male artists that inhabit my archive, a consequence that the Guerilla Girls critique at length, and I’m addressing that in a poem about them and about Ana Mendieta. I’m also inviting new experiences of art in different, less conventional spaces, to change that. 

NA: “A Painting I Can’t Remember 11” is animated by a wide range of references that seem to carry equal relevancy in the imagination of the poet. What are your personal habits as a consumer of art and pop culture? What do you give your attention to and how does that inform your creative process?

CG: Like Frank O’Hara, I know the reasons I’m not a painter, but I sure wish I was, so my eyes literally drink art and pop culture. I love the visual world, and to think about how composition is a type of rhetoric. 11 is the first poem of the series that I described earlier, and I guess it represents how my mind works, that I don’t just see what’s there to be seen: I like to see what I hear and taste it. I am a completely uninhibited consumer like the whale who takes giant gulps of ocean to trap whatever fish are in it. I give attention to everything. Besides wanting to have been a painter, I would have loved to have been a collage artist like Jess, or Hannah Höch, which I think is informed by looking at ubiquity as generative. It all can work; it all can fit; it all can generate. I’ve gotten crazy and profound ideas about love from the most elementary cookie-cutter shows. I guess I see that anything can be a portal.

NA: What have you been looking at, listening to, or absorbing lately that’s turning you on?

CG: If there’s a contemporary book that best exemplifies what I just described (shameless Graywolf plug), it’s Predator by Ander Monson. The book is about the movie, which he’s seen 147 times, but it’s also about how we live in the age of the predator, and it’s an autobiography and it’s a lament. I loved Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World (translated by Adrian Nathan West), and noted the interesting turn in fiction that seems a bit connected to the lyric essay, a tinge or thread of rigorous historical and scientific research. Another example of that kind of book is Kim Juyoung, Born 1982 written by Korean novelist Cho Nam-Joo (translated by Jamie Chang), which is a biography of a woman and the harrowing challenges of joining the workforce because of misogyny. The book also uses research and data to contextualize her experience. I’m obsessed with Diane Seuss so I’m reading everything she’s written. Listening to Siouxsie and the Banshees, Mallika Vie, and the Alan Parsons Project, and watching Loot, and Physical on AppleTV. 

NA: Both these poems contain a peculiar tension between the impulse toward memory or observation and the “craving” the speaker has for an experience that is more immediate and embodied. They seem to grapple with the gap between what we might seek from art or literature and the limitations of what it can give us. In what ways can that gap be a generative place to write from? 

CG: Craving is such a potent element—hunger—which I think is a vital force in your poems, Nico. This series has taken me back to childhood and adolescence, when I recalled the nameless and ineffable desire I had for what I would later discover was the sublime. It’s why I wrote those tortured poems about the soul and angst; I was describing what being on the edge or outside of sublimity felt like, and those nouns felt like they housed it. Wanting to be a painter or perhaps wanting my writing to have the same effect as painting is generative in this series. Trying to remember particles and sections as opposed to wholesale events is also very generative and freeing. Memory is an illusion after all. We aren’t computers; over time, we shape our histories to suit our wants, so by accessing ambiguous moments with art I’m able to think more about a memory’s affective echo.

NA: In “A Painting I Can’t Remember 47,” you write “…having fallen out of love with humanity, / I outgrew my leather pants, irony, / nuclear rage…” These lines speak to a loss of idealism but perhaps also a mode of performance the speaker lets go of in order to permit more vulnerability. What choices do you find yourself making in relationship to voice and self-presentation in your current work?

Yes, yes, yes. I always have an ambition for each book to do something I haven’t done before. The last book I wrote contained a long poem that really became a universe, sonically and thematically, that I was desperate to move on from, and for a long while I was unable to find that next step. My work can be lyrically mysterious (for lack of a better word), and so that’s what the letting go is about. I’m writing more narratively and hopefully in an autobiographical way that’s new.

I also feel like I’m calmer and the anger that’s propelled my work previously feels less appealing. It’s an enormous amount of work to be angry, and though that rage and anger was propulsive, I’m looking at other ways of moving through the world. The first few poems I wrote that contended with this idea were all about shame, which was so zzzzzzzz, so self-involved. My hope is a gaze that is able to look outward, even when I’m writing about myself. Not coolness, not hot, but I guess Goldilock’s just right.

NA: You’re an editor as well as a writer; how do you turn off your editorial instincts when you sit down to write? What methods do you use to give yourself permission to take risks and make messes as you draft?

CG: It’s hard to turn off those instincts. I’m always weighing the rhetorical implications of each noun, adverb, preposition, etc. An advantage is that I can do this work in fairly quick order, but it can be an obstacle. I often do generative exercises that force me to draw from reserves out of my control. I make dramatic revisions that create new problems for me that force me to go deeper, to delve into the negative capability that the certainty of the editor sometimes blocks, the desire to have ended. I also put my poems in other people’s hands who point me to places I haven’t thought of. That collaborative work is humbling and reminds me I’m not some omniscient practitioner.

NA: Speaking of . . . you just broke some big news that you’ve accepted a position as the new executive director and publisher at Graywolf Press. Anything you want to say about your hopes for this next chapter of your career?

CG: I’m so excited about this opportunity. Different muscles, a different conversation, but also an occasion for me to really apply the wonderful gifts and lessons I garnered as publisher at Noemi Press. I love teaching and thinking about literature as a teacher, but this is going to be a unique portal for me. I also adore Graywolf and everything they do. I have long admired the team, especially after having worked with them on my last book, so jumping into their stream feels like a dream. Life is long, but it’s also short. I don’t know what’s ahead, so I tend to jump into adventure.

Nico Amador’s writing has been published in Bettering American Poetry, Vol. 3, Poem-a-Day, PANK, Pleiades, The Cortland Review, Hypertext Review, The Visible Poetry Project and featured on the Poetry Unbound podcast. His chapbook, Flower Wars, won the Anzaldúa Poetry Prize and was published by Newfound Press. He holds an MFA from Bennington College, is a grant recipient of the Vermont Arts Council and an alumni of the Lambda Literary Foundation’s Writers Retreat.

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