Centering the ‘land’ in Sarahland: A Conversation with Sam Cohen
content warning: sexual violence & self-harm
At the 2019 Lambda Litfest in L.A., I listened to Sam Cohen read from “Sarahland,” the titular story of her linked collection from Grand Central Publishing, an imprint of Hachette Book Group (published March 2021). At one point, the writer friend sitting next to me leaned in, sighed, and whispered, “So good.” I too was feeling that smoothie of emotions: wonder, inspiration, delight, envy. We wanted to be able to write like that, so fresh and fearless. Reading Sarahland, with its veritable multiverse of Sarahs, was a similar experience. The book’s intimacy and vulnerability reminded me why I love to write. What was more astonishing, for me, was that the stories opened up possibilities for how to live. It was a gift to find myself in these pages. Sam Cohen and I corresponded via email about her collection. I’m grateful to her for answering my questions about her process and what drives her as an artist.
Wendy Oleson: Split Lip is a voice-loving, pop-culture obsessed magazine, and Sarahland contains some of the most gloriously juiced-up, voicey writing I’ve encountered. How do the pop-culture elements of your work (characters speaking through actual pop-culture figures: Sarah Paulson, Sarah Schulman, Sarah Edmonson, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Sarah Silverman, Sarah Jessica Parker) influence the voice? Do you think about voice driving your stories—does the voice come first or is it always twinned with concept/POV/character/style/setting?
Sam Cohen: First I wanted to say: Yes! Voice comes first! And then I wanted to say: Oh, yes, it comes along with character or concept. It might vary by story, and also I will tell you the truth which is that I can never remember how I found my way into a story which makes it always feel impossible that it will ever happen again.
The story in which all those real people you named appear was one of the later stories written, and most of the lines of dialogue came directly from their mouths—I pulled them from shows or texts or interviews, so that whole Sarah Machine section is really sort of a New Narrative inspired collage.
WO: Where is the overlap between the worlds of Sarahland, of Sam Cohen, and of the reader?
SC: There are overlaps everywhere. Some stories have taken images from my own memories, lines of dialogue I’ve heard, snippets of my dreams, houses I’ve lived in, shows I’ve seen, etc., and funneled them all through a “Dream Palace”-like filter or put them in a blender. Others come from somewhere else entirely.
WO: These stories unfurl with momentum, a Möbius strip where inside is outside is inside again. There’s a recurring theme of porous or absent boundaries—not just between the self and other, but the self and the self and the self (ad infinitum). Porousness seems particularly heightened in “Exorcism, or Eating My Twin,” where the separation between the exorcism and the story of the twinning occurs with little narrative separation temporally or spatially. In a specific story or even generally, could you talk about how you approach the narrative structure and movement between story past and story present?
SC: This is such a gorgeous description. Porousness in time—between self and other, between selves—is so central to this book, and I love that you are linking that to the structure too. With “Exorcism,” which was one of the first stories I wrote for the collection, I knew I wanted to tell the story in that form, but then of course it required going back and telling most of the story as backstory. I do think this might be how I experience time—the past seeping or rushing into the present, thinking I’m telling one story only to dig a little and find all these other stories connected to it. What I thought was the roots is just more stories.
WO: How do you approach writing a sentence?
SC: I am very concerned with precision and also with rhythm. I read out loud a lot and I’m a constant editor, never picking up writing the next day without reading what I wrote the day before, and so the sentences become themselves slowly that way too. I am always combining clauses that were once separate sentences or severing clauses that were once conjoined. I don’t really agonize over it; a lot of my writing process is this type of editing, like puttering around the house, moving things around, cleaning something out, having the feeling of: This feels right here.
I will tell you though, Wendy, that I am obsessed with sentences, the architecture of sentences—I taught a pre-101 English class at community college for a long time and really centered the whole thing on What is a sentence? I think if you have a strong command of your sentences, you can do basically anything else.
WO: At Split Lip Magazine we confess to a “kind-of-embarrassing love for storytelling.” While reading your deeply innovative and refreshing collection, I kept thinking about the fabulous storytelling that stopped me from ever wanting to put the book down. In what ways are you a traditional storyteller—or what, if anything, is traditional about this book?
SC: I come from a storytelling family. A lot of the adults I grew up around didn’t go to college or pick up a newspaper or anything like that, but they endlessly pored over minutiae, assessed every detail of interactions—everything was a story. If someone went to pick up takeout, more likely than not, they’d return with a story, and everyone was anxious to hear it. And this is very influential, I think, this mundane oral storytelling tradition.
And then of course I’m playing with some traditional narrative forms: gossip, an exorcism, a Bible story, the hero’s journey.
WO: “Becoming Trees” reminds the reader of the connection between certain cities and the possibility for artistic expression: “We went to Chinatown to eat pea shoots for breakfast. In our city, people are creative and often appear in strange ways, like for art, and so it was okay that Jan had green skin and feet shaped like Japanese yams.” However, “Gemstones,” with its references to rising rents, gentrification, the depletion of artist communities, and the extreme economic inequality of late capitalism, reminds the reader that finding a physical, geographically concentrated artist community with affordable housing in 2021 is nearly impossible. Could you talk about your connection to the New Narrative movement, and if New Narrative-identified writers had 1970s San Francisco, how do writers/artists exist in physical space together in 2021? Is that necessary?
SC: First of all, yes, it is absolutely necessary to share physical space, and it can’t just happen in institutional settings! In Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, Samuel Delany writes that the health of a city can be measured by how much spontaneous interclass contact there is. I would extend this and say that good art needs this interclass and spontaneous contact too.
It seems there were artist and working-class immigrant neighborhoods that functioned for decades—I’m not saying it was some kind of utopia or that there was no tension between these groups—but they’d coexist okay before the creative class moved in with their $5 coffee. I recently binge-read Sarah Schulman’s early novels and I loved reading about the Lower East Side with this working-class Jewish immigrant culture and also inhabited by artists and dykes. None of these people want a $5 cup of coffee.
Here in L.A. at least, though, developers have started to intentionally speed up gentrification by financing private art galleries and coffee shops in working-class neighborhoods, trying to draw in the creative class. As a result, working-class people are being pushed out of their homes, and art has become, rightfully, suspect. Also, rents have doubled in the last ten years, so young artists are more dispersed.
That said, L.A. has never been San Francisco or New York. People have always had to commute to particular spaces where the queer and artist microworld was. Like in Michelle Tea’s Valencia, which is in The Mission in S.F., the whole time people just walk around—I mean the book is named for a street where things just happen—but in L.A. you’ve always had to intentionally put yourself in these spaces.
WO: Characters in these stories engage each other’s thoughts about art, theory, and activism; these conversations are exciting and invigorating to experience as a reader—particularly when characters disagree, reconsider, or reassess what they thought they knew. For me, Sarahland reads like an intersectional feminist text unafraid of showing the reader the deficits of late capitalism in a white supremacist patriarchy. It’s a political text in ways explicit and implicit. How did you achieve this balance? Were there moments when you felt the stories (or an individual story) didn’t push hard enough or pushed too hard?
SC: So once the book was picked up by GCP, once I knew it would have a readership, I added in more overt political conversations, more political rantiness—most of this was then cut because it didn’t have the subtle touch the publisher had liked before. There’s a paranoid part of me that feels like they just couldn’t handle explicit politics, or didn’t want to alienate a mainstream reader, and then there’s another part of me that wants to trust that not everything has to be spelled out, and that I was actually the one working from a paranoid place.
WO: In “All the Teenaged Sarahs” you use the structure of the hero’s quest to illustrate Sarah’s failure to come of age (or, as novelist emily m. danforth puts it, coming of “GAY-ge”), first in a Midwestern suburb, then a Big Ten university and beyond. Unlike some of the normalized violence elsewhere in the collection (after being raped in the first story, that Sarah assures herself everything’s fine: “And it is, I think, okay. It’s like everything”), the violence of this Sarah’s escalating self-harm is described in stark, matter-of-fact prose. In the futuristic “Purple Epoch”: “The femurs of former Sarahs…would look the same, if anyone was there to see them—dolphin scientists and dungeon Mistresses, sad girl poets and trophy wives, oil drillers and onion harvesters have become piles of ivory sticks, tumbled smooth like driftwood by the radioactive sea.” Was it difficult to put the Sarahs in harm’s way, and was it harder to have them hurt by the world than by their own hands? What did you learn from these darker moments in the text?
SC: I don’t think the Sarahs becoming bones is violent—in a healthy system, people should die and decompose. But rape is of course violent and I believe that in a healthy system without universal misogyny, without the glorification and the punishment of female sexuality, there would be no rape.
The reality is that I feel so constantly aware of both systemic violence and its reverberations into individual relationships that it is probably easier for me to write violence than to write connection and pleasure.
I wrote “Sarahland” the story during #MeToo and it was my contribution to that conversation. I knew very early on writing “Sarahland” that it was a story about the ways girls are raised to surrender their agency at every turn, about the way some girls start to actually think of their bodies as public property. It was always going to end with rape.
In a way, I think “All the Teenaged Sarahs” Sarah’s response to sexual violence—self-harm—is probably more healing than “Sarahland” Sarah’s. The way “Sarahland” Sarah so immediately renames and dismisses her rape leaves so little hope for her to ever heal, to ever become more agentive than she is. Cutting might not be the best way to release something from the body, but it is still a release, still an attempt at a purge, at self-ownership.
WO: While reading, I’d think, Oh, wow, this story’s my favorite, and then I’d get to the next story and think the same thing. I adored the last three stories in the collection (“Becoming Trees,” “All the Teenaged Sarahs,” and “Purple Epoch”), which seemed to embody the tenants of Queer Ecology by blurring the human/nonhuman boundary, acknowledging interdependence between species and environment, and featuring extra-linguistic modes of communication. At what point, if any, did you think of yourself as explicitly writing cli-fi (climate fiction)?
SC: I’ve had an ongoing writing project since maybe 2006 that may or may not ever be a book or, like, finished in any way, but is definitely queer ecological and about the earth, so planetary concern has always felt central to my own understanding of myself as a writer. Being a person on a planet that is no longer hospitable to so many of its creatures and being part of a species that is destroying the whole system of life feels central, for me, to thinking about being a person at all. That said, I was surprised and really happy when my agent called this book “cli-fi” because I hadn’t necessarily thought of it as such.
WO: How did Sarahland evolve? What did this manuscript look like when you submitted it to your agent?
SC: When I submitted the manuscript to my agent, it did not yet have “Sarahland,” “Dream Palace,” or “Becoming Trees”. I had titled it The Sarah Machine after the bizarre mall photo booth thingy in “Gemstones,” and because I saw the collection as being centrally about the ways identity is contingent, context-dependent, transformable. Once I added those three stories, my agent actually suggested retitling the collection Sarahland and used the term “cli-fi” for the first time, which maybe answers your last question. She was concerned I might think “cli-fi” was a gross marketing term, but it was just the opposite—I felt aglow, just vibrating, at this suggestion. Centering the “land” in Sarahland made the book become itself, become legible in a new way, even to me.
My agent seemed primarily concerned with how the stories would be received within our political and cultural context. My editor, once she acquired it, was more concerned with the book being “propulsive,” moving from one story to the next swiftly, having an “arc.” She helped a lot with ordering and pacing. It was good to work with people who had these separate concerns.
I will say that I conceded ambivalently to my editor’s vision for the end of “All the Teenaged Sarahs” which is, in a way, the ending of the book—I felt like Sarah needed to be part of a relationship or a collective of people, while my editor really wanted her standing on her own. I don’t like narratives of female independence as supposed success; I feel sure we are meant to be in deep relationships, to need each other.
But so finally I compromised with the ending, having the final Sarah moving toward drag queens and garlic and books at the end because I thought: Okay, those are good things to be in collective with, too, and you know, she’s still building her collective, still looking. Honestly for me at this point, all the multiple endings I wrote and cut still exist, or there is no ending—maybe Sarah will go to a drag show and think, that was okay but now I’m ready to return to the horses.
Sam Cohen is the author of Sarahland (Grand Central Publishing, March 2021). She is a queer, Jewish femme who was born and raised in suburban Detroit. Her fiction is published in Fence, Bomb, Diagram, and Gulf Coast, among others. The recipient of a MacDowell fellowship and a Ph.D. fellow at the University of Southern California, Cohen lives in Los Angeles. Follow her on Instagram @samiterrestrial.
Wendy Oleson (@weoleson) is the author of two award-winning prose chapbooks, Please Find Us (Gertrude Press) and Our Daughter and Other Stories (Map Literary). Her fiction and poetry appear in dozens of venues, including Denver Quarterly, Passages North, Copper Nickel, Best of the Net 2018, and SmokeLong Quarterly: Best of the First Ten Years. Wendy serves as managing editor for Split Lip Magazine and associate prose editor for Fairy Tale Review. She lives in Walla Walla, Washington. Find her at www.wendyoleson.com