Familiarity and Otherworldliness: An Interview with Sarah Fawn Montgomery by Wendy Oleson

 Our latest Tenth Anniversary Interview is with Sarah Fawn Montgomery as she launches her essay collection, Halfway from Home (Split/Lip Press), TODAY. Split Lip Magazine (a separate entity from S/L Press) has had the good fortune to publish Montgomery twice, a memoir (“Men Teach Me How to Play D&D," 2019) and a poem (“Ghost Town," 2021).

Sarah Fawn Montgomery is also the author of Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir (The Ohio State University Press, 2018) and three poetry chapbooks. Her work has been listed as notable in Best American Essays for the last several years, and her poetry and prose have appeared in Brevity, DIAGRAM, Electric Literature, LitHub, New England Review, Poetry Foundation, The Rumpus, and numerous other journals and anthologies. She is an Assistant Professor at Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts.

We communicated over email about nostalgia, shells and scrimshaw, wandering through the woods, the ritual of decoupaging with rejection slips, and the sweetness of Fruit by the Foot.

Wendy Oleson: Happy pub day to your collection, Halfway from Home (Split/Lip Press, 2022)! The writing is stunning—intimate and smart, at turns lyrically unspooling and a sharpened blade. I wept reading the opening essay, “Excavation.” It’s tender, full of wonder, and exquisitely contained through the structure of the dig sites and dates. What an act of love to write like that about your late father, who became so real to me as I read. My heart dropped when he plunged his pocketknife into the grass.

In the second essay, “In Search of Nostalgia,” I found this passage that I think touches on what we’re feeling at Split Lip Magazine leading up to our tenth anniversary reading on November 15th: “Even since I was a child, I’ve felt a sweet ache at my core, the kind of satisfaction that left me swooning, unmoored at the same time I could not fathom being more fulfilled.” What reading and writing have left you most feeling that kind of swooning satisfaction, unmoored yet fulfilled?

Sarah Fawn Montgomery: Thanks for your kind words about my collection! I’ve long been fascinated with burial and excavation which are so connected to the constructs of time. As a kid, The Wrinkle in Time series made me feel the same sense of comfort and unease. The series played with time and home, travel and searching in a way that resonated with how I felt growing up. Books were hard to come by in my working-class family, so I read the series over and over until the series became a part of my emotional experience. In Halfway from Home, I write about many of the same concepts, though these many years later we are watching our real world turn dark and frightening through the lens of climate change rather than childhood science fiction.

Now as an adult I still seek out books that create a similar sense of familiarity and otherworldliness, the sense that what is happening on the page is both real and unreal, memory and imagination. I’m drawn to writers like Ottessa Moshfegh, Sequoia Nagamatsu, Sarah Rose Etter, Jenny Ofill, Helen Oyeyemi, K-Ming Chang, and others.

WO: You’ve published extensively as a poet, memoirist, and essayist. Do you feel like the same person while you’re working on a poem versus an essay—or as you labor in your role as a faculty member? Is there a Sarah Fawn Montgomery Venn diagram where poet and nonfiction writer and professor overlap?

SFM: For me, genre is fluid and mutable. Craft elements that might strike the reader as indicative of a poem are those we also use in lyric essays. Nonfiction relies on persona as much as poetry, and nonfiction relies on worldbuilding like fiction. Writing across genres, roles, and times in my life has taught me multiplicity. The narrative expectations of the “real” world often reinforce conformity, but we exist in great complexity and even contradiction. Writing allows my various selves to exist on the page, allows me to both capture and also create the selves I am and hope to be. The power of writing is that it presents us with Venn diagrams that never end, a kaleidoscope of possibilities that we can turn, shifting subject and focus so that we are never stagnant. As someone who craves both reflection and restlessness, past and present even as I look to the future, I love the way writing allows me as many possible selves as I can imagine.

WO: In honor of SLM’s tenth anniversary: could you share your ten favorite images from your writing? (If you’re feeling bashful, feel free to include images from other writers.)

SFM: Happy ten years! It feels like yesterday and also forever ago that the magazine came blazing on the scene!

Ten of my favorite images and motifs that appear throughout Halfway from Home are flames in a world on fire, abundant trees with barren branches, prairie grass with deep roots, monarchs and moths, shells and scrimshaw, rocks and fossilized relics, clocks and timepieces, mirrors and reflections, space and the moon, and finally, images of burial and uncovering.

WO: Are there any words, phrases, or sentence structures you find yourself returning to in your writing?  

SFM: A Halfway from Home word cloud reveals that some of the most-used words in the collection are place, time, longing, home, dead, map, and body. These are true of the book and much of my writing. I most often write about place and body, about the ways the two are both separated and inseparable. A word I can’t quit is “thrum.” An image I use as much as I can is that of a “cage”—branches as the cage of the sky or ribs as the cage of the body. It is nearly impossible for me to use the word “world” without also using the word “wound” and vice versa. And like any poet I’m always writing about the moon, always stringing syntax so something sounds strange.  

WO: Do you have any rituals (I love your rejection ritual you talk about here in Prairie Schooner) or good luck charms to get you in the flow of writing?

SFM: Thank you! The ritual of decoupaging all my rejections onto my office coffee table served me well when I was first submitting! If we are not careful to acknowledge that rejection is as much—or more—a part of writing than success, it is easy to feel shame. I collected rejections as reminders that I was doing the hard, vulnerable work of believing in my art. Soon I was publishing in or working at the same journals that had rejected me when I first began submitting.

Sarah Fawn Montgomery’s Table of Rejections

Now getting outside is what inspires my work and keep me writing and submitting when I am world-weary. Wandering through the woods looking for different mushrooms or mosses, gathering shells and stones on the beach, collecting fallen pinecones or acorns stops me from doomscrolling and refocuses me on the power and possibility of creation.

WO: Which of all your published pieces was most fun to write? Which was the most challenging, and which one has the closest energy to what you’re working on now? Bonus: What are you working on now?!

SFM: One of my favorites to write was “Hide” from SmokeLong Quarterly because it was the second piece of fiction I ever attempted, so the process was exciting and terrifying and full of that delightful uncertainty that makes me want to write in the first place. I’ve since published more fiction and even written a queer haunted novel inspired by the “Hide” protagonist and setting.

The most challenging thing to write has probably been Halfway from Home. My father, who features heavily in the book, was diagnosed with cancer shortly after I finished writing it. I signed contracts on the book a few weeks after he was admitted to the hospital, and I had to complete final edits in the weeks after he passed away. The process of completing edits on a collection about searching for home, childhood nostalgia, and a foundational figure in my life who was suddenly gone seemed impossible.

And finally, right now I’m working on a book of nonfiction about women’s bodily autonomy that has similar energy to Quite Mad. The book blends creative writing with critical study, weaving memoir and literary journalism to explore mothers in my family history alongside those in pop culture and American politics, in order to deconstruct traditional roles of girlhood and motherhood and to issue a warning about current social and political attacks on women’s reproductive freedom. After Quite Mad, I swore I’d never write something so research-intensive again, yet here I am compiling another dense index and enjoying every minute!

WO: What is your go-to snack/drink while you’re writing, and what was your favorite childhood snack?

SFM: Tea is my writing companion. The ritual of making tea accompanies the ritual of writing. I love black tea with rose, earl grey with lavender syrup, the spice of ginger tea, and the soothing comfort of chamomile.

In terms of a favorite childhood snack, since Halfway from Home is about 90’s nostalgia, Dr. Pepper, Fruit by the Foot, and Hot Pockets all come to mind. But memories of my favorite childhood foods are those associated with the people I love—my grandmother stirring up Nestlé Quik in tiny blue glasses, my mother holding my hand while we picked tart berries from the vine in hot California summer, my father driving me out to the beach and stopping to pull a buttery avocado off a roadside tree to slice open there in the sun. Like most nostalgic things, these snacks are sweeter in my mind.

Wendy Oleson (she/they) is the author of two award-winning prose chapbooks. Wendy’s fiction and hybrid work appears in Ninth Letter, Denver Quarterly, HAD, Copper Nickel, Cimarron Review, and elsewhere. Wendy is managing editor for Split Lip Magazine, associate prose editor for Fairy Tale Review, and lives in Walla Walla, Washington.