Sarah Wells, B.A. 2003, M.F.A. 2015, has maintained an active publication agenda since graduation. The interview below covers several of her recent and forthcoming books. Click here for links to purchase the books mentioned below, with access to more of Wells's publications.
HD: Within the last two years you have published a book of poetry, Between the Heron and the Moss, and you have a memoir American Honey and a second volume of The Family Bible Devotional coming out in the months ahead. What are the common threads among your writings?
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| Sarah Wells |
SW: I am very interested in exploring intersections in my writing, regardless of the genre, intersections between the natural and spiritual worlds especially. The more I explore these intersections, the more I agree with the Celtic Christian wisdom teachers that declare there is nothing mundane; everything is sacred. My poetry and nonfiction especially explore this idea, looking for the sacred in the seemingly mundane to see what truth of human experience can be revealed there.
Between the Heron and the Moss explores the recurring appearance of a heron as an icon of the Holy Spirit’s presence in a world that is both holy and wracked with brokenness. And here we are, positioned between the two: heron flying above, moss growing below. What are we to make of it all?
American Honey is primarily exploring the subjects of attraction and fidelity; what happens when temptations attempt to woo you from what you’ve called holy and sacred? That’s a broad and lofty statement I think, since there’s plenty of time spent in the nitty gritty details of life, but I believe that’s where sacredness lives, tucked into the slicing of sweet potatoes, baked into the restaurant dinner leftovers. Being memoir, American Honey is ultimately a pursuit to know myself better, to understand where I’ve come from and how I arrived at this particular crossroad. The initial writing of these essays was an act of literary lifesaving, writing my way out of chaos and into clarity.
The devotionals that I have written follow this same pattern, although less explicitly. Here is this sacred text Christians around the world revere as wisdom literature, the guiding book of our religion, and yet there are pockets of people who proclaim a Jesus that doesn’t look or feel anything like the one we find in the Gospels. There is a desecration—a de-sacredization—that happens when our faith is so amputated from our actions. As James writes in his epistle, “You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder.“ Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase aptly translates it this way: "Do I hear you professing to believe in the one and only God, but then observe you complacently sitting back as if you had done something wonderful? That’s just great. Demons do that, but what good does it do them? Use your heads! Do you suppose for a minute that you can cut faith and works in two and not end up with a corpse on your hands?”
The devotional that is about to come out puts Jesus’ love and action in the world on center stage. Each entry is intended to deepen and enrich our understanding of who Jesus is while simultaneously shaping and guiding how we respond to Jesus’ call to love our neighbors as ourselves. What is following Jesus supposed to look like in real life? How does this spiritual text intersect with our natural world? The goal of the devotional is to understand who Jesus is and how he loves, better than we did before, so that we can be equipped as his disciples to live more authentically Christ following lives.
HD: How does each text require different approaches to writing and revising?
SW: Writing the The Family Bible Devotional, both Volumes 1 and 2, required a very different approach to writing than any I had taken previously. I started with a table of contents, for one thing. I knew exactly which scripture passages I planned to write about, what the structure of each chapter would be, and when the manuscript was due. In some ways, the devotional entries have parallels to formal poetry: I knew exactly what form each chapter needed to take, but where that chapter might end up was left to the dance of the Holy Spirit. That’s where the delight of this project came for me: I knew that I would write about Jesus’ relationship with Judas, but I didn’t know what I would say, or what needed to be said, or what the Spirit might reveal during the writing and researching process. That component of discovery in any genre is just thrilling. I love it. It’s important for me in whatever genre I find myself playing in to stay open to the shift and movement of the Spirit, to not be tight-fisted on what I think something is about and let the Spirit help me see what something is really about.
Writing poetry and nonfiction is far more open ended. In the case of poetry, I often begin with an image. I don’t know what the image means or if it has any inherent meaning, but I want to dig into how I intersect with that image. What does it mean to me? What does it reveal about how I am processing something seemingly unrelated to that image right now? And then I play, with the music of language as guide.
With nonfiction, there’s usually a question I am trying to answer. Right now, I really want to write an essay that explores the way trees will drop whole branches when they are under stress, and how the trees this year produced massive amounts of seeds, far more than usual, either in preparation for something hard to come or in response to something hard they’ve just been through to perpetuate their species. What have I dropped in my own kind of survival mode over the last 18 months? What seeds have I planted, do I want to plant, in the face of mortality, to live out a full and meaningful life, to perpetuate the human species? These are big questions, and they aren’t likely to have one resolution. Essays and memoir give space to explore the way I think about things and see what it is I think.
While the writing process seems different across the genres, the revision process in all three cases is similar, it’s all chisel and finesse, fine tune and shape, whether for clarity in the case of the devotionals, music in the case of poetry, and a combination of the two in the case of nonfiction. I want my words to sing but I also want the story to be clear.
HD: How has your writing career evolved since you graduated from the Ashland MFA?
SW: I worked full time in marketing for six years after graduating from the MFA program. I think working in a space that required creativity but not literary writing does two things: it requires you to listen and observe the vast world of ideas so that you can create interesting images and language, and it frees whatever literary writing you are pursuing from the burden of paying the bills. Working in marketing sharpened my ability to write with abandon and with constraints - there’s a deadline, so you better just write, take some risks or it’s going to come across as the same old thing, and listen.
In the last year, I shifted into a freelance writing career, which allows me to write pretty much all of the time. I write marketing content, articles for an online magazine called Root & Vine News, and this spring I wrote a novel. I never thought I’d write a novel, but I did. There’s pretty much one thing my brain is wired to do these days and that is to write. And walk my dog.
In the midst of so much living, sometimes the writing feels slow. We marry. We have jobs. We have babies. We have dogs. We have parents. We have friends. All of these people demand so much of our time as writers and we feel impatient for the words to come. Words are cumulative; if you write 500 of them today, 500 will be there to start with again tomorrow. Just keep writing. That’s what Michael Miller told me when I had three little people at home and a job and a husband and no time, no time, no time! Just keep writing. The living is a kind of pre-writing activity.
HD: What else would you like to share with Language and Literature students, alumni, and friends?
SW: When I worked for the MFA program from 2007-2014, I was aware of just how fortunate I was to be immersed in a literary community. That literary community sustained and spurred on my own writing. We emphasized the importance of being a literary citizen, to invest in others and in the community of writers, not just for the sake of networking but to celebrate and carry forward stories that matter. Read contemporary literature. Read widely and broadly and read people who don’t look like you or live where you’ve lived. Whenever I read a book, I try to make a point of shouting from the rooftops about it. Review books on Amazon and Goodreads. Post about them on social media. Send a note to the author about how much you loved their work. Buy books if you can. Our storytelling and reading of each other’s stories ought to be a constant celebration of literature, which lifts up everyone involved. That celebration is a celebration of humanity, a celebration of life, an honoring of what is sacred… and everything is sacred.
HD: Thanks so much for your time, and congratulations!
