Sheryl’s poetry books include Going Home, The Mask of Medusa (both chapbooks)Making Bread at Midnight, How Heavy the Breath of God, The Journals of Scheherazade), and Let it Be a Dark Roux: New and Selected Poems. She has also published a chapbook of translations of the Cajun poet Jean Arceneaux, Je Suis Cadien . She’s published two memoirs, Swamp Songs: the Making of an Unruly Woman, and Navigating Disaster: Sixteen Essays of Love and a Poem of Despair. She co-edited, with Margaret Whitford, Between Song and Story: Essays for the 21st Century. With Sarah Shotland she co-edited Words Without Walls: Writers on Addiction, Violence and Incarceration.
A new poetry collection, The Small Door of Your Death, in Spring 2018 with Autumn House Press. A collection of essays, Fifty Miles, is forthcoming with Etruscan Press in early Spring 2020. A native of New Orleans, Sheryl has taught creative writing at The University of Texas at Dallas, The University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Knox College, Iowa State University, and Chatham University. Her work has received several awards, including two NEA Fellowships, an NEH Fellowship, the Dobie-Paisano Fellowship, the Ki Davis Award from the Aspen Writers Foundation, and the William Faulkner Award for the personal essay. She is the co-founder and director of the Words Without Walls Program. Sheryl was named Louisiana Writer of the Year in November 2018. See http://sheryl-stgermain.com/for more information.
Kristina Marie Darling: Your essay collection, 50 Miles, will be launched soon from Etruscan Press. Tell us three things you’d like readers to know before they delve into the work itself.
Sheryl St. Germain: The book is a collection of linked essays and at least one poem, depending on how you understand poetry, that traces life with my son, who died four years ago of a heroin overdose. The pieces are meditations on addiction and healing, and examine the complications of loving one in the throes of substance abuse. Some essays come out of my own experience with substance abuse as well as my father’s death of it. Other pieces look to working with yarn, playing video games, travel and writing as vehicles for both healing and recovery. I didn’t try to write in a single voice in the collection, so you’ll find pieces that are grieving or playful, some privileging my role as a mother, others as a daughter, a poet, an educator.
KMD: How did this book begin?
SSG: When my son, Gray, died, I found it hard to write any kind of sustained narrative about his life. Instead I wrote a series of poems that evoked grief, mourning and anger. That collection was published in 2018 by Autumn House Press as The Small Door of Your Death. As time passed, I began to think of more coherent stories I might tell. I wanted to write essays that challenged the clichéd ideas we have about what an addict is like, and to offer some personal critiques of our culture’s response to addiction, subjects that might not have worked as poems. I had written one essay before Gray died, “Do No Harm,” about his being prescribed Ritalin at 6 years old, the first drug he would abuse, and how the prescription of drugs like Ritalin and Adderall for kids might lead to future abuse. I had also written a couple of essays about my own recovery. I started with those and began to write more. The first one I wrote after he died, “Fifty Miles,” the essay that gives the collection its title, is a meditation on the fact that Gray drove fifty miles the day he died to a friend’s house where he shot up the drugs that killed him. Thirty-three years earlier I had driven fifty miles away from a lover who had been shooting me up with cocaine. I wanted to tell a story connecting both of those journeys.
KMD: In addition to your achievements in creative nonfiction, you are an accomplished poet. What can poets learn from nonfiction writers about voice, narrative, pacing, and other aspects of writerly craft?
SSG: I think writing essays forces you to slow down. The high, or buzz, of the writing is spread out over a longer space, whereas poems are sometimes all about that one intense moment. In essays you learn how to link moments together. You learn the value of slowness, and to vary the rhythm of your paragraphs. You don’t want all the paragraphs to move at breakneck speed, for example, so you learn to balance scene, description and reflection, each of which offer a different pace in an essay. There’s not a lot of space for outright reflection in a poem, but the kinds of essays I like leave lots of room for reflection. Many of the craft elements you use in poetry (imagery, metaphor, rhythmic pacing) will also be used in prose, but I think essays can ground you, and the reader, a bit more than poetry. You have to write in sentences, mostly, so you have to make sense. You can’t just put these wild images out there (as beginning poets sometimes do) and hope that something catches. One of the biggest things a poet learns by writing nonfiction is how to write a sentence that is clear and artful.
KMD: How is structuring an essay collection different from structuring a volume of poems? What holds true across genres?
SSG: It’s actually pretty similar, at least for me. You have to think hard about the first essay or poem that will open the collection, set the tone, and introduce the critical themes or issues of the book. Deciding on the final essay, which, without summing up, should offer points of both closure and opening, echoes considerations that go into deciding on a final poem. And then you determine the arc of the book is in terms of where you’ll place the remaining essays or poems. I chose to order the essays in this book mostly chronologically, which made most sense to me, but that kind of order would not always work in a book of poetry. Perhaps you have to be a bit more careful in a poetry book about keeping voice consistent. We tend to like poetry books that speak with one voice. Not true so much for essays. In A Small Door of Your Death it felt important that the reader feel that the voice and style of the poems was consistent across the book, but I didn’t feel that pressure with the essay collection. I could write as mother, daughter, user, poet, educator. In an essay collection you have more freedom to explore the many voices you have.
KMD: What practical advice do you have for poets who may be interested in writing across genres? In other words, poets who may be trying their hand at nonfiction for the first time?
SSG: One thing poets who want to try their hand at writing nonfiction might do is start with the prose poem. There you don’t have to worry about narrative because it’s poetry, but you do have to work with the sentence instead of the line as a building block, which is a big thing. You might even want to play with taking a poem draft, removing the line breaks, and seeing how that changes the feeling of the poem. Learn how to write short essays first. Brevity, an online journal for brief creative nonfiction (under 750 words) is a great resource. I published some of my early brief essays there. Instead of attempting to privilege narrative, you also might work with the lyric essay at first, which is a form I love (there are lots of lyric essays in this new book). I’m often thinking poetry when I’m writing a lyric essay, I’m just leaving out about line breaks. I want the essay to work like a poem, but I don’t want to scare away someone who might not read poetry. I like to think of the lyric essay as a poem wearing comfortable clothes. It invites you in for coffee, offers you the most comfortable chair to sit in, doesn’t try to impress you.
Most poets will need to learn how to structure a scene and incorporate realistic dialogue. You can work on that after you become comfortable writing in paragraphs and sentences.
KMD: What’s next? What can readers look forward to?
SSG: I’ve written a lot about addiction, even outside of these last two books, and while I’ll continue to be involved in the recovery community—I teach creative writing to women in recovery— I’ve been feeling the need to do something completely different. I’ve been learning to make art quilts this year, and to use text in those quilts. I’ve been thinking a lot about how quickly we write, with computers, and how in the past our ancestors (mostly women) would learn to painstakingly embroider letters and eventually poems, in samplers and other forms of thread art. What would fall by the wayside, I wonder, if we had to take the time to stitch in fabric all the words in a poem or essay? I’m currently working on a series of abstract quilts that are in conversation with poems I’ve written, and incorporate some of the words and phrases from the poems. Once I’ve done a significant number, I’ll explore putting together a book that sets the poems next to images of the quilts. I recently started a blog, The Poetry of Quilting, that traces my development as poet who is learning to quilt, and I’m hoping to transform some of the blog writing into a series of lyric essays or poems about the connections between poetry and quilting, and my own journey with this new art form.