What:
I’m happy to share, for those who don’t know — the poetry world is indeed a small one — that my debut full-length collection of poems, The Grief Committee Minutes, came out in September 2024 from Saint Julian Press. Although I’d had two chapbooks published previously, I’d always aspired to produce a full-length work, so this book will always be special. It took me roughly three years, three editors and multiple submissions to various presses and contests to find a publisher after I first began working on it; needless to say, I am delighted that it is finally out there in the world.
Although my manuscript had garnered a few finalist nods from good presses in different book competitions by the time 2024 rolled around, I had reached a point where I wasn’t sure what to do next. I was quite frustrated that it hadn’t made it to publication yet, and more than that, had started to feel genuinely discouraged. I felt like I had done about as much as I wanted to do with that manuscript, revision-wise, and I believed the work was strong. So having it not land with the presses I had initially sought out was depressing. I wasn’t sure what my subsequent steps would be. Drop it entirely? Put it aside and begin working on something new? I’d invested so much time and energy into the book that neither of those options were very appealing to me.
Then I traveled to Kansas City for the AWP conference last February and happened to meet Ron Starbuck, publisher at Saint Julian Press. I was familiar with a few of his authors: Melissa Studdard and Cynthia Atkins, to name just two, and saw the beautiful books that the press had on display at its booth. I chatted with Ron, and a few weeks later, sent him my manuscript. He accepted it in the spring.
While it’s a milestone to have it published, the book itself also has enormous personal significance to me because of how it came about. The poems in The Grief Committee Minutes chronicle an intense and difficult period in my life, during which my mother’s health had rapidly declined and my own role in her caretaking increased dramatically. While not all of the poems were written during that period, many were, and almost all the poems touch on grief and loss in some manner. Although I tell people I don’t want them to feel like this book is dark and depressing — there are joy poems in its pages as well — there’s no question but that grief affects all of us at levels we may not even understand.
My hope is that others who have traveled this journey will find empathy and perhaps even some comfort in the poems from this book. In a way, it’s a kind of love letter to my mother as well, because I feel I got to know and appreciate parts of her I never had before in the writing of the poems that make up The Grief Committee Minutes.
Most of these poems had been published in various literary journals, and it is a relief knowing that they will be preserved in a collection, when so many journals go off-line or vanish these days. I’m grateful on behalf of the poems in The Grief Committee Minutes that they can live on, hopefully for a long time, in book form. The book is the glue that holds the poems together together, and will let me revisit the memories and stories they represent in the years to come, when memories won’t be as fresh. It will allow me to continue to put context to that particular chapter of my life and work.
Why:
I first started working on The Grief Committee Minutes in 2021 as a “distraction project” to focus on during a time when my mother’s health had begun to rapidly decline due to what we later understood was Alzheimer’s disease. I was having to devote more of my time and energy to her needs, and was traveling back and forth from Gainesville, Florida, where I live, to Tallahassee, where her home was, and juggling a full-time job and other responsibilities as well. Initially, I considered poems that hadn’t been previously collected in either of my two chapbooks, as well as other poems I’d had published since then. For the most part, those poems, while they touched on themes that recurred throughout the book, such as family relationships, aging, and losses of various kinds, didn’t directly deal with my mom’s situation and what I was going through at the time in navigating it.
At some point, though, I began writing more directly to that experience — my mother’s symptoms, my own awareness and observations relating to converging environmental and personal losses, and eventually my mother’s transition into assisted living and her death.
What else can I say about my “why” when it comes to poetry? I write because I feel an urgency to do so. As a writer now in my 60s, I write as a means of preserving memory, to challenge myself and as part of my commitment to myself to continue to grow as a poet, a reader of other poets and a literary citizen. I write because as someone increasingly aware of my own and others’ mortality, I hope to leave something of myself behind.
When people ask me about the title of The Grief Committee Minutes, I usually say that I like the dual meaning of the word “minutes,” as it represents both record-keeping and a unit of time. I tell people that the book is a kind of poetic record of the people, places, and events I keep going back to in my life, and the passing of time is a recurrent theme in my work. I feel like the title captures the book’s “raison d’etre.”
How:
The process of writing these poems resembles my process of writing ever since I’ve been making poems, starting back in the late 1970s! By that I mean, I write because I have to; I feel an obligation to myself to do so, perhaps a calling, of sorts. I write to keep myself anchored, and I write for myself, about what I want or need to write about, versus thinking about what I ought to be writing about or paying much attention to strategy or audience, at least in the early stages.
In that sense, I suppose the writing of poetry is for me a form of self-care. That being said, nothing that I might write initially because it feels good ever remains very long in that same state.
The process of revision is one I struggled with as a younger writer, back in my days as a student of creative writing in the master’s program at Florida State University, where my then-professor, Van Brock, used to always say, “revise, revise, revise!” And I’d just look at him, and continue to turn in poems that were not well-thought out. I think that was a reflection of my much younger and more scattered self when I was in my early 20s.
It took me a long time to really understand what Van meant, and a lot of years of writing intermittently and not having my head in the game. However, today, several decades later, I understand the process of revision as one during which I can begin to detach from whatever initial emotions or thoughts I might have had when I first sat down to write, and allow the poem-in-progress to begin to speak to me. I embrace revision, because I realize it’s not that my poetic voice won’t still be there when I revise, but rather that in allowing a poem to maintain fluidity, and allowing myself the open-mindedness to let it go in different directions than I might initially have envisioned, a poem becomes a vehicle for possibility. A beacon of hope, if you will.
By the time The Grief Committee Minutes was published, I had conducted fairly extensive revisions to most of the poems, as well as to the work itself, tweaking the collection to allow the poems to better speak to themselves as a whole. For example, even after Saint Julian had accepted my manuscript, I decided that dividing the work into six sections would make it easier to read. At that point, with the publisher’s permission, I named the sections, revised the manuscript yet again, and it was that version that made it into print.
Whenever I have a journal acceptance, which is always sweet and feels like form of validation, I think about what went into making that poem, not just the genesis of my thought process at its inception, but why and how it changed to take the form it ended up taking. By the time The Grief Committee Minutes was published, I felt each poem had earned its spot, and I knew each one of them like a close friend I’d been through a lot with, and could talk about how each came to be.
To have completed such a meaningful project left me with a deep sense of gratitude. I owe so much to every person who helped me along the way: my wonderful blurb writers, Alice Friman, Chelsea Dingman, Cynthia Barnett, Jen Karetnick and Erica Wright, the editors who helped me hone the poems and the shape of the entire work, and the editors of journals who published individual poems in the collection. I’m grateful also to have had the expertise of my friend Mary Cecelia, who helped with cover design on a tight timeline, and for Stephen Tabone, who allowed me to use his fabulous image of sandhill cranes flying over Paynes Prairie State Park on the cover. And of course, I’m grateful to my publisher, Ron Starbuck, and to every friend and reader who has supported me by buying or sharing the book. That support means everything to me.
Bio:
Sarah Carey is a graduate of the Florida State University creative writing program. Her poems have appeared recently in Gulf Coast, Five Points, Sugar House Review, Florida Review, Redivider, and elsewhere. Her book reviews have appeared in Salamander, Tinderbox Poetry Journal and the Los Angeles Review.
Sarah’s poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, the Orison Anthology and Best of the Net. Her debut full-length collection, The Grief Committee Minutes, was released from Saint Julian Press in September 2024. Her next book, Bloodstream, is under contract with Mercer University Press for publication in 2026. Sarah also is the author of two poetry chapbooks, including Accommodations (2019), winner of the Concrete Wolf Chapbook Award.
Links
SarahKCarey.com,
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The Grief Committee Minutes
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Thank you for visiting.
Linda K. Sienkiewicz is a writer, poet, and artist
Books: In the Context of Love | Gordy and the Ghost Crab | Sleepwalker
New novel, Love and Other Incurable Ailments, coming fall 2026 from Regal House Publishing
Connect with Linda on social media: LinkTree
