What:
My most recent publication was my debut book of poetry, I Thought There Would Be More Wolves, which came out this February from University of Alaska Press. It was the winner of the Permafrost Book Prize and was chosen by Elizabeth Bradfield. It’s been difficult to have a book be released during the pandemic, but I’ve been grateful for the support I’ve received and the virtual readings I’ve been able to do. Perhaps it was fitting for this book to come out during the pandemic, as it is very much about being isolated and lonely. The poems in I Thought There Would Be More Wolves center around my time living and studying in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. A Midwesterner at heart, I felt close to home but somehow still felt isolated. I drove around Lake Michigan in a big loop (basically “the circle tour”) and visited the family graves I’d never been to, finally exploring my roots in these places alongside the water. The book is also very much about the natural landscape of the UP—the forests, the wolves, Lake Superior. Even though I felt isolated in my small town of 20,000, I also felt an insistent and lively energy in the woods and waters around me. In this book, I look at the girl and the wolf and attempt to set them both free.
I am also the author of two chapbooks, Never Leave the Foot of an Animal Unskinned, a hybrid chapbook of poems and micro-essays as endnotes from Porkbelly Press, and Excellent Evidence of Human Activity, a chapbook of flash nonfiction from The Cupboard Pamphlet. All three of these books converse with one another on the natural world, extinction, taxidermy, being a woman, and loneliness.
Why:
I have been writing since I was a high school student in Michigan. I had moved from Illinois after my freshman year and felt isolated and afraid to start a new life in an unfamiliar place. I was experiencing heartbreak for the first time and turned to poetry in my grief. The grief subsided, of course, and new heartbreaks came and went, but poetry stayed. I studied it in college, got my MFA, and am now a PhD candidate studying creative writing. During this difficult and strange year, I have found myself wondering why, or how, poetry matters during times of strife, unrest, and grief. It’s easy to trivialize what a poem is, and I see this often as a teacher—people think of nursery rhymes, lullabies sung in hushed tones, Dr. Seuss, Shel Silverstein, the sing-song rhythms we can’t get out of our heads. This year, however, I believe that people have begun to see the genre differently. Many have turned to reading and listening when they have lost the words for “I’m sorry” or “I’m scared” or “What now?” During the pandemic, when much of the world shuddered to a stop, people found themselves at home, unsure of how to connect with those in the world around them. I think that this is where I, and many others, found purpose in poetry. In finding communal spaces online to listen to poets and writers read their work. In opening literary journals and new books and celebrating the work within, the poetry and essays and stories that, despite the chaos around us, glimmered on the page and seemed to stop time. These words invited us in, allowed us to escape the questions, the unsureness, the fear.
What I hope that readers get from my book is some of this hope—a hand reached out that reassures others they are not alone, even in loneliness. Even though the poems in my book were written in a different space at a different time, I hope that they persist in some significant way. Creativity is something that I am reaching towards right now, writing and reading especially, and the question of “why” continues to be answered with “because how could I do anything else?”
How:
I don’t write every day and have very much had to train myself out of the guilt of not writing every day, since I feel like it’s a mantra espoused by many. However, I’m always thinking about poems. I write little phrases and words on my phone’s notes app, I read multiple poems a day, and I am often thinking about the poem I want to write next. Because I’m in academia, I also try to avoid being sucked into the productivity machine. I don’t hold myself to daily word count quotas or yearly publication goals, but instead focus on smaller goals like writing a poem a day in the month of April, reading a book of poetry a day in August, organizing a manuscript over the summer. I am productive when life allows and encourages me to be, and when I’m not, I don’t feel guilt or shame. This past semester, I passed my qualifying exams after reading one hundred books, and while I didn’t do much writing, I was thinking a lot about my next manuscript and my dissertation. I was taking electronic and handwritten notes, and hoping I’d remember what I wanted to return to.
This process might make me seem like a slow and purposeful writer and poet, but that’s not the case. I write a poem immediately into my computer, and it often comes out fully formed in a matter of minutes. I tinker here and there but do much of my revision in these beginning stages when the poem lives in my head. I love revision, though, and try to force it into my process when necessary. I thankfully find myself in a community of writers in my daily life, so am grateful for the presence of others going through creative processes, working on their books, and revising their writing.
Bio:
Sara Ryan is the author of I Thought There Would Be More Wolves (University of Alaska Press), and the chapbooks Never Leave the Foot of an Animal Unskinned (Porkbelly Press) and Excellent Evidence of Human Activity (The Cupboard Pamphlet). Her work has been published in or is forthcoming from Brevity, Kenyon Review, Pleiades, DIAGRAM, Prairie Schooner, New Ohio Review, Thrush Poetry Journal and others. She is a managing editor at Iron Horse Literary Review, a memoir reader at Split Lip Magazine, and is a PhD candidate at Texas Tech University.
Links:
To buy I Thought There Would Be More Wolves:
University of Chicago Press
Bookshop.org
Amazon