What:
I’m a poet with a scientist’s soul—a paradox, maybe, but it shapes how I navigate this wondrous and often difficult world. I majored in Genetics and English in college. Scholarships were the catalytic threads which wove my dreams of higher education into reality. I was a girl whose single mother worked multiple minimum wage jobs. My father, a firefighter, lost his life in the line of duty. I was often alone, shuttled between grandparents and after-school programs. Books were the only constant in my life, and I took much pleasure in writing stories about my cat Lily in my school notebooks. These were stories I wrote for pleasure when I got sick of memorizing the times tables or practicing my terrible cursive (I am left-handed, after all).
For better or worse, I have always had an analytic temperament. I fell in love with science’s logic, its power to quantify nature’s mysteries. I loved the scientific method, how a hypothesis could be tested to acquire knowledge. Yet, science could not explain the miracles around us. How could people live long and well despite the odds of terminal illnesses? How could people survive the unsurvivable? How could healthy children die? How could my father, who my mother taught me was a hero, die so young? These questions haunted me. When I got to college, I was seduced by my philosophy classes, mesmerized by how Artistotle considered philosophy to be a natural extension of science which could reveal humanity. I loved Kant’s heady mix of rationalism and empiricism, Sartre’s existentialism, and Descartes’ Cartesian system of understanding the mind and body.
For me, poetry became an imperfect union of science’s certainties and philosophy’s propositions. Like Keats, my poems and my life dwelled in “negative capability”—living and writing in a state of uncertainty, mysteries, and doubts. This did not always bring me comfort. I trusted science. I wanted answers. As a compromise, like Rilke, I committed myself to living the questions themselves.
I realized that I was an artist simply unaware of my poetic calling. A scientist-poet, a poet of the natural and metaphysical realms—I was a living contradiction, a love child of the school of hard knocks and the life of books.
Since those early years, my journey as a scientist-turned-poet has evolved in ways I could only barely allow myself to dream of. I won scholarships that allowed me to complete my education with little debt, pursuing an MFA in creative writing, then a Ph.D. My dissertation, View From True North, won the 2017 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award and was published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2018. Terra Incognita, an elegy for my mother, won the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize and was published by Ohio University Press in 2022. Just this past April, my latest collection of poems, Burn, was published as a Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Editor’s Selection by Southern Illinois University Press.
Now, as an assistant professor of creative writing at Marshall University, I have the great honor of nurturing the next generation of writers, encouraging them to find power in language and experience, to write with an open mind and an open heart. It is my hope that like me, they will consider art to be their guiding star, their best true north.
Why:
I am driven to write poems which challenge the very social systems which once tested my sense of self and belonging. These systems often trap the most vulnerable of us in toxic cycles—poverty, addiction, closeted or erased identities, domestic abuse, family secrets, and the misunderstood crises of mental illness, both diagnosed and undiagnosed.
As a product of these systems, I have become an accidental elegist, committed to honoring those lost too soon—my father in his thirties, my mother in her early sixties to cancer. Parentless by my early thirties, I felt like I operated in a different existential and social system from my friends. Whether I liked it or not, I had to embrace myself as my own center. There was no “returning home,” save for stepping through the door to my apartment and later, my house. With time, I found power in my internal agency and independence. With time, I realized that I am a poet committed to finding joy after great tragedy. Joy awakens when we learn to carry our loved ones’ stories within us, when we learn to find comfort in our own skin. I have been told that people die twice: once, when they pass from the world, then a second time when their names are uttered for the last time. By writing my loved ones into my books, I attempt to create a living anthology of not only my love for them, but how they changed the world simply by existing in it. Discovering this fact changed the way in which I conceptualized the power of art.
Writing is my compass for understanding this world, the way in which I pray, my way of living the questions, my medium to connect with the departed. It is my crusade to contribute to a literary community that has become my chosen kin.
But above all, poetry is how I strive to answer Mary Oliver’s profound question from “The Summer Day”— Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
How:
To be a working artist in academia is a difficult balance of teaching and practicing what I teach. While I teach my students to form healthy rituals to include writing in their lives, I am not a daily writer. I do not wake up at 5 am to write every day, hell or high water, though I respect the friends I know who do. I do not have a special notebook, a special pen, a special coffee shop or bookstore where I summon the muse. I come from a line of writers like Natalie Goldberg (who writes in cheap notebooks), like Nicole Cooley (who might write a poem on the back of a grocery bag or during a subway commute), like Kim Addonizio (who might wake in the middle of the night and instead of tossing and turning restlessly, writes a poem). I respect that certain people need rituals to survive, but in my often-chaotic life, I can’t afford them. I like to think that when it comes to both life and the life of writing, we are all constantly moving between Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
For those unfamiliar, Abraham Maslow, a psychologist, ranked the different levels of human experience to explain how they can be achieved. For instance, we cannot truly achieve safety (personal security, resources, income, structure, order) if we do not have our physiological needs met (water, food shelter, etc.), and so on. Notice that self-actualization, the stuff of beauty, art, and the calling of the muse, is right at the top.
There were times I cared more about keeping a roof overhead, nursing my mother through terminal cancer, and buying groceries without bouncing checks than my artistic calling. There were years in which I relied on SNAP benefits, heating assistance, and choosing between milk and bread at the end of the month. The difficult and unsexy truth is that often, so much of our lives happen instead of art. Poet Dorianne Laux wrote about it in a poem called “Finding What’s Lost.”
Finding What’s Lost
In the middle of the poem my daughter reminds me
that I promised to drive her to the bus stop.
She waits a few beats then calls out the time.
Repeats that I’ve promised.
I keep the line in my head, repeat it under my breath
as I look for my keys, rummage through my purse,
my jacket pockets. When we’re in the car, I search
the floor for a Jack-in-the-Box bag, a ticket stub,
a bridge toll dollar, anything to write on.
I’m still repeating my line when she points
out the window and says “look, there’s the poppy
I told you about,” and as I turn the corner I see it,
grown through a crack between the sidewalk and the curb.
We talk about it while I scan driveways for kids
on skateboards and bikes, while the old man who runs
the Rexall locks up for the night and a mangy dog
lifts a frail leg and sprays the side of a tree.
Then we talk about her history essay and her boyfriend,
and she asks again about summer vacation, if we’re
going somewhere or just staying home. I say
I don’t know and ask what she’d rather do, but by now
we’re at the bus stop and she leans over
and, this is so unlike her, brushes her lips
quickly against my cheek. Then, without looking back,
she’s out the door, and the line, the poem,
is gone, lost somewhere near 8th and G, hovering
like an orange flower over the gravel street.
However, there are some practical ways I have discovered to get my writing done that I am happy to share. I write with my students when I assign in-class writing exercises. I think it is important for me to be willing to do what I ask them to do, and this helps me generate raw material to revise later. Last year, I joined a writing group on campus at Marshall University. We write together one day per week during the school year and twice per week during the summer months. Also, I am part of a wonderful local writing group. We share and critique each other’s work. Lastly, I set aside weekly time to write which I have learned to become protective of (usually 2 two-hour morning sessions per week, which occur days I either do not teach or teach in the afternoon). A dear mentor once taught me to hold onto those hours one manages to carve out as if one’s life depended on it. Because, as a working artist, it does.
Bio:
Sara Henning is the author of the poetry collections Burn (Southern Illinois University Press, 2024), a 2022 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Editor’s Selection; Terra Incognita (Ohio University Press, 2022), winner of the 2021 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize; and View from True North (Southern Illinois University Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award and the 2019 High Plains Book Award. She was awarded the 2015 Crazyhorse Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize and the 2019 Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin Memorial Award. She’s a recipient of scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Appalachian Writers’ Workshop. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Marshall University, where she coordinates the A.E. Stringer Visiting Writers Series.
Links:
Social Media:
Website
Instagram
Facebook
Sarah’s books:
Burn
Terra Incognita
View From True North
Interviews:
“The Fire in Which We Burn (Poetry Off the Shelf Podcast, Helena de Groot, Poetry Foundation):
”On Grief: a Conversation with Sara Henning (with Corinne Segal, Poetry Foundation):
“Conversations with Contributors: Sara Henning” (with Bryan Lopez, the Adroit Journal):
Poems:
“Terra Inferna” Literary Hub
”Once, I Prayed in the Water” Poetry Society of America
”Drunk Again, He Pushes Her,” Verse Daily
”A Brief History of Hurricanes,” Alaska Quarterly Review
“Letter in the Shape of a Banyan Tree,” Baltimore Review
“Texas Duplex” & “The Virgin’s Club,” Mezzo Cammin
”Good Kissing” & “A Brief History of Fathers,” South Florida Poetry Journal
“Ars Poetica After an Abnormal Mammogram,” Sweet
Thank you for visiting.
Linda K. Sienkiewicz is a writer, poet, and artist:
Multi-finalist award winning novel In the Context of Love
Picture book Gordy and the Ghost Crab
Latest poetry chapbook: Sleepwalker
Buy Signed Books: In the Context of Love | Gordy and the Ghost Crab | Sleepwalker
Connect with Linda on social media: LinkTree