The Interview of Sandra Simonds
Greetings to new subscribers and welcome to Sitting in Silence, a newsletter for writers, readers, and thinkers. The interview is an ongoing feature of the newsletter. I love talking to writers about inspiration, craft, and life. They never disappoint. So, from time to time, you’ll find these intimate and enlightening conversations in this space. This issue’s conversation is with the great Sandra Simonds.
Sandra Simonds is the author of eight collections of poetry including Triptychs, a 2022 New York Times selection. She also published a novel this year based on the life of Assia Wevill. I blurbed the novel, Assia, which is an amazing piece of work about a fascinating woman. It was shortlisted for the Dzanc Fiction Prize.
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Now, for our interview.
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Maurice: What are your earliest memories of reading or writing stories?
Sandra: My childhood was very chaotic. Unfortunately, there was a lot of abuse in my early years so my beginnings as a writer are tied up with that early world. I was raised by a single mom in Los Angeles in the 90s who suffered from mental illness. My first memory of writing was writing in a diary. I learned early on that I could at least attempt to make sense of the world in those pages. At some point my diary writing started to break out into poetry. I think poetry was able to capture my feelings more than prose because of the abstraction that poetry can handle and encompass. I was very young when I started writing--late elementary school and early middle school. I also remember that in middle school one year I spent my spring break writing a long story. I think I was about eleven years old. The story was about two sisters who escape from Los Angeles to Mexico. I took all of the vocabulary words my teachers had given me up to that point and tried to include all of them in my story. A lot of the vocabulary words are misused of course, but I think it's also sort of amazing, looking back, that I spent those hours working on a story rather than playing outside or whatever else I could have been doing.
Maurice: You've written quite a bit of excellent poetry and prose in your life. We'll get into that, but first: what do you think your 11-year old self would say about the writer you've become? Do you think she'd be surprised that you're still deeply attached to a writing practice? And what would you tell her?
Sandra: My 11-year old self knew I would become a writer and whenever I'm insecure or have imposter syndrome now, I have to remind myself that she knew all along. I don't know how she knew though, but the voice that told her was very distinctive and I can hear it to this day--really like a higher power or something outside of the self-and the voice was very firm: "you are going to do this." It's not something I can understand with logic.
Maurice: I first heard you read your poetry at an event in New Orleans, and I've read your work in places like Poetry Magazine. You have this one great poem called "It's Going to Hurt" that has the following lines "In the middle of Florida in the middle of the night after you/step off the plane you see the swamps morph/into the mountains of your childhood/They raise their heads like giants.”
One thing I notice in what you performed and what I've read is a kind of attractive pungency. The push-pull of positive feeling, anticipation, and dread. This read may say more about me than how you actually see your work, but I'm curious: what emotional journeys are you navigating in the lyrical space? And what relevance does narrative have for you?
Sandra: This poem was written as a way for me to cope with addiction but I don't even think that I realized it at the time. For years, I tried to stop drinking and one way that I did this was to go "cold turkey" as they say. It never worked. So there was a voice in my head that kept saying "it's going to hurt" and that is where that line comes from. At the same time, I was driving from the airport from Jacksonville back to Tallahassee where I live and there was a man who survived a plane crash somewhere in South America and he was being interviewed on NPR. At the end of the interview, he stated his name and age in this very simple way and when he said his name and age, I felt this deep sympathy with him. Like I remember thinking this person is so small and I am so small. Like this pure feeling of survival and I knew that maybe not at that point, but at some point, I would be able to get through this journey. There's all this fear and dread to living, but the flip side is that you get these moments where it's like you have a direct connection to something divine or something bigger than you that can keep you going. For me, the scary landscape of Florida at night with all of its overgrown lushness, the heat, the alcohol and the radio and my sister texting me that her baby was coming--all of that came together in this poem. So, I guess the poem is a landscape and a portrait of that.
Maurice: Speaking of deep sympathy and things that hurt, I had the good fortune to read your brilliant new novel Assia, which I blurbed. It's about Assia Wevill who began a relationship with the husband of poet Sylvia Plath. That story on its face is so sensational--several people died--yet, I'm struck by how you avoid all cliches in your presentation of Assia. She is no homewrecker, but a mother, poet, and person trying to navigate her own difficulties. How did you decide to take on this story and what did you want to do with it?
Sandra: I feel like I was called to her story on some deep level. When I started doing the research at Emory, I couldn't help feeling a deep connection to Assia. Not the murder and suicide, but the history of the Holocaust because my grandparents were Turkish Jews who survived the Holocaust in France, so I believe I have an almost intuitive grasp of intergenerational trauma and I do feel that we carry this weight in our bodies and our minds. To me, Assia's story can't be separated from the Holocaust, the greatest tragedy of the 20th century, the genocide--all of that. I wanted to give her a voice in that story--and I wanted that voice to be about art, love, tragedy, and history. To give someone agency and voice, to make the character complex, you have to try to break through those clichés because, at the end of the day, no one is a cliché. People are complex and their lives are complicated, and we are often prisoners of time and history. But to give someone a voice is to give them dignity and that is, I hope, an act of grace.
Maurice: I can feel that connection between Assia's personal history and her communal history. She is so determined to do something with her life for herself. She's running toward something rather than away when she enters that household. Do you find that your own intuitive grasp of those traumas has been a central part of your work? Or do you write from another angle entirely?
Sandra: I think sometimes we have no idea what we are running into or writing into? At the same time, so much of what we write is about our past lives, desires combined with the force of imagination, and pondering alternate histories "what if?" is such a powerful and important question. So, I think I write with a combination of the personal, political, imaginative questioning/ thinking, feeling. We are contending with oblivion on some fundamental level, and we are all, in some sense, small, at the mercy of these historical forces--we were born into them---what can we do? We get swept away! Good thing we have art to mark time in those waters.
Maurice: "Contending with oblivion" is such a vibe. I suppose art is the antidote. What does writing feel like to you when it's going well? Do you feel a rush that you can't ignore or do you disappear and then realize hours have passed?
Sandra: I feel like when writing is going well, it's like I'm in another world. Time and even being in a body---none of it matters. I just turn all of my attention to what is in front of me--the language that's pulling me forward. It's really amazing. Better than any drug!
Maurice: Thank you so much, Sandra. It was a pleasure talking to you!