Thursdays are dedicated to connecting with our contributors showing where they have been, where they are now, and what’s up for the future.
Name: Sara Henning
Title of Pieces Published in Sweet: “How to Pray Like a Girl“
Issues: 5.2
Find Her:
These days, Sara lives in Texas, teach at Stephen F. Austin State University, and serve as poetry editor for Stephen F. Austin State University Press.
Find out more about Sara on her website.
What are some major accomplishments you have had since your Sweet publication?
So much has happened to me since “How to Pray Like a Girl” was published–personally, literarily, and existentially–but perhaps the coolest thing is that my collection of poetry, View From True North (Southern Illinois University Press, 2018), won the 2017 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award. Adrian Matejka chose two winners that year–me and Monica Berlin. My book went on to win the 2019 High Plains Book Award Poetry and to be shortlisted for the 2018 Julie Suk Award. Diane Seuss blew my mind when wrote about my book, “Henning’s ravishing music is in revolt against the trauma of the book’s narrative, just as her sonnet sequences provide the ballast of history, of virtuosity. Sara Henning, a ‘trickster,’ ‘an heiress of disaster,’ has composed a radical masterpiece.”
Can you tell us about a current/ongoing project that you’re excited about?
Yes! I just finished up edits for my third book manuscript, Terra Incognita, a collection of poems focused around grief and the manner in which we pathologize the unknown. Latin for “unknown land,” Terra Incognita is a term used by cartographers to describe terrains that have been unmapped or otherwise undocumented. My objective for these poems is to explore and resolve the paradoxes of grief and its assimilation, weaving together my mother’s death from cancer, her mental illness, my husband’s hospitalizations, and re-occurrent miscarriage. Several poems from the collection won the 2019 George Bogin Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America.
Who is your favorite author?
I love too many to narrow it down, but Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, and Mary Oliver are three poets very close to my heart.
What is your favorite poem/essay/book?
I have too many favorites to name, so I will share two with you. I love Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day,” particularly the question at the end: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” Asking myself that question has helped me to escape a difficult childhood and to work on living my best life in small, beautiful ways. My second choice is Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s “Song.” I don’t believe in perfect poems, but I truly feel that this one is perfect in every way.
What inspires you to write?
I write to understand the world around me and the world inside of me.
What are you reading right now?
I’ve been re-reading Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. I’ve also been spending quite a bit of time with Jane Kenyon’s poems.
What is your favorite sweet? We would love for you to share a recipe or link to place that serves it. Pictures are great, too!
I really love salt water taffy. I was born in Savannah, Georgia, and when I was a little girl, my mom would take us to River Street Sweets, the oldest candy store in the city, where I would watch the folks who worked there stretch it on a 100-year-old taffy machine! My childhood tastes like still-warm taffy, as if you took sugar and mixed it with the sea.
Oh, I have such fond memories of walking down Savannah’s Riverwalk just to go get taffy and pralines for my dad. Always worth the trip!
Thank you, Sara, for taking the time to reconnect with us. We look forward to seeing more of your work in the future!
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