Poet and essayist Jenny Sadre-Orafai’s Dear Outsiders (University of Akron Press) is an evocative collection of prose poems about childhood, memory, and survival, each of them working together in service of a larger story. It’s a story about the body and its ecologies, about the topography of trauma and landscape, about how we learn to navigate both in the ravages of grief.
The dreamlike poems in Dear Outsiders introduce us to sibling speakers: the narrative voice, a chorus of two. They take us from the tourist beach town where they grew up, teeming with flora and fauna, to the mountains and deep woods where they struggle to survive profound loss.
Jessica Q. Stark describes Dear Outsiders as “a lamentation, an intimate catalog, an off-script map that mimes the chaotic regularity of the big, wide sea . . . where the mysteriousness of nature lives within the details of the human body, in the intricacies of our most intimate relationships across time.”
Sadre-Orafai teaches creative writing at Kennesaw State University. She co-founded and co-edits the poetry journal Josephine Quarterly and is the author of three previous collections, Paper Cotton Leather, Malak, and Book of Levitations, which she co-wrote with Anne Champion.
I spoke with Sadre-Orafai over Zoom about the shape of narrative and the nature of belonging, about how writing poems can turn us into cartographers of our own broken hearts.
***
The Rumpus: When did this book begin to take shape for you? At what point, when you’re working on poems, do you feel the poems begin to speak to each other?
Jenny Sadre-Orafai: I had taken them to Tin House in 2012, worked with Matthew Zapruder, and that was an amazing experience. I was kind of playing around with them, and my intent was to work on them at Hambidge. I got there. I hung them all up on the walls, and I was just really unsatisfied with them. I wasn’t happy with where they were going. I felt really disconnected from them. Already, just a couple of days in, the isolation of being in a residency was really starting to affect me psychologically. It was very disorienting.
The phone at Hambidge doesn’t dial out, but people can call in. My dad called me early one morning, and I told him that I was struggling with the poems that I brought. He told me to write about what I was afraid of. I hung up, and I just started writing about my parents dying. I started writing from this we perspective and this we voice. I think initially, and maybe throughout this whole thing, that was a way to comfort myself so that it wasn’t just me going through this anticipatory grief.
After four or five days, I wrote fifty-five poems or something. They all just kind of came spilling out. I didn’t know the structure of [the collection]. I just thought a lot about environment, and what it felt like to not belong, and how [our] environment can influence the topography of things.
Rumpus: Unlike a lot of poetry collections, which might have a theme or an image that ties them together, this one has a narrative arc. Can you speak a little bit about the shape of that arc? When you were putting the poems together, where were you wanting readers to begin? Where was it that you had hoped we would end?
Sadre-Orafai: Even though my other poetry collections don’t have narrative arcs, I think that I’m always mindful of wanting the reader to not have their footing at the beginning of a collection and really not have their footing at the end. That’s a gamble, a risk. The biggest risk is at the beginning, not having that footing, that grounding, because then the reader may not feel compelled to invest or to interact with the book at all.
It is important for me, for this collection and all my collections, to kind of end in an ambiguous place. I think about film a lot. The films that really stick with me and make me think about them long after I’ve watched them, end in a surprising place, a quiet place. I wanted this collection to do that. My intent for the poems was that they feel very hazy, like you’ve been out in the sun too long, like you’re a little dizzy. Because of that, it was really important to me that it worked chronologically, that that arc would be the grounding.
[The reader doesn’t] know the siblings’ names, their ages, the name of the tourist town, where [the speakers] end up, where that town is, what state, or even what region of the country. There are a lot of unknowns. So, it was my thinking that I could make time, linear time, the thing that would help keep the reader’s feet on the ground.Rumpus: Did you know the place names and the character names, and you willingly withheld them, or were they unknown to you too?
Sadre-Orafai: I love that! I never had names for the siblings, but I did have the mother’s name in there. I don’t think I have the father’s name. Maybe I had ocean names or something, but I scrubbed the collection of all of that.
It’s like this movie, It Follows. I remember watching it in the theater and feeling so disoriented. I didn’t know what the time period was, so I kept looking at the cars. The way it’s shot, it feels like the ’70s or ’80s, but there’s nothing there. They have this one scene where one of the characters has a clamshell-shaped e-reader, like it’s purposely trying to create this other world, to leave you very disoriented. I loved that feeling. I really wanted that to happen in the book too.
Rumpus: You’re giving us all these details that tell the reader “Okay, I’m at a beach. I’m in the mountains. I’m in a classroom.” But despite all that, there’s still a lingering sense of dislocation. I think that shows that it’s not just about description, describing place, when it comes to situating a reader. It takes more than the name of an ocean for someone to feel located somewhere. When I first started reading Dear Outsiders, I felt like the speaker could be two different people speaking, two different siblings speaking to us, or to each other, but it also feels like a cleaving of one person into two selves, one person talking to this twinned part of themselves. How did this voice reveal itself?
Sadre-Orafai: I used the we voice hoping to draw the reader in and make them feel even more that this is happening to them. They are going through this trauma, this devastation. That was part of my decision to not write from a singular first-person point of view.
At first, I just became these two people. I think your reading of [the book] is very accurate, this cleaving of the self. They came through with the we voice. It was never I maybe because it was just too hard to write about imagining my parents dying, from my perspective. I had to put it in characters. The characters had to go through that.
Because the poems all came out so fast, it was also really easy to stay in that meditative state, writing from that perspective. When I put them away, it was really, really difficult to get back into that mindset. So I went to beach towns again, watched tourists while I was a tourist. I did a lot of reading, army survival guides, things about making medicines out of plants. I went to watch somebody make tinctures in this cabin. That was my way of getting back into who they were.
Rumpus: For the second half of the book, these characters are learning how to survive an emotional catastrophe, not a natural catastrophe. They think they’re trying to survive a place, when really, they’re trying to survive this thing inside of themselves. I read it as a projection of their trauma and fear onto the landscape. Was that the intention?
Sadre-Orafai: Absolutely. It’s a distraction: “Let me learn all these things about plants. Let me learn all about divining water. Let me get a handle on this [place], and then somehow I don’t have to deal with the grief of my parents, the absence of my parents.”
Rumpus: In Dear Outsiders, readers have the sea and the beach town as one landscape, and the mountains and the woods as the other. The body also serves as a landscape in some of these poems. One of the poems asks, “What is a body?” which poses an interesting textual connection between the human body and body of water. As I was navigating my way through the poems, I was wondering what thoughts you were having about place, body, and landscape?
Sadre-Orafai: For me, water is calming. It is, in my mind, restorative, purifying. Most of my trauma, the traumatic experiences I’ve had in my life, have taken place near mountains and on land. This makes water a safe place for me. The mountains were just a way of me really putting myself into a space that felt dangerous to me.
I love coming-of-age novels and films because they’re all about exploration. In the first half of the book, in “Occupation Interview,” the siblings get “astronaut” as a suggestion for their future career. An astronaut is an explorer. They are adventurers. I think they certainly see that in themselves. Even in their beach town, they’re excavating and trying to learn things. This serves them when they get in an unfamiliar environment, in the second half of the book. So much of being a poet and a writer is also about exploration. In that way, I felt very tied to the siblings. As the book progresses, too, my aim was to have them trying to figure out who they were within the environment they were raised and then outside of that environment. I really wanted them to become more animal in that second half. In my experience, I become more animal when I’m grieving.
Rumpus: Was there an awareness, as you were putting the book together, that our environments shape us, this idea that the places we live actually raise us, just as a parent would?
Sadre-Orafai: I don’t know that I was conscious of it at first, but I definitely was thinking how we are a product of both. For me, growing up in the [American] South my whole life, living in the South, I felt like I didn’t belong, but my family? I felt I belonged inside my family. My parents loved me, even amidst these messages that I was receiving: “You’re where we live. You don’t live here. You’re not from here.”
I also think about how when you’re in a tourist town because I grew up in Chattanooga, I think that there’s this performative aspect, as the person who lives there. You’re being sized up in a way. People are primarily coming there to see an attraction or the environment, but they’re also trying to make sense of things and orient themselves. As someone who lives in that town, there’s this kind of feeling that I am the representative of this place.
For me, I’ve never felt like I belonged anywhere I’ve lived, ever. I’ve lived in Georgia now for twenty-two years, and still when people ask me where I’m from, I don’t really know what the answer is. I feel very unmoored from place. I don’t feel that way about my family. I feel like I belong to my family.
Rumpus: The poems in the first half of the book are so different, in texture and tenor, than the ones in the second half. Can you talk about the difference in writing the poems from the first half of the book, compared to the second?
Sadre-Orafai: The first half [of the book] was much easier to write. It was more hopeful. The parents hadn’t passed away yet. The siblings, or the speakers, felt younger. They weren’t jaded yet. They weren’t as fearful. That was more fun to write.
The second half was just more difficult. It was written from a more autobiographical place, and so in that way, it was definitely more uncomfortable to write but more familiar.
Rumpus: Did writing these poems, finishing these poems, make you feel less afraid of losing your parents than when you started?
Sadre-Orafai: No. Not at all. I think it made it worse, actually.
Rumpus: People sometimes assume that writing about hard things, like grief, is cathartic, and that when writers are done, those fears are exorcized from us because they’re on a page, externalized. But we’re never not contending with them. Writing is more a way to navigate the grief. It gives us a map. What do you think?
Sadre-Orafai: Ever since I was really young, I’ve always dealt with anticipatory grief. Whenever I learned that my parents would die, I was consumed with that. One thing about anticipatory grief, or catastrophic thinking, though not in the case of my parents necessarily, is that when it finally happens, it doesn’t injure me as much, because I’ve already experienced it in my body. That’s the only positive, or benefit, of living in that kind of space.
Rumpus: Do the voices of these narrators and their grief still linger with you? Or do they feel gone from you now?
Sadre-Orafai: They linger. That anticipatory grief is always there.
***
Author photo courtesy of Jenny Sadre-Orafai
