On Home, Longing, and Excavating the Past
A Conversation with Sarah Fawn Montgomery
The best books prompt readers to make connections with their own lives, to see themselves in the characters or narratives, and to feel as though the book could have been, in some small way, written about them. Although I don’t know Sarah Fawn Montgomery personally, it would be safe to say that her life and mine have had different dynamics and trajectories. But as I read essay after essay in her sophomore collection Halfway from Home (Split/Lip Press, 2022), I saw myself in the house she was raised in, in the Nebraskan and New England environments that made her think of her home in California, in the process she undertook contemplating subjects as diverse as time, maps, nostalgia, family relationships, and the nature of writing itself.
There is a phrase that often gets thrown around by writers that says that the more personal a piece of writing is, the more universal it becomes. Montgomery’s essay collection is personal, and if by chance it happens to be universal, it is because Montgomery writes in such a clear and lyrically honest way that it’s difficult not to place yourself in her shoes, to not feel the need to exhume the nuances of the past and shed new light on the truth.
I sat with Sarah Fawn to discuss her newest book, her writing process, and what literature provides in times of need.
Esteban Rodríguez: Thank you so much for your time. I’m so glad to be discussing your new essay collection, Halfway from Home. I wanted to start by looking at “Lessons in Cartography” and the following line: “Like most people, I had to leave a place to realize I loved it.” I grew up in deep south Texas, and a lot of my peers in high school were always keen on stating that they wanted to leave the Rio Grande Valley. I thought I felt the same, too, but as soon I as moved to Austin for college (and subsequently a few years later back to central Texas for work), I realized that my home would never leave me, and there was no point in harboring animosity to the extent that I did when I was younger. How do you define home? Has the definition changed for you over the years?
Sarah Fawn Montgomery: Home for me has always been defined by impermanence. I grew up in a nontraditional working-class family with eight children from different biological families, many adopted from backgrounds of severe trauma and abuse. Growing up, my family landscape changed frequently, as my parents adopted new children every few years, and also took in children, adults, and sometimes entire families experiencing housing insecurities. As a result, home was constantly shifting, and because my father worked in construction, he built rooms inside of rooms to accommodate the growing number of bodies, so that the physical home was always changing.
As a first-generation student, I also moved frequently to pursue higher education, making my home in places I would eventually have to leave. I moved an hour away from home for my undergraduate degree, then a few hours away for my MFA. Later I moved from California to Nebraska to pursue my PhD, and then again to Massachusetts to work as a professor. Education opened up the world to me, but it also took me as far away from home as possible, the entire continent now stretching between my current home and my home of origin.
I’ve long defined home as temporary, as fleeting, as a limited resource. And while that sense of scarcity can be difficult, it has also allowed me to more closely observe and appreciate the wonders of the many places I’ve called home—the monarch groves and tide pools of California, the fossil beds and grass prairies of Nebraska, the scrimshaw shops and tangled forests of Massachusetts.
ER: There are a number of topics here ranging from clocks to maps to the concept of nostalgia, to name a few. What did the research process look like when you were composing this book?
SFM: Research is an important component of writing nonfiction for me because it moves me away from the self and connect my experiences to a larger network of possibilities. While I write memoir and personal essay, research reminds me that I write my stories in order to better serve others. Sometimes research allows me to do this directly, like connecting my stories of moving across America to the history of cartography, or connecting my explorations of impermanence to the rich fossil record of the Midwest. But sometimes research is actually a way for me to uncover how I feel about my experience—learning about how underground forest fungal networks share resources among many species of trees, for example, allowed me to process my grief over our country’s cruel pandemic response, and learning about the psychology of self-perception allowed me to process my aversion to mirrors. While writing Halfway from Home, I allowed myself to pursue my many ideas about everything from nostalgia to clocks, coal mining to declining insect populations. When I research, I gather information like artifacts and then let this curation lead my reflection. The research often comes first and then I filter my experiences through different informational lenses to see how facts shift and shape the stories.
ER: You are the author of three poetry chapbooks, Regenerate: Poems of Mad Women, Leaving Tracks: A Prairie Guide, and The Astronaut Checks His Watch. Do you approach poetry and prose differently, in terms of your process? Has poetry made you a better prose writer? Or vice versa?
SFM: For me genre is quite fluid. I often write about the same subjects across genres, approaching an image or observation in multiple genres at the same time. It is not uncommon for me to write a poem or essay, and sometimes even a piece of fiction, about the same phrase or moment. With poetry, however, I want to focus in on an image or observation, using the text to move the reader closer to the heart or revelation. With nonfiction, on the other hand, I want to expand and explore beyond the image and observation, using the text to move the reader outward to broader explorations and discoveries.
And reading poetry has definitely made me a better prose writer. I primarily read poetry and have found it influences my prose most. There is so much rich work coming out of the poetry community right now that I could sing the praises of many writers. Chen Chen, Anthony Moll, Danez Smith, Dorothy Chan, Torrin A. Greathouse, Donika Kelly, Tiana Clark, Leila Chatti, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Victoria Chang, Ada Limón, and the list goes on!
ER: Halfway from Home is your second nonfiction work, your first being Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir. What have you learned about yourself from the first book of nonfiction to your second?
SFM: Quite Mad was the first time I wrote about mental illness, sexual trauma, and medical sexism. While I had published a fair number of personal essays up to this point, I had never written so explicitly about my experiences, never shared the details of my life with friends and family, let alone readers. The experience of writing and publishing Quite Mad ultimately taught me to trust my story and myself, which are essential for any writer. Doing so empowered me to do the important work of self-reflection and self-exploration that I needed to do in order to write Halfway from Home. The essays in this collection are deeply personal, highly political, and they experiment with craft in ways I was only beginning to explore in my first book. Above all, however, I think my first book taught me that I could claim space on the page, while the second taught me to explore the many ways this space can be utilized.
ER: In an interview I read once, the poet W.S. Di Piero said that when he first started writing, he wrote poems, art criticism, and essays simultaneously because he thought that writers, despite their preferred genre, were meant to express themselves in any way they could. I love the idea that writers don’t have to be bound to one particular genre, style, or subject matter. You’re working very successfully in both poetry and non-fiction, but how did your journey as a writer begin?
SFM: My interest in nonfiction began in high school when an English teacher required our class to keep a creative journal for a summer. As a scholarship kid from a rural working-class town, I couldn’t believe someone would be interested in reading about my dusty town of less than 1,000 people, about my father’s construction work, and about what I thought of the spiders building webs in the lonely corners of my house. None of the literature I’d read featured communities and stories like mine. After reading my journal, my teacher then invited me to keep writing and submitting my work to her throughout the year, and she gave me great stacks of books including nonfiction by Joan Didion, Audrey Lorde, and Virginia Woolf. No one in my family read, let alone owned books, so I treasured these gifts.
I went on to major in English literature in college, where I spent my time searching in vain for literature about communities like mine. Since I never found any, I applied to MFA programs even though I’d never taken a creative writing course. I wanted to write nonfiction because I wanted to claim my existence on the page, wanted to write the true stories of the people I come from. I went on to focus on nonfiction during both my MFA and my PhD, but I am thankful that mentors encouraged me to try other genres along the way.
Graduate programs often ask students to “pick a genre” as though creative writing is as easy as ordering from a menu, but that builds unnecessary constructs around the genres that can limit the ways writers are willing to explore on the page. During my PhD program in nonfiction, I remember thinking I couldn’t possibly write poetry, and yet once I started exploring this genre, I published three poetry collections before my first book of nonfiction was released. Now, Halfway from Home is a collection of lyric essays that are as much poetry as prose. And recently I’ve started writing fiction and have published a handful of stories and drafted a novel.
ER: There are aspects of your personal life here that are quite intimate, especially as it relates to your relationship with your family. In “Descendant,” you say that you “cannot recall a recent family memory that does not involve intoxication.” Alcoholism can no doubt be a sensitive subject, and yet you write about your family’s struggle with drinking in such an understanding and nuanced way. Were there certain moments from the past that you needed to write, despite what it might reveal? How did you envision your family reacting to your work?
SFM: Writing has always been a way to understand my family’s legacies of trauma, violence, and addiction. I write not to expose but empathize. The act of writing nonfiction is one of vulnerability, and so I try to offer my family’s stories the kind of understanding that I hope readers will offer mine. It can be a struggle to determine what stories we are comfortable sharing, especially when they are stories that are not ours alone. The ethical principal that guides me is “First do no harm,” which keeps me from writing for shock or shame, and keeps me focused on writing stories that share or support.
Writing about others is always a risk, but what has helped me over the years is to have open conversations with the people in my life that also appear in my pages. I’ve had conversations with my mother, for example, about how a family story serves the purpose of a piece or fits into a book’s narrative arc. I also discuss with her the craft choices I have for rendering experiences certain ways or the challenges I’ve had while writing. After many years of this, my mother can view my work as a parent but also as a reader. She understands that stories within a family work differently than stories within a book. I also reinforce that we read nonfiction to see the complex, contradictory, even chaotic human experience rendered. Our faults are precisely why readers connect with us, so to sanitize them would be dishonest. And since storytelling often centers on conflict, I like to remind the people in my life that sharing our struggles is a central component of storytelling, but that these struggles are just one facet of our relationship.
ER: Which essay were you most enthused with writing? Which was the most difficult?
SFM: The essays about my father were the most enjoyable, as well as the most painful to write. I wrote Halfway from Home during the early months of the pandemic when I could not go home to see my aging father. I missed him terribly, and writing about our California adventures—digging for treasure, exploring construction sites, searching for tidepools starfish, watching the monarchs gather in the eucalyptus groves each winter for warmth—was a way to be close to him even when I was thousands of miles away in Massachusetts.
Shortly after I finished writing the book, my father was diagnosed with cancer. I knew we did not have much time left and I was desperate to publish the book so I could tell him that he would last forever in my pages. I was fortunate that the collection was accepted quickly, and I was able to call my father in the hospital and tell him I’d sold a collection about our many memories together. My father passed away when I was working on final book edits. The following weeks of grieving while also trying to finish edits were some of the most painful I’ve ever experienced. Essays that were joyful and nostalgic became sorrowful and agonizing. There were many times I did not think I could work on an essay without being crushed by the grief, but I managed because I could think of no greater way to honor my father than to memorialize him through story.
ER: When writing a nonfiction collection of essays, each essay is meant to stand alone, but there is an arc and progression between essays. How did you go about arranging your collection?
SFM: Both the essays and this collection as a whole use collage and mosaic as an organizing principle. I’m interested in this approach to writing about memory and grief because neither are linear. The various segments within a collaged essay do not move linearly, often shifting in place and perspective, and incorporating research, linked through repeating phrases or images and weave together webs of meaning. Organizing the collection worked similarity. Since the collection is about memory and grief, movement and impermanence, it does not move linearly through time or place or a tidy linear arc. Instead, it shifts and cycles, creates links and echoes between essays, uses repeating images of flames, moths, grass roots, burial, and excavation to connect essays across time and space. Writers teach readers how to read a piece or a collection in the opening pages of an essay or book, and the first essays in this collection utilize collage to introduce readers to the mosaic that will organize both the essays and the collection. There is also an essay early the collection about the construct of time itself, which topically and thematically introduces readers to the organizing mechanisms of the collection. I often think of writing as a giant game of Tetris. Whether I’m working to organize the sections of an essay or the essays in a collection, I am typically sitting on the floor, shuffling pieces around to see how placement impacts perception.
ER: In “Excavation,” I found myself returning to the following statement: “We bury the things we believe will define us after death. We bury ourselves for the future. In this way, we write the histories that will prevail.” What things would you like to define you in the future? What things would you like to keep buried?
SFM: I would like to be defined by tenderness, gratitude, and wonder. All things that can be buried by the weight of the world if we are not careful. Much of this essay is about the joy I felt as child digging in my treasure hole with my father and about what we can discover of ourselves, our families, and our histories if we unearth was has been buried with time, with intent, with forgetfulness. I hope to preserve that sense of exploration, of excavating things to appreciate the artifacts of our lives.
There is nothing I would like to keep buried. Regret, pain, and even shame can be dug up from the dark in order to set them into the light. There is no good for me that comes from burying things in order to keep them hidden. I have to examine what has been buried in order to know the self, and over the years, unearthing even the most challenging stories and secrets has allowed me to understand them from many angles and the many selves I’ve been. Excavation is a chance to offer others and ourselves understanding, empathy, and even redemption.
