Today we’d like to introduce you to Sarah Blackman.
Hi Sarah, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
I have always considered myself a writer. That sounds arrogant, but I mean it literally. My parents were both scientists, archeologists with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. before their retirement, and something that was very clear to both me and my sister in our childhood was that a happy life meant that your vocation and your avocation needed to be related. For my mom and dad that meant a life immersed in the stories that data could tell–the picture of how people walked and talked and raised their families and made their living in humanity’s ancient past that could be teased out by looking at the amassed materials they left behind. For me that meant a life immersed in the stories that words could tell of the world I saw around me–making educated guesses not about where I came from down the long line of human ancestry, but rather educated guesses about where I was right now and who was around me; how they lived; how they thought; what else other than what I could already see around me was possible. Not that I necessarily thought this way when I was a little kid, but I was writing this way. Before I could physically make the letters, I was dictating stories to my parents. Before I had any idea what publication was, I was filling notebooks with stories and poems whose purpose was solely the act of telling.
I’m saying, I guess, that for me avocation was the joy and bringing that joy into a vocation that would put a roof over my head, give me food to eat, help me support my family, that was the thing to figure out.
I came to Greenville, South Carolina in 2008 with my partner, the poet John Pursley III, to take the creative writing position at the Fine Arts Center–South Carolina’s oldest public arts magnet high school. I had no intention of staying. I had no intention of teaching high school; it had literally never occurred to me. I had spent the last five years in Tuscaloosa, Alabama earning my MFA in fiction and teaching as a GTA and then an Instructor in the University of Alabama’s English department. I liked teaching college well enough. I loved talking about the literature and was delighted when I had a handful of students every semester who were willing to add to the conversation, but mostly college teaching at the level I was doing it felt like holding out a platter of the ripest fruits and most choice delicacies the world had to offer only to have your company look around for the Chick Fil A. It was disheartening, but it was what I had to do in order to keep the roof over my head, the food on my plate while I did what I really wanted to do–write and write and write and write.
I had no expectation that teaching high school would be any different–even in such a beautifully appointed and clearly iconoclastic place as the Fine Arts Center. Imagine my surprise when, just a couple of months in, I realized I LOVED teaching high school; that this was the kind of marriage between my avocation and my vocation that my mother had always told me to look for. The students were intellectually adventurous, flexible in their thinking, full of the energy needed to engage in art rather than merely dissect it for a grade. Their work was studded with potential and I found my own work rising to meet their limitless sense of possibility. That was sixteen years ago and I still feel the same way which each passing class and each new topic I choose to teach. So we stayed. John took a position at Clemson University where he runs the Clemson Literary Festival and teaches creative writing and literature. We bought a house. We had two children. We made Greenville home.
Professionally in that time, I’ve published two books–Mother Box and Other Tales (2012) and Hex (2016) both of which came out with FC2, a small, not-for-profit publisher run by authors which considers itself a hub for artistically adventurous, non-traditional fiction and was founded in 1974 (coincidentally, the same year as the Fine Arts Center; hooray for the 70s!). My work has appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including The Georgia Review, American Poetry Review, Conjunctions, Zoetrope and the Yale Review, among many others. In 2018, I joined the editorial board of FC2 and also serve as fiction editor at DIAGRAM, an online magazine for experimental prose, poetry and schematics; Cherry Tree, the literary magazine of my alma mater, Washington College; and am a fiction reviewer for Kirkus; an international examiner for the Master’s Program at Rhodes University in Grahamtown, South Africa; and the founding editor of Crashtest, an online journal for high school age writers and artists that I started with my students at the Fine Arts Center in 2010. I have two manuscripts out for consideration now, represented by my agents Jackie Ko and Kristi Murray at the Wylie Agency, and am working on the first installation of a murder mystery series under my pen name, H.L. Hanley. To say I am artistically busy feels like an understatement, but, because my avocation and my vocation are wed, I feel like I am artistically full rather than harried or overextended. I am exactly where I want to be.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Roads are never smooth, not even Roman ones. There have been tons of professional disappointments along the way–books that didn’t get the critical attention I thought they could, manuscripts that didn’t pan out in spite of years of fiddling. It is hard to balance parenting, working and art making and, when my children were very young, I often felt like the creative energy I needed to make a story was the exact same energy I was putting into keeping them alive and loved and able to take the next steps of their childhood on their own. I mean that literally. I could feel, sometimes, the golden thread of my self unspooling into them and it was beautiful and right but it also took my artistic breath away. For a long time, I could only make work in fits and starts and that was hard to get used to. Now that they are older, I miss those days, of course, but I remember something my friend, fellow FAC teacher and enamellist, Katy Cassells, told me at the time. She has two children of her own, stair-stepped above mine, and she said to envision your life as a pie and think of it in its totality. The wedge of the pie where your children were very young was such a tiny sliver in the whole thing that giving it away shouldn’t be a frustration but an invitation, like, “Here, have a taste. It’s so good. There’s so much left.” She also said it was alright to be frustrated which was a gift in and of itself coming from a fellow artist who had also chosen to become a mother. There is nothing I would have done differently, but even when you are wholeheartedly delighted to be a mother it is a boon not to be judged for your more prickly feelings about motherhood.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
My work is experimental in its form and, often, in its subject. That means that my short stories and novels don’t often follow a progression that readers might expect from work that is more straightforward in its narrative aims. I consider my work akin to domestic surrealism where elements of the familiar world are exactly what are so strange, but it is also heavily character driven and, more and more as I get older, dominated by the feminine: ways women live in the world, ways the world lives in women. It’s feminist, sure; but I think all literature that demands humanity from its characters (all of its characters) is feminist in that it acknowledges human equality. My writing is more specifically interested not in asserting equality or examining an approach to gender through art (though those are obviously elements) but in pushing deeper and deeper into the endless inner space of every human until you push through into something even stranger than being a person. I love Emily Dickenson’s long dashes because I think that is a place in her poetry where something you cannot describe looks back at you. I try to do something like that in my own work.
I am most proud of the fact that each book I finish is the best book I have ever written, until I start the next one. I think a certain restlessness of spirit is pretty vital to making art, but I also think art in all its forms is the most basic element of human nature. We are makers, everyone of us. It’s in our DNA. Denying that–like all those folks who proudly state, “Now, I don’t have a creative bone in my body…”–is a political act meant to divide something essential about humanity into parcels that are more easily divvied and controlled.
What was your favorite childhood memory?
This is not my favorite memory because it was happy, but it is my favorite because it is very funny and I think a pretty honest representation of who I was, and still am.
I was walking home from school, probably about the fourth grade. Two middle school kids whose buses had let them off at the elementary were walking behind me. They were talking to each other and maybe making funny of me a little because I was younger than them and happened to be in their line of sight. This made me anxious so I decided to prove I was no laughing matter. Deep in my own world, as I was/am most of the time, I ignored all plausible physics or prior evidence of my physical skills and took off running at top speed towards a big sycamore tree that was growing at the bottom of the hill. When I got to it, I intended to run up the side of the tree, do a backflip and land facing the scornful middle schoolers, who would then see the error of their ways. What happened instead was that I ran full tilt into a tree, kind of hoisted myself a few feet up its trunk and then fell flat on my back at their feet. They were stunned into silence. Sensing this was not the silence of awe, I fixed the matter by leaping to my feet and thrusting my arm up into the air for the red tailed hawk I was convinced followed me everywhere I went because it recognized my kindred spirit (it was a leafy suburban neighborhood; there were hawks everywhere; they were not interested in me) and shouted “To me!” Needless to say, the hawk failed to materialize and enact vengeance; the middle schoolers almost wet themselves laughing and are probably telling the story still; I was humiliated, but learned nothing from my mistakes. Telling the story now makes me laugh so hard I cry. My kids are appropriately horrified for me.
Contact Info:
- Website: sarahblackmanauthor.com
- Other: https://crashtestmag.com/
