Interview Conducted by Anna Vaughn
Photo Caption: Sandra Beasley
Photo Source: https://sbeasley.blogspot.com/
Sandra Beasley read poetry and creative non-fiction during her reading for the Prout Reading Series, which occurred on March 13th, 2025. During Sandra’s visit, she sat down with MAR Assistant Editor Anna Vaughn for an interview at Bangkok Kitchen (some of the best Thai food in N.E. Ohio.) That interview is found below.
Interviewer: What typically motivates you to write?
Sandra Beasley: When I’m thinking about what motivates us to write, the first thing that comes to my mind is the practical reality that sometimes there are pained or anxious students who go into a meeting with their teachers and say “I’m just not really sure that I want to be a writer…” and usually the answer to that is, Then, for God’s sake, run as fast as you can, because being a writer is a grueling thing.
Being a writer has lots of joy and lots of fun, but you have to be super open to repeated rejection, persevering, sending out, and not making enough money for the labor or the care that you put in—sometimes even sabotage or disappointment—and certainly, the vulnerability and the hurt feelings of those around you. Being a writer will kick your butt. So, if you don’t wake up in the morning and feel, at least some days, like it is the thing you have to do, that it’s the only thing you can be, then don’t turn yourself inside out trying to make yourself a writer.
I write the pieces when I can’t not write them. I go for long stretches without writing. I am not a 4 a.m. “daily” writer—it’s just not a good practice for me. If that does work for someone, great. Most of the time when I have written a poem or essay, it is out of a kind of essential need to work something out on the page, or to express myself in terms of a strong emotion, or capture a memory before I think it’s going to lose its specificity. Writing out of emotional urgency is a time-honored tradition and it’s important and powerful. But it is important to then bring in that level of revision, getting distance from something, and not treating writing as a purely therapeutic act if you then intend to push towards publishing.
If you’re writing for yourself as your only audience, great. If you’re writing expecting or asking for the audience of others, you owe it to them as part of a social pact to think critically about the work and to not have that kind of unfettered stream of consciousness. Both parts are important. Writing out of essential emotion is important, but that distance is also critical. Creative writing does live in academia and there are so many of us that are in a position interacting with each other not just as “mentors” and “mentees,” but as teachers and students in a work environment. I think it’s important to honor those boundaries and be up front about that.
So, when you’re out of academia, as I am—and you think about writing from the essential moment—I have to ask myself, “so I got this down, now what? What is going to be the way that I professionalize my gaze?” Sometimes that’s getting excited about a particular magazine to send to, a particular contest opportunity; sometimes it’s about going to an open mic and reading and trying to really pay attention to my internal processing. Where do I feel it failing? Where do I see the audience struggling to connect? What do people say to me afterwards? I just try to take all of that really seriously.
Interviewer: My follow-up question is why and how did you start writing?
Sandra Beasley: I had a wonderful influence in my life at a very young age. Her name was Rose MacMurray, and she was known as the “poetry lady” of Fairfax County public schools in Virginia. I was selected—probably somewhat randomly—but all the way back in elementary school, I was getting opportunities to get out of the classroom, maybe once a week or once a month, and do poetry workshops with Rose MacMurray.
I’m not 100% sure but I think it’s very possible she was donating her time. If she was getting paid, it wasn’t much. She was a local poet and just having someone stand in front of us and claim that identity and be very serious about her work as a contemporary writer meant a lot. Her prompts were great, super creative, she had us writing poems in shapes to describe the content of the poem; she had us responding to postcards like ekphrasis, she had us reading Edgar Allan Poe. She had us reading these kinds of moody, sophisticated, musical poets from the get-go.
So, when you are fortunate enough to cross paths with someone who is both really enthusiastic and really sophisticated, early on, I thought: “oh, that’s a thing you can be in the world—and I want to do that.” Unfortunately, I missed my opportunity to tell Rose MacMurray how much her teaching had meant to me, but I’m still in touch with her daughter, and in fact just emailed with her and her husband this past month.
Interviewer: Interesting, it’s nice to still be in contact with past influences or mentors. So, I’ve hear you describe a poet, or really the process of writing a poem, as like an oyster, where a poem begins with a little bit of irritant grit that enters the shell, the oyster or poet is trying to protect itself from the grit so it coats it over and over again, but always ends up as a pearl—
Sandra Beasley: It doesn’t always end up as a pearl. Sometimes, there are some duds.
Interviewer: That’s very true. I still believe it is a beautiful way to describe poetry and the process of writing a poem. Is your process of writing nonfiction similar or different to the oyster process of a poem?
Sandra Beasley: I would honestly say that I have to be wary of that approach to nonfiction, because sometimes when I try to build it up as an oyster—I want to be honest here about my bias with nonfiction—I like larger, robust essays. Not all the time; I write flash occasionally. But I like big essays with arguments and ideas and, if I use the oyster strategy to build an idea for a nonfiction piece, what I can usually get it to being is a highly lyric, entertaining flash piece of 500 words or less. As I try to go beyond that, I start seeing filler come in. It would be like using the oyster principle to build an oyster the size of a bowling ball; at some point it just gets weird.
I’ve gone on the record as thinking of nonfiction more like an egg. That’s in part to honor what I have said about myself, which is that I’m both a perfectionist and a procrastinator. The “egg principle” is you’ve got this fertile holding space of a story, which you probably experienced in real life, and realized immediately could make for a nonfiction piece. It’s hard because in its “egg” form it’s perfect, and you think, this is going to make the best essay. If you leave it in that form, it stays forever perfect and forever unrealized. That’s the biggest struggle for me with nonfiction—a commitment to the mess, a commitment to the broken egg, that is necessary.
Poems, I can look back and, in every draft, typically find something that I love about the poem. Frequently, with nonfiction there will be an intermediary draft where I just hate it. I really don’t see the value in what I’m writing, in that moment, and I have to maintain some kind of fortitude, or at least patience, and pull it back towards something that I’m proud of.
Interviewer: So now we have an egg instead of an oyster. That’s wonderful. I listened to your reading of “Let Me Count the Waves” and absolutely love your ability to incorporate humor into a poem that is surrounded by beautiful language and imagery. Is there any advice you can give to writers about using humor in writing?
Sandra Beasley: One thing to remember is that successful delivery of humor—and the few friends I have who are either comedians or do full-time comedic writing have confirmed this—successful humor delivery is as much about the music of phrasing, and very specific things about how something is phrased, where the breath is, how a completing phrase is delivered or landed, that almost has as much to do with the audience reaction as the idea behind the joke or the idea behind the humor. So, that’s the first thing to remember is that it’s virtually impossible to land humor without musicality.
The second thing is just the importance of honoring your reaction to the thing that you find funny and giving that reaction space. Sometimes that ends up needing to be edited out, but sometimes it’s that secondary beat of reaction or reflection on the thing that inspired you to think there could be a joke here. That is what helps the audience experience the humor. We have this tendency to think that our job is to “snapshot.” It’s a little bit like ekphrasis—it’s the problem with ekphrasis. A lot of well meaning, but failed, ekphrastic poems just try to replicate the aspiring artwork as dutifully as possible. All that does is make someone wish they were there in the museum gallery with the actual artwork.
Same thing with humor. If you simply try to replicate with exactitude the sequence of events that you thought was funny, at best case scenario they’re going to wish they were there to see that. They’re not going to actually be able to laugh along. You have to include the reflection, and the reaction, and the layering of detail, in order to make it work.
Interviewer: That’s really helpful. I often think about using comedy to reflect on childhood events or to merge it with other memories. I struggle to combine these two themes or ideas in my writing and hearing you describe how to express certain events to readers through humor is something that will stay with me for a long while.
Sandra Beasley: Since you mentioned “Count the Waves” as a premise poem, even under the best circumstances, not everyone is going to get your joke—even when you successfully land it. That poem was submitted as part of a chapbook’s worth of sestinas to some editors. They accepted every poem in the packet that I sent them except that one. That poem, they didn’t want. The humor of that one was different than the others. I had some humor in the other poems, but it was all very earnest, and this one had a kind of meta, slightly sarcastic, ironic quality. And that ended up being essentially the start of a next book, and a poem that Poetry magazine not only accepted but gave a prize to. So it just is a great reminder that when humor works strongly, it’s not going to be equally appealing to everyone.
Interviewer: That’s true. I’ve also heard you mention your interest in writing poems about specific research topics and sharing that history through creativity. What advice can you give to other writers on writing creative works that incorporate some kind of historical background or researched topic?
Sandra Beasley: If you’re writing a poem that is specifically drawing on a particular historic context, you want to get to the point where your vocabulary is saturated with the language: the objects and the verbs that would have been appropriate to that context. Consider keeping—in addition to a working draft document—a matching document that is just a kind of “word bank” or idea bank. Stock things that come to you through research that you find interesting, even if you don’t necessarily know where they are going to fit yet. You can constantly tuck those things away so that, in the moment, you can sub them in as organically as possible.
This is not a strong example, because it is not historically accurate by any means, but in the poem “Another Failed Poem About the Greeks” I have this figure from Greek classical myth show up in this contemporary setting. When I first drafted that poem, I had a vision in my head, but I had not done research in advance and so I ended up using placeholder language of 21st century American vernacular. But then I figured, “ok, it’s not going to be ‘quarters’ it’s going to be ‘drachmas.’” Trying to get the little substitutions that could give it some grit of reality.
I do want to caution, though, that I do not consider myself a poet of historical persona. I honor and admire the people who dedicate whole book-length projects to capturing a historical moment or a set of events, but I don’t think it’s a destination I am drawn to. I think that we’ve learned, as a community, that a lot of times you can’t create those big comprehensive historical landscapes without doing at least some representation of others that borders on appropriation. We are in a moment where there is often resistance to those projects, because of those concerns about embedded identity presumptions, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. There are wonderful exceptions to that. Paisley Rekdal’s recent book, West: A Translation, on the Chinese workers who built the railroad lines, is a great example.
Interviewer: I just find the research approach to writing poetry so interesting because just thinking about poetry in a similar way to conducting research seems challenging but freeing in the sense that we might research something to fit into a creative work rather than to write with a prompt. I find that fascinating. So, in 2011 you published Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life which has been called a memoir that grapples your own experience with allergies and allergic reactions with how society deals with them. How do you decipher between various creative nonfiction categories, such as memoir or a personal essay, in your writing or while writing?
Sandra Beasley: I wanted to write a cultural history informed by bits of memoir because, frankly, I wasn’t sure how my family or I felt about me writing a full-fledged memoir. That felt vulnerable, very self-indulgent. But I was prepared to take on the level of research that I thought would make for a good cultural history. Then I got into the actual project, and I discovered: A) my publisher really wanted a memoir—that’s what they knew how to market and sell, and B) some of the resources I thought I would be able to find for a cultural history were really hard to find, because of factors such as the fact that the word “allergy” was not coined until the very top of the 1900s. If you go earlier than that, you can’t keyword search. You can figure it out, but you’re not going to find a neat history.
When I couldn’t find some of the resources I thought I’d be able to, I had to pivot and lean into the memoir. I still used cultural history as an anchor, chapter by chapter. I organized it in a way where I could, for each chapter, associate memoir elements that fell into approximately chronological order; so, you watch me “grow up” over the course of that book. In terms of my current book project, I have individually published—and anticipate continuing to publish—everything as personal essays, but I may want the whole to read as a memoir, and that’s really hard.
Someone once told me that they thought that ‘personal essays’ are where you have a sustained first-person narrator, but the things that most interest that narrator are always the things going on around them. Whereas, in a memoir, the difference is that things go on around the narrator, but the thing that is most important is developing the record of their internal thoughts, the ego, and the development and journey of that narrator. That was how that author differentiated what made for a personal essay versus what made for a memoir. I don’t know if that’s true; I just know I’m still quoting it eight years later.
It is a struggle, parsing personal essay from memoir, and I think that with memoir, one thing that I think about a lot is developing other characters on the page. You have a responsibility to fully develop a cast of characters, not just You and ‘a bunch of people who get mentioned maybe once.’ A lot of people, when they’re writing memoir, forget to develop the other people. Even though, in our actual everyday lives, the other people are huge.
In Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl, I had to think about that with my mother; I had to think about that with the romantic partner I had at the time; I had to think about that with a couple of close friendships. In the work that I’m doing now I’m thinking about that with my husband; making sure that he exists on the page as a fully rounded person, and not just a catalyst for crisis because he got sick. He has a lot of dimensions beyond that, and I have to make sure that all of those are captured.
Interviewer: I watched your interview with Kyle Dargan where you briefly mention some of the current projects you are working on that you stated deals with the medicalized body and life. You also mention that part of your reasoning for writing nonfiction is to allow you a larger space to explore science, medicine, and a sort of backstory. Would you share more about exploring your experiences with allergies/food through writing in nonfiction forms, and how this genre allows you to explore through this topic compared to poetry?
Sandra Beasley: The biggest thing that I am struggling with, in my current project, is that I can’t write my husband’s story. There are limits to which I can even write the story of “our marriage.” I can only write my story. I’ve really had to struggle to recenter myself in my own part of the narrative. What’s funny is, this is a microcosm of something that anybody who’s ever been thrust into a caregiving role struggles with. Not as a creative writer, not on the page, but just in life. How do I recenter myself?
People would ask me, in the first months after my husband had been in the hospital, “what are you doing for you today?” I hated that question. I thought that was such a bullshit question. They meant well. The fact that I couldn’t even fathom answering that question was an indicator of just how far away I had gotten from being centered in my own story. I was frustrated by the question—but it was really more my problem, not theirs.
I wrote my own story as truthfully as I could in Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl. It was a memoir. It was not a manual. I acknowledged a lot of moments that I’m aware was not “best practices,” but it’s what I did; so, it’s what I’m going to share that I did.
Then I had a reckoning, particularly as a poet, but also as a person, thinking about food allergy as disability. I became more engaged and, I hope, will continue to be more outspoken about disability. Now, as I continue writing about it, I’m just thinking through what does it mean to be older, mature, what does it mean to live with a lifelong and therefore essentially chronic condition? How does it affect how I interact with others? Where can I take responsible risks and make compromises?
Because of my husband’s medical needs, we now have eggs and dairy in the house, which are dangerous food allergens for me. I had many years where I was able to just say no. That would be fine if it wasn’t hurting someone else, but now it would be hurting him to not have those available. So now, I am in a situation where my needs and his needs have to make peace with one another. Even though it is sometimes scary to me to have dirty dishes in the sink that have something that could cause me an allergic reaction, I’ve got to make peace with that.
The fact that I have the allergies that I do is relevant to choosing not to have kids. I am fine with that choice; I feel good about that choice. But it’s something that when I discuss it with others, I notice sometimes makes them uncomfortable, especially parents with food allergic children. If I say that food allergies are something that shaped the choice for me, perhaps their thoughts immediately go to whether it’s true for their own kids. It’s a delicate thing.
I hope that the book that I’m working on now takes all the experience, life, and knowledge of that first memoir and just complicates it. Just honors the complication. Someone who’s a best friend in the first book, on a practical level, doesn’t exist in the second book because she ghosted me. That’s the reality. Best friendships sometimes end suddenly. We have to own these more bitter-sweet elements and, yet, somehow maintain a sense of humor about it.
Interviewer: My last question is what is the importance of poetry in your life and how would you describe the importance of poetry to emerging poets?
Sandra Beasley: Poetry gives me a lot of hope and a lot of refuge. I always know, with a few rare exceptions, that I will have a good time in the company of poets. They really are a group that for the most part is creative, and understands scarcity, and understands service, and understands the importance of capturing the individual experience even when it creates a moment of discomfort or clash with others. It’s a group that I’m really proud of associating with.
It’s also important for a love of poetry to not be equated with a love of hearing your own voice. I’m always delighted to meet people who love poetry but are not themselves poets. I’m in alliance with, and respectful of, poets who go through long periods of time believing that theirs is not the voice that needs to be heard.
I think, particularly when you’re coming out of academia, there is so much pressure to go, go, go. Either if you’re faculty looking to get the next book to help secure your job position, or if you’re a student ready to get your work out into the world. All of that’s good, but I hope that people live long enough and work long enough to also have some period, for whatever life reason, in which they realize, “I don’t need to publish poetry in this time. And I’m still a poet. And I still love poetry.”
I continue to marvel at the variety of poetry that’s being published. Not only in America today, but internationally. World poetry is where it’s at. If you’re not reading poets in translation, you’re missing out so much. I’ve done a handful of things where I’m judging or reading large selections of manuscripts, submission pools numbering in the hundreds. It never fails to amaze me how many different things are going on in poetry.
Interviewer: Thank you for your time.