Interview with Selah Saterstrom
Linda Tate

Selah Saterstrom, an assistant professor of English, came to the University of Denver in 2006. Her first novel, The Pink Institution, was published by Coffee House Press in 2004. In 2007, Coffee House published her second novel, The Meat and Spirit Plan. Her work has also appeared in Bombay Gin, Tarpaulin Sky, The American Book Review, and other periodicals. Saterstrom has been a fellow at The MacDowell Colony, the Case Writer-In-Residence for Western Illinois University, and Artist-In-Residence at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. She also teaches in the Summer Writing Program at Naropa University and at the writers workshop at Centrum in Port Townsend, Washington. More information about Saterstrom can be found at her website: http://www.selahsaterstrom.com.

Linda Tate: Where did you do your undergraduate and graduate work? Did you always study creative writing?
Selah Saterstrom: I did not always study Creative Writing. In fact, I came to explicitly study writing quite late in my student career. I completed my undergraduate work in honors theology (focusing on hermeneutics) at Millsaps College, a small liberal arts college in Jackson, Mississippi.

While there I studied with the hermeneutist, Mark Ledbetter, an inspired scholar, who had long-standing ties with a hermeneutics graduate program in Scotland at the University of Glasgow. After meeting David Jaspers, who directs this program, I knew I wanted to pursue hermeneutics and moved to Scotland where I completed my Masters in Theology and Literature (a hermeneutics degree as hermeneutics is a discipline poised between these two areas of study).

After this degree, I stayed on in Glasgow and began a PhD focusing on hermeneutics. However, during this time I realized that the most poignant way for me to engage with and express my concerns was through the medium of creative language. Upon this realization, I took a leave of absence from my PhD program and pursued an MFA through Goddard College in Vermont where I worked with a writer I had long admired, Rebecca Brown (author of numerous and wonderful books). The result of my MFA thesis was my first published book, The Pink Institution.

Though I didnt study creative writing until much later in my academic career, I very much see my hermeneutics training as key to my development as a writer and teacher and cant imagine having gone any other route. Its funny . . . the routes we take to end up doing what we love to do!

What other institutions have you taught in?
Before coming to DU, I taught creative writing and text/image arts at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina. I also did a number of visiting writer/scholar gigs at colleges and universities during these years and had the opportunity to engage with a variety of communities. These visiting writer/scholar positions were a great joy and very much informed my practice of writing as well as providing opportunities to ruminate upon what it means to be a working writer or a writer in the world, so to speak.

This is your second year at DU. What courses are you teaching?
In Winter 2008, I taught a Core course entitled Religious Identity in Southern Culture: From the Bible to the Blues. In this class, we looked at southern religious traditions that are often considered marginal and examined the ways they have informed history (for example, the civil rights movement). We also investigated the ways different communities claim and read sacred texts and what these interpretive strategies suggest about reading and writing in a larger sense. In Spring 2008, I taught a creative writing fiction workshop and a graduate tutorial concerning writing and violence, looking closely at history to see how silence and trauma find form.

You work with many creative writing majors. In what ways is that different from teaching non-creative writing majors?
Perhaps the difference between non-creative writing majors and creative writing majors has to do with intention. Most creative writing majors are intentionally working with language as a medium. This means, among other things, that they are interested in exploring language at the level of the line as well as deeply considering the nature of language in critical ways. It isnt enough just to read a work of literature, but one must also consider how language works therein and what this suggests about much larger issues, such as history, silence, identity, the social contract, and so on. The notion here is that creative work also functions in a critical (and culturally valuable) way. Such a course of study, like any course of study, is a commitment that invites students to go beyond established boundaries within their thinking. As a creative writing teacher (and though I cant speak for my colleagues, I see them embodying this in powerful ways), I want to illuminate strategies that evolve skill and craft but that also critically explore what it means to write (and therefore investigate ways we might be better vessels for language).

Having said as much, I believe that each of us has a unique contract with language and that this contract is significant. In this sense, there is no difference between non-creative writing and creative writing majors. In introductory workshops, and other classes, such as CREX and some Core classes, everyone enters the classroom on the same playing field, so to speak. Of course, different students bring different gifts to the classroom, and some students will have had more experiencing writing, but at the introductory level, we are all investigating what is possible in terms of writing as well as our intentions concerning writing and the ways we engage with language.

You have a new book out, The Meat and Spirit Plan. Can you tell us a bit about your writing process?
With this second novel, I needed to create a different set of challenges for myself as a writer. My first novel was concerned with how multiple voices fracture through time and space, so in this second novel I focused on how a single voice can maintain a single trajectory, without fragmenting, as it moves through time and space. I suppose my process, in terms of craft, began with asking myself: What are my challenges now as an artist? It is important for me to keep risking as an artist, to not become dependent on my bag of writerly tricks.

On a more subtle, non-craft, level my process began with listening. At first, I didnt want to write The Meat and Spirit Plan, a book concerned with difficult content surrounding the body and how we, in culture, create (or dont) language around the experience of our bodies. I was trying to write another book altogether, but this other book idea, which would become the novel I actually wrote, wouldnt leave me alone. In that experience, I learned that as a writer Im in service of the stories which come to me, fascinate me, wont leave me alone and that sometimes these stories are not congruent with what I think I should be writing or even what Id like to be writing. It was, essentially and in the end, a very humbling experience to realize this. Writing gives its practioners many opportunities to practice non-attachment and vulnerability. This is, of course, very evident in the editorial process, which Ive come to see not as an adjunct or supplement to writing that we often avoid or have mixed feelings about but as an expression of writing. The erasure within the editorial process isnt the opposite of writing; rather, it is a kind of parallel writing in reverse, resonant with meaning.

I also learned that manifesting a large project requires commitment, time, and space. It means creating a life which supports such manifestation. It is perhaps rare for the world to give you permission to write a book. You have to give yourself permission. It is a transgressive act.

When I use the word transgressive, I mean transgressive in the sense of dreaming. As Anne Waldman and others have said in various ways (and said much better than I am saying here), part of what writers do is to have dreams on behalf of culture, dreaming more poignant strategies for engagement and dialogue two things we are always in need of in the world in which we live, and like dreamers we must transcend the boundaries of what is known. In our dreams, we can walk through walls and see situations from multiple points of view, despite the rules. I think the same is true in writing. In difficult moments we might ask ourselves who are we to tell such stories to dream in these ways that is, who do we think we are? Writing offers us a chance to try and find out, a process which can include humility and integrity. On a good day, literature reading it and making it can help us to change our minds about how we see ourselves and the world. Thats a lot. A whole lot.

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