Poet Interview: Sarah Schriber
Sarah Schriber is an educator and writer in Washington, DC. She studied English Literature at Johns Hopkins University. Sunday Mornings at the River is her first publication.
When did you become a poet? How did you know it was the right medium for your stories?
I have been scrawling poems in notebooks since I was twelve or thirteen. I can remember really distinctly having a poet visit our class. She gave us a list of five completely random words and challenged us to write little poems that incorporated all of them. I haven’t stopped scrawling since. I love the incredible freedom of writing poetry, which is why it is my favourite medium. With poetry, you can choose to be structured and strict, or completely open. You can indicate a clear meaning and purpose, or be mysterious and symbolic. Sometimes poems don’t need to mean anything at all; they can just sound nice. I love the freedom of moving between these.
What inspires you to write?
Art and museums more than anything inspire me to write. I love taking a notebook to an art museum and challenging myself to write a poem about each piece I see. It means I leave the museum with pages and pages of mini-poems, many of them quite bad, but a few in there that are wonderful starts.
Who are some of your literary or artistic crushes or influences?
I am completely inspired by Han Kang’s novels, which are so poetic in and of themselves, and I love how she pushes the boundaries of what books can or should do. I also would be remiss if I did not include the beautiful work of my good friend, the poet Sean Felix. I adore his prose poems in his collection Did You Even Know I Was Here?
What does "good poetry" mean to you?
Good poetry can mean so many things, but I think my favourite poems are the ones that articulate an aspect of a situation, feeling, or image that perhaps I already understood subconsciously, but had never seen drawn out before. It’s a really special moment when you read something and think, “I’ve never heard it put like that before!”
What are you currently reading?
I am reading Butcher’s Crossing by John Williams. As an English teacher, I really loved his novel Stoner, which is basically about an English professor’s love of English. This novel is very different, about four men losing themselves in a buffalo hunt, but I’m enjoying his beautiful imagery all the same.
Do you feel that sharing your poetry is a vulnerable process?
Sharing poetry is an incredibly vulnerable process for me because it can be so personal—not personal like “intimate,” though it certainly can be that also, but personal in terms of individual to that author. I write about things that personally strike me as interesting or compelling, but that doesn’t mean anyone else will feel the same way. How can I know that an idea or image that really resonated with me will resonate with someone else? What if they read it and just think I’m a hack? So, yes, sharing any kind of art publicly is a vulnerable thing, but I’m hoping to get better at it with each sharing.
Do family and "real life" friends read your work?
Yes, I have several good friends who are writers who read my work, and then I also like to ask my friends who aren’t writers to take a look, even though it can be frightening to share. I like to hear from people who aren’t quite as steeped in poetry or literature in their day-to-day because I want to write poems that might resonate with a variety of people and not just those in my field. It also means I get to hear really different interpretations of my work, which is also really neat.
Sarah’s work can be read in our latest Quarterly Anthology ‘Depression is What Really Killed the Dinosaurs.’
You can read more of her work on her Instagram.