An Interview with Sarah Fawn Montgomery regarding Halfway from Home (Split/Lip Press)

Interview by Whitney (Walters) Jacobson

Whitney (Walters) Jacobson: Halfway from Home might have knocked another book off of my desert island short-list. Each essay in your book felt fully realized, and I thoroughly enjoyed savoring the layers of meaning seamlessly built into each one. So, I’m incredibly curious to know: What was your writing process for these essays? How did you accumulate the building blocks for each essay? What did your research process look like? Did your approach differ for each one? 

Sarah Fawn Montgomery: Thank you! Much of this collection was written in the early months of the pandemic, when my attention was fragmented and my emotions heightened. As a result, I often wrote in short intense bursts, as I was unable to focus or work for very long on the topics I was exploring—searching for home during emotional and environmental collapse, navigating social and political upheaval, attempting to uncover versions of the self lost over time. As a result, many of the essays are segmented, pieces collaged together to create collective meaning.

I often build essays around a central theme like the act of digging, the psychology of nostalgia, or the construct of time. I also build essays around a central image like flames, moons, or shells. Weaving the central idea or image throughout various segments threads them together. Utilizing a unifying idea or image also allows me to move away from personal experiences like gathering shells from the tidepools of California, watching lightning storms in Nebraska, or purchasing my first home in the Massachusetts woods into more complex and universal territory like exploring the art of scrimshaw and what it means to etch a story on to bone, looking to the complex fossil record of the Great Plains in order to understand what it takes to survive, and examining the fungal networks beneath forests as models of community care.

Similarly, I incorporate research in order to move away from my personal experience enough to make larger social, political, and environmental connections. Incorporating research about the invention of clocks, the history of nostalgia across cultures, or mirrors and self-perception allows me to connect my personal stories to larger webs of cultural meaning. Much like the writing, research is a slow accumulation, collaged from various facts I’ve deliberately uncovered or come across by coincidence. I gather facts the same way I gather rocks or acorns—I roll them around in my hand to see what thoughts they inspire or store them away for later and pull them out when I am lost in an essay and need to use them as a lens through which to view my experience.

Since finishing the collection, I’ve been trying (and failing) to put my finger on what exactly made it so cohesive, because in my experience with collections, there’s often an essay or two that don’t resonate as much as the rest. However, yours was utterly satisfying to read. Our life experiences aren't a common ground which pulls me in, so I’m wondering if the origins of the book might have played a key role. Did you set out to write an essay collection, or did the book start out in a different form? What advice would you give to writers about crafting a compelling essay collection?

SFM: I wrote much of Halfway from Home during the first months of the pandemic. Like many people, I was frightened and lonely, desperate to go back in time to before the pandemic and its social and political chaos, back to the places where I once lived that were now vanished due to climate change. Since I struggled to process grief in real time, I decided to write essays that inspired wonder or brought me joy, essays about my childhood treasure hole or rock collection, about picking berries with my family or watching the monarchs gather together for warmth each winter. After a while, the many disparate essays seemed to coalesce around central topics of nostalgia and time, wonder and cynicism, joy and grief. I then set out to juxtapose essays set in the past with those firmly rooted in the present, to uncover the ways our past impacts our future, the ways our contemporary position shapes our understanding of history.

What resulted was a collection about leaving my chaotic home at eighteen to chase restlessness, claiming places on the West Coast, in the Midwest, and on the East Coast, determined never to settle while still longing for the past. It explores contemporary nostalgia and collective grief, searching for how to build a home when human connection is disappearing, and how to live meaningfully when our sense of self is uncertain in a fractured world. Taking readers from the tide pools and monarch groves of California, to the fossil beds and grass prairies of Nebraska, to the scrimshaw shops and tangled forests of Massachusetts, the essays in this collection hold a mirror up to America and ask us to reflect on our past before we run out of time to save our future. 

My advice for writers hoping to write an essay collection is to follow your wonder. Essays are driven by inquiry, by our search for meaning or understanding or connection. If you are writing for plot or for the purpose of filling pages, the work will lack spirit. Questioning, exploring, and delighting in ideas or images or language infuses essays with energy. The best thing to do for your writing is to cultivate awe in your everyday life—the spiral of a shell, the sound of wind across a prairie, the gentle forking of tree branches. Marveling in the seemingly mundane teaches you pay attention to image, to think deeply about your connection to other communities, to find greater meaning. This will find its way to your pages and enrich your work. If you let wonder lead—seeing stories in the clouds, researching geology, considering stubborn garden weeds as examples of hardship and survival in the natural world—the writing becomes easier and the collection more cohesive because it is sustained by a unifying sense of curiosity.

As writers, we are inherently readers, and each interaction leaves an imprint on us. Who are your vital literary ancestors? Did you read other essay collections before or while composing yours? If so, which ones? If not, what did you read while writing? What effect did your reading have on your writing?

SFM: Writers like Robin Wall Kimmerer and Aimee Nezhukumatathil were instrumental in cultivating my approach to writing place, while writers like Melissa Febos and Elissa Washuta influenced my approach to essay structure and form. I typically read poetry when writing prose, so I also read Maggie Smith, Jericho Brown, Ocean Vuong, Ada Limón, Tracy K. Smith, Ross Gay, Natalie Scenters-Zapico and many others. Reading poetry is essential to my living and my writing because it puts me in the role of the observer, encourages close attention to detail, and invites innovation while also honoring history. Every writer can improve their craft by reading poetry often and aloud.

Perhaps my favorite passage in the book is when you state: “Nostalgia and haunting are not so very different, after all–we are only nostalgic for things that are gone, we are only haunted by the things we once loved” (100). Given the varying and emotional nature of nostalgia, I imagine there were many challenges to writing about it. Please share a bit about those challenges and your process for overcoming them but also the rewards of doing so.

SFM: When I wrote this book, I was nostalgic not only for times and places, but for the versions of myself I’d lost along the way. I set out to discover the versions of myself I’d misplaced and to write them back into life. I also set out to write the versions of my family, my country, my environmental world that had vanished. But nostalgia is only safe for some—to yearn to go back in time is only something you desire if you were safe. For many people in this country, our current reality is a continuation of the same hurts and haunts. I wanted to make sure my reminisces weren’t too rosy or naïve. It was important for me to balance out the tender parts of nostalgia with its threats—after all, as I describe in the book, nostalgia was first coined as a mental illness with dangerous symptoms. As a result, I wanted to write honestly about the past, representing both sweetness and sorrow. It was difficult to write about my family with a critical lens, but ultimately this provided more honest and accurate portrayals of addiction, domestic violence, and poverty. Doing so also allowed me understand my family with more compassion and also invited me to be more imperfect and vulnerable on the page.

Did you have a particular physical writing set-up that fostered your writing? If so, what did it look like? If not, what creates a productive writing space for you?

SFM: As a disabled writer, writing can be very difficult due to chronic pain, so my writing spaces differ depending upon my symptoms. Sometimes I write sitting or standing at a desk. Sometimes I write at the kitchen table or outside. I also alternate between typing, writing by hand, or utilizing dictation software. Similarly, I am often only able to write for short periods of time. Sometimes this is a few pages, but often it is only a few paragraphs or sentences at a time. Many of the essays in this collection rely on segments, fragments, braiding, and collage as a result this writing process. For me, a productive writing space is one that allows my body and mind to be comfortable enough to wander, ponder, experiment, and play in all the ways that creative writing asks of writers. Sometimes a productive writing space isn’t even a space where I write. My best thinking happens outside, in museums, on walks, while gazing out the window. I’ve learned to embrace these moments as part of the writing process, for while I am not producing words, I am thinking, feeling, living, which are the very marrow of my work.

A lot of conventional writing advice says we must write at a desk or a coffee shop, must write a certain number of words every time we sit down to write, must write every day. This simply doesn’t work for disabled writers, writers with full-time jobs, writers raising children or caregiving. What has been most productive for me as a writer is to re-invent my writing practice to suit my life. Now I write in short segments of found time—a line or two while I’m cooking, an image jotted down after I drive to work, a few thoughts I had in the bathtub—and the result of compiling all this found time and found writing is tremendous, perhaps even more than I could produce if I stuck to conventional wisdom.

With the publication of your book, who do you hope will read it? What effect do you hope it will have on readers, fellow writers, or the larger world?

SFM: I hope those who are world-weary by our current social, political, and environmental crises will read the collection and encounter collective grief but also be inspired to take collective action. While much of this collection examines difficult subjects—addiction, illness, physical violence, gun violence, climate change—it also turns to nature for stories of hope and healing. There is great resilience in nature, the ability to endure hardship and grow stronger through years of drought or particularly dark winters, and I hope the discussions of California’s monarchs who gather together for warmth each winter, the deep roots of prairie grasses that allow them to survive fires, or the fungal networks that allow trees to share resources encourage readers to learn from nature and cultivate their own resilience and action. I also hope this collection allows readers to rediscover a sense of wonder over moths or the moon, new buds on trees in the spring, or moss growing on a fallen log. Delighting in the natural world is a balm which we need in order to have the energy to protect it going forward.

Your section and essay endings resound. So many stopped me in my tracks in the best way–I intend to spend a good deal of time studying them! What’s the best piece of writerly advice you’ve been given for endings? Or, what writerly advice would you give?

SFM: Thank you so much! A lot of poetry advice also strengthens prose, so I always encourage writers to end on an image. Nonfiction writers will often attempt to end with summary or exposition that wraps up the plot and themes, but readers are not likely to remember this when they put the pages down. Instead, they will remember an image of a field on fire or a sliver of green moon or a child digging for rusted coins in the dirt. By ending on a precise and unexpected image, writers leave readers with something that will endure in their imagination long after they have stopped reading.

Another piece of advice about endings is to resist tidy resolution. Concluding a piece is not the same thing as concluding a conflict, a memory, or a particularly painful or powerful moment in your life. Sometimes nonfiction writers try to wrap things up quickly or smoothly, implying that everything is finished or that there is a happy ending. But life rarely works that way. The complex human experiences we write about in nonfiction rarely conclude fully or with ease. Instead, an honest and interesting conclusion is one where the writer rests in ambiguity, where the writer admits they don’t have all the answers or that their perspectives might change, one where the writer acknowledges the many complexities and contradictions of the human experience.

As a publication focused on place, environment, and the relationship between humans and the natural world, we’re curious: if you were venturing into the wilderness (alone) for a month, what three books would you take with you and why?

SFM: I’m not sure I would! When I am deeply rooted in place, I tend to read the landscape more than any text. I don’t bring books or screens, don’t listen to music or check phone notifications. I’m too easily distracted by these things, and prefer to instead read and reread the place like a favorite poem. I like to walk the same paths time and again, noticing different tree structures or fungi, looking for animal tracks or unfamiliar plant species. Places also have narratives, yet we often fail to give it as much of our attention as we do to the other texts in our daily lives. If I did take any texts, they would likely be poetry collections by writers like Chen Chen, Danez Smith, or Victoria Chang because these invite close reading, reinterpretation, meaning shifting with our mood and memory, with our position and place.