Jenny Sadre-Orafai is the author of four poetry collections. A new edition of Malak, her second poetry collection, will be published by the University of Akron Press in 2024. Her prose has appeared in The Rumpus, Fourteen Hills, The Los Angeles Review, The Collagist, and others. She co-founded and co-edits Josephine Quarterly and teaches and mentors creative writers.
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Sam Casto Hollman: All right, let’s talk about Dear Outsiders. Your epigraph is from Garous Abdolmalekian:
There was no space for a continuous forest/no space for an infinite sea/no matter how endless the search.
It struck me as a reflection of the form that the grief of the speakers takes throughout the book. How did you discover this passage, and what was behind your decision to use it?
Jenny Sadre-Orafai: That’s a really great question. Like so many things, I discovered him on Twitter. I saw that somebody had taken a screenshot of a portion of the poem, and I bookmarked it, and then I thought about it, and I was like, oh, I feel like that really captures the physical geographies of the collection, and also speaks for the emotional terrain. I think that the book is definitely one of searching, certainly for the siblings, who are the protagonists. They’re searching for their parents and for their identities without their parents. And I think that their search feels endless and exhausting. And it’s a search for where they fit in—what does it mean to be a part of an environment, and then to not be?
SCH: That resonates with me so much. I noticed that the geography and the subject matter were intertwined and set the tone for the next few poems in particular, and for the book as a whole. I thought it was genius.
JS: Thank you.
SCH: I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about “Topographies” and how you decided to use the poem at the very start of the book.
JS: I wanted that first poem to be lined, set apart from the rest of the book because the entire book is just prose poems. I also wanted the poems to feel like a mirage. There’s grief and love and family and belonging in the book, and there’s also not belonging, right? It was also important to me that this poem, much like the epigraph, would foreshadow the subjects’ eventual grief. I think it’s also the poem that is the least surreal, and I wanted it to provide footing and grounding, just like the epigraph. But it’s not completely that way; you still don’t know where you are. You don’t know what year it is. You know there are a lot of unanswered questions, but it is a little bit more definitive. It has some mirage-like qualities, and it’s direct in a way that I think the other poems aren’t.
SCH: I see that now.
JS: But you know, it’s funny that you mentioned this one, because as we were talking about it, I was trying to remember when I wrote it. And I wrote it after I wrote the entire book because I really didn’t want the whole book to be too hazy. Especially from the outset. I wanted to meet the reader and say, Here’s this thing I can give you. But from here on out, you’re on your own.
SCH: I also really love what you said about kind of finding belonging in the not belonging. I think that’s so relatable. And I love that you wanted the book to encompass the experience of trying to navigate belonging and grief.
JS: It’s funny, because I think about my time in high school, when I always gravitated toward the people who didn’t belong. And there was this bond amongst us, because we didn’t fit in with anyone else as much as we fit in with each other. The people who move through the world freely weren’t interesting to me. And this wasn’t how I felt like I could move through the world, either.
SCH: I can definitely relate to that.
JS: And that stays with you, right? Even when you leave that place, you carry it in your body. You remember what it feels like.
SCH: Yes, most definitely. You’ve mentioned before that you took a lot of inspiration for the narrative from your mom’s experience of growing up in Florida. Is that correct? How did you decide to place much of the setting here? And also, did those experiences relate a lot to your own experiences growing up in your hometown of Chattanooga?
JS: I did draw on my mom’s adolescent and teenage experiences a lot. I also dipped into my own encounters with other beach towns on both coasts. I really wanted the town to feel like it could be any beach town. I didn’t want it to be so definite. And I think that it goes back to wanting the poems to seem even more surreal, and I think that had I said this is Pensacola or this is Hilton Head, I would have provided a grounding that I wasn’t interested in.
I wanted the reader to be able to invest, but also, I wanted it to be like when it gets hot outside and the heat has waves. I wanted the whole book to feel like somebody had been out in the sun too long, and they couldn’t really discern things. Everything is blurred. When I think of tourist towns, beach towns come to mind first. And oceans make me think of my mom. So it was important to me that she was present in that way in the book. I grew up around mountains and ridges—like the topographies in the second section.
I know what it’s like to have visitors and tourists in spaces that one considers home, and I tapped into my experiences for that section. It was this merging of my life experiences and my mom’s life experiences together.
Ironically, I feel like even though I grew up in a tourist town, I didn’t feel like I belonged where I lived, either. It was this weird experience where I didn’t really feel an allegiance to the people in my hometown and I didn’t really feel an allegiance to the tourists, either. I was in an in-between place; and even now living in Atlanta, I’ve been here twenty-one years, but I don’t really consider myself a Georgian.
I think if I felt like a place was home, it would be really great for my nervous system. But I think there’s a fear that then I wouldn’t be hypervigilant, and that would expose me to danger. I think that there’s something about being uncomfortable that makes me feel safe.
SCH: I can relate to that on a few different levels. When you just don’t feel like you can completely relax, I think it can be difficult to connect with and identify with that place, or central elements that typically unify a community.
“Fortune Fish” and your other poems comment on the experience of growing up in a tourist town where nothing feels quite yours, and one’s own sense of place might be distorted, as we’ve talked about. This manifests in the way that tourists in the book seem to intrude on the daily lives of locals, as well as how they miss the truth and the magic of the place that they’ve come to visit. For me, it created questions about place, identity, belonging, and what all that means in spaces that are more or less commodified.
Then, in “Tragedy Lesson,” the line, “They line their balconies with them—flags to countries they’ll never belong to,” reflects this sort of intrusion with the line, “The body is rescued and buried because it didn’t swim at 45 degrees to shore. There aren’t long talks over dinners. We’re so sorry and that’s enough,” as a response to this intrusion, as if there’s no apology owed to those who are inconvenienced and ignored, or perhaps sacrificed in a lot of ways. The book also uses the image of drones in a few places as imagery for what it feels like to be on the outside of your own community.
Can you speak a little bit about your inspiration behind these lines?
JS: I was living in Chattanooga before they built the Tennessee Aquarium, and when the aquarium came, and everyone was visiting the city. And I think people have a very complicated relationship with tourists.
On one hand, they bring money in. On the other hand, most locals don’t want them there. I watched this documentary, The Last Tourist, and they talk about this—how the amount of money coming into the communities is minimal. So what do the community members get out of it? There isn’t usually any kind of desire for most tourists to learn about the place or the people. So I really wanted the speakers, the siblings, and the community to be unsympathetic to the tourists. And in another poem, the siblings and the community point to things for the tourists to take pictures of, even though it’s nothing. It’s their way of taking back their place, or even of making an inside joke—these people aren’t aware this is nothing, but we’re going to make them post this random thing on social media. I wanted them to have a say. I didn’t want them to be passive, the tourists. And there’s this idea that we’ll only be nice to the small children, because maybe they don’t have a say in this.
SCH: I love how you wrote it, like you said, kind of in a haze or highly open to interpretation. And how you described it as a mirage, with heat rising, because that also reminds me of the beach setting.
JS: When I was little, I remember being outside for a long time and then coming inside and everything was dark. You see spots because you’re trying to adjust, and that’s what I want the book to do.
SCH: I imagine that’s not easy to do, having a narrative that has that quality but at the same time tells a story effectively. There’s a through line the whole way. That was very impressive, and it really inspired me to write more prose.
JS: Well, you’re so good at this in your work. I’m very excited for people to read your prose too, because it’s incredibly powerful.
SCH: Thank you! I feel like I’m still kind of getting the hang of it. But I really appreciate that.
Your book includes a lot of images of something viewed from a distance, such as in “Scale and Embodiment.” I was particularly touched by your line, “the color of the boat that is so far away that maybe we wouldn’t even be able to say for sure or something so brilliant it hurts,” as well as this moment in “Glory Pact”: “You won’t squint at the stop sign two-and-a-quarter miles from here and see grey puffs like sighs.” For me, this distancing emphasized the space between these very different things that seem just out of reach throughout the book—agency, belonging, and eventually, their parents.
Can you speak a little bit on this use of distance, physically and otherwise, in the book? I feel like that also plays into what we just talked about with a sort of intentional choice, but you know, distance—that’s also something I think of when I think of heat and how it changes how things far away appear, as though you’re not quite sure if something’s there.
JS: I love this question and your reading of it, and that this is something that stood out to you because I don’t think I was very conscious of distancing in this way. And for all its blurriness and distancing, I think it comes down to the speakers trying to make sense of and understand where they come from as a way of staying safe, of knowing what’s capable of harming them and what isn’t.
Growing up, stranger danger permeated my childhood and adolescence. That’s why the mother in the book is having the siblings write down their clothes, in case they’re abducted. And I remember that fear, that energy, that charge in the air growing up. You were getting it at school and on TV, on the news, from your parents—you couldn’t escape this kind of danger. And what can happen is someone distances themselves to avoid getting hurt. But I think that it’s also a matter of listening and knowing—these are the things that will save me and these are the things that will hurt me. It’s trying to identify and put things into categories to feel safe and to survive.
SCH: That makes a lot of sense. That really struck me, that image of distancing that I saw over and over. And so that’s interesting to me that it wasn’t intentional but something that kind of just came up, because to me it really mirrored a lot of the journey that the siblings take.
JS: I’m usually in a hypervigilant state, so I’m constantly sizing up my surroundings in order to stay safe.
I think in “Glory Pact,” the mom’s trying to convince her children that they’re fine and that disaster isn’t imminent. It’s also obviously foreshadowing what happens later, or this obsession with fire. I read about a superstition that if you hang seaweed in your house, your house will be safe from fire. But it’s the mom saying, you’re going to get abducted, write down your clothes, but also, this house is not burning down, that’s absolutely not going to happen, and I’ve taken superstitious measures to make sure that there’s not going to be a fire here. So it gets very confusing—again, it’s like, what’s true and what’s not true, and what’s the antidote and what’s the poison?
SCH: I really see that now. I feel like so many parents want you to be scared enough to be safe, but also they want you to feel safe. That was a really good way of showing that.
JS: Thank you.
SCH: What inspired you to write on losing parent figures? And also, I think you already talked a little bit about what inspired you to use nature imagery as a device, but I was wondering if you had anything else to say about that. In addition, I’m curious about the siblings and how you decided to write it from the perspective of siblings instead of maybe just one character.
JS: I liked the idea of having more than one person experiencing sadness and bewilderment. I wanted them to be able to lean on each other and to highlight how they grieve differently. We see that in the second section with their clothing—how each of them begins to process and grapple with loss.
I believed that if the speaker was plural, my narrative voice would read more urgently, and it would also invite the reader in more, because then they can see themselves as one of the siblings, too. As I wrote the book, I also realized it served another purpose—ultimately it became a way for me to comfort myself and accept that there will be an eventual loss of my parents. I think the book was meant to comfort me. I don’t know that it did, but channeling it through these imaginary siblings was helpful to try on that grief and see what it would feel like in my body.
SCH: I can see that. And then also, since there are two speakers and not one, I can see how writing that would help you feel a little less alone in that exploration.
This use of two main speakers also prompted me to wonder whether this creative decision had anything to do with the astrological sign Gemini, or if you are connected to this sign in some way. I had a strong hunch about this intuitively while reading. Which sign do you feel like you most identify with?
JS: Gemini. But when I read about Scorpios, I think, Oh, that’s me. But Geminis are communicators and they’re fickle. I’m all of that.
SCH: I feel like air signs always seem to gravitate towards each other.
JS: I was just telling someone I write the most when I’m on a plane. It’s like all of a sudden I can’t stop writing. They asked me, what’s your sign and I said I was a Gemini. They said it’s because you’re an air sign.
SCH: Wow! I’m definitely going to have to test that theory next time I’m on a plane.
In “Half a Parade,” you write, “The ocean’s an / animal head on a wall, and we can’t see the body.” Tell me about the content that seems to be about nature as spectacle, as a thing to be purchased or ogled, and how that came into play in the process of writing this book, with images such as the conch shells.
JS: This is another brilliant question. I think this display of an animal, this game, this conquest, this prize—it’s similar to the display of people who live in the tourist town or how they feel. I’ve certainly been made to feel like an animal in the way I’ve been surveilled. It’s something I think about a lot because I don’t want to appear like a threat. So there’s this performative aspect.
I remember as a child going to the beach and trying my best to get shells, and I didn’t care if they were broken, ideally, they wouldn’t be, but I was so excited that the ocean would bring them to the shore. But I also remember leaving the beach and going to the shell store, and there they all were. It was just very confusing and disheartening. I feel like being in nature in general is about really experiencing it. Having this exploratory experience. And then to know that you can go somewhere and just get a souvenir of nature. I don’t know. Something about it feels sad to me. I remember buying the shells in the store and thinking, but this is a lie, I didn’t catch this, and it’s not real. But it’s conflicting for me, too, because I like to have something that reminds me of experiences I’ve had.
That’s why I thought, okay, we’re going to flip it, and we’re going to look at what tourists leave behind, like these are our souvenirs now, and we’re going to judge them based on the items.
SCH: I love that so much.
JS: I actually went to the hotel where we were staying at in a beach town, and I asked them, “Can you tell me what you have in your lost and found?” and they said, “What? No,” and I explained that I was writing a book and I just wanted to know what people leave behind. Then they held things up for me and there really was that stuffed animal horse, and keys, and passports that I put in “Souvenirs for Locals.” And then they told me that someone left a huge bag of money. I did research because I was curious about what people forget and then never come back for.
SCH: I think that that’s such a poignant comment that you made about nature souvenirs because it’s always amazing to me how people want souvenirs from nature but don’t necessarily want to be in nature for that long, or really experience it. But I think that relates to the book so much with how the tourists interact with the setting, and I think about how a lot of us, when we go into nature, how we interact with it kind of at a distance or something and don’t always want to understand what we’re experiencing or interacting with. We just kind of want to see it, you know.
JS: It’s funny, whenever I go on a beach trip, I immediately throw my bags down in the hotel room, and then go directly to the beach. I feel like a five-year-old. It’s just pure excitement and joy. I run down and just stand by the water. And that’s all there is.
I wonder if you feel this way, too—I think that there’s something about the ocean that makes me feel so small and insignificant, and that soothes me. Do you feel that way when you go, too?
SCH: Absolutely. But when I go to the beach, I always have to go out at night as well, because to me that feeling is amplified during that time, because you really can’t see the horizon at all. It feels like you’re just in this giant womb, with the sound of the water and the darkness.
I was wondering, was this your first time writing a book in this style? And do you think that this is a format you will return to?
JS: I’ve written a prose poetry manuscript before, but it wasn’t published, and it didn’t feel insistent in the way these poems did when I was writing them. I love reading prose poems, and I like playing around with form and seeing what I can do in a prose poem that I can’t do in a lined poem. But I definitely would write another book of prose poems.
I’ve always felt like a prose poem demands that I be even more “poetic.” I feel obligated to differentiate a prose poem from prose. I anticipate—and maybe this isn’t true—someone opening this book and wondering why it couldn’t have just been prose. So I feel like I have to make a case in a way. I think writing about grief, having a container like the prose poem, is grounding. It’s like I can only hold my grief here. It can’t be all over the page and be six stanzas long. It’s going to be confined to this block of text.
SCH: So the final piece, “Send a Revival”—the lines,
We’re looking for a bear who can’t see us and can’t hear
us now. If we were home, we would swim noiseless out past the
warnings. We’d say here’s the rip that sweeps our bodies under and
into her chest. This is where we were born. This is where we became
orphans, where we stayed on top of the water. This is where we say no
more.
The final line feels like a powerful declaration.
JS: It’s really a surrender, and a meditation maybe, or a prayer, and I grapple with what happens when someone survives devastation and loss. How do they move on? If they move on at all. But it’s certainly a declaration. It’s the siblings taking agency, regardless of whether they’re giving up or moving on. Whatever it is, they own it. They stand in it. It’s no longer passive grief.
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Sam Casto Hollman is a poet, essayist, and visual artist. Her work primarily explores the intersections of creating art, natural processes, and processing trauma. Sam has an MA in Creative Writing from Kennesaw State University, and she serves as Content Editor for The Adroit Journal. Her work is published or forthcoming with Josephine Quarterly, Blue Earth Review, Carolina Muse, and others. Find Sam on IG @nitelights_ and on X @sam.joy