10 Questions for Sarah Audsley (poetry ’19)
Sarah Audsley (poetry ’19) interviewed by Abby Macgregor in The Massachusetts Review
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I started writing poetry in my childhood bedroom in the log cabin-house my father built. I remember making things up on the page and writing letters to my imagined biological parents in my pink marbled journal. In high school, I wrote poems, looking back on it now, as a way to process my parents’ eventual divorce, and to channel all that teenage angst and rage. It was not until I turned 29 that I started writing again, and taking it seriously. Naively, I had no idea that this literary landscape existed, and I didn’t even know there was such a thing as an MFA.
What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
My teachers and mentors at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College: Brooks Haxton, Daniel Tobin, C. Dale Young, Christine Kitano, and Sally Keith.
Also: Maudelle Driskell and Martha Rhodes. I would be nothing without Ellen Bryant Voigt and Debra Allbery. And to Mary Oliver, my gateway drug, to whom I’ll always be grateful.
