On Grief: A Conversation with Sara Henning

When the earliest cartographers set out to draw the world—seeking a way to understand their place on Earth, and Earth’s place in the universe—they also had to find a method of mapping what was beyond their knowledge. The phrase “terra incognita,” or “unknown land,” said to have first appeared in Ptolemy’s Geographia, was used to indicate those areas that remain outside of the realm of comprehension. It is also the term that poet Sara Henning seized on in the aftermath of her mother’s death from cancer in 2016, when she found herself in unmapped emotional territory and struggling to rebuild a life amid loss. Her writing during this period became Terra Incognita (March, Ohio University Press), winner of the 2021 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize. The elegiac collection opens in Georgia during Henning’s childhood—an unstable time marked by her mother’s struggles with mental illness and financial insecurity, yet shot through with love and the routines of everyday life—and takes on the totality of her grief as she confronts the world as a motherless adult. In “Woman in Flames,” the speaker declares:

Call me lantern, not woman.
Heat beats my skin. It’s almost pretty—
the ridges of my body sprung and stretched
as a star / inside me explodes, or is it a world?

Henning is a clear-eyed explorer of some of our darkest emotional terrain. Her previous collection, View from True North, investigated the abuse her family experienced at the hands of her grandfather, who struggled with alcoholism and sexual repression, and was battered by disease. With Terra Incognita, the poet cracks open the private world of a daughter and mother just wide enough to allow us a glimpse of their love story. Henning is searching but not lost, as she moves nimbly between forms and landscapes. What emerges from this journey is an act of devotion and a testament to life after loss.

Henning joined me over Zoom and by phone in mid-March from Texas, where she teaches and coordinates the BFA Program in Creative Writing at Stephen F. Austin State University, to discuss her poetic practice and the role of literature in grief advocacy. Here are a few edited excerpts from our conversations.

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I want to address a question that the speaker asks in “Terra Nova,” the poem that makes up the third section of Terra Incognita. The question is, “My body: where do I end?” I see a lot of your poems circling around that question, in one way or another, and am curious about what led you there.

I was an only child raised by a single parent. My father died in a fire in 1982, when I was a toddler. My mother went to college—she had her bachelor’s in social work and she ended up finding herself in these jobs that were lower-paying. She struggled with her own mental illness; she was bipolar, she was unmedicated. She would go on mania spending sprees and we would end up in dire straits because of that. I didn't know what was going on as a child—I just knew sometimes Mom was fun and sometimes Mom was sad. I didn’t have language for it. But I do think there's something very special about that bond between a single mother and an only daughter, particularly when they are facing near-constant crisis—those lessons that women pass to girls and women pass to women, trying to create that legacy of survival.

Even into my twenties and thirties, I still very much felt like I was her advocate. I was the person who made sure that she was doing as well as she could. When the mental illness [morphed] into the physical illness, I felt very much in the center of that. When she died, losing that sense of tether really spun me out into—it really felt like terra incognita. I could not name the world that I was living in. It didn't make sense to me. I thought a lot about Marie Howe. In “The Gate,” from What the Living Do, she writes, “I had no idea that the gate I would step through / to finally enter this world / would be the space my brother's body made.” That's what it felt like. I was trying desperately to cross back into a world of meaning. But I realized I could only do so in the space of her loss. And I had to find words for that.

I’d like to hear more about how that search for words resulted in this book and influenced its structure and form. How did you find a tether, and where do the poems find a tether amid such instability?

That's such an interesting and important question. I couldn’t do much besides journal and read other grief narratives, to seek out the words of folks like Mark Doty, Kevin Toolis, Meghan O’Rourke’s The Long Goodbye, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Cheryl Strayed’s Wild. While I was searching after these narratives I found that structure, starting with that idea of terra incognita, unknown land. It’s cartography—unmappable, undocumented areas. Dragons could be lurking in the water. Who knows? Nobody knew.

To go back to the structure of the book, [it starts] in this moment of crisis, "Terra Inferna”—hell on earth—that's what it felt like. It felt like hell on earth, the hell of my mother’s and my origin story, that fight for survival culminating in this awful diagnosis. My mother was very much one of those, I'm fine, I'm fine. She didn't like doctors—I'm fine. Everything's fine. They found a humongous tumor in her uterus. It was metastatic, and she was not fine. So, the crisis of existence coalesced into a crisis of meaning, which transitions then into the section called “Terra Incognita,” which is this unknown land—the mother dead, the daughter navigating grief, which touches everything around her. With “Terra Nova”—new land—the daughter is focusing on what her life is now, what living without a mother and an emotional center looks like, what those physical and emotional boundaries are. And then that final section of the book, “Terra Firma,” the earth under one’s boots, that’s where we’re trying to find that sense of ground and life. That structure helped me, by doing it aesthetically, to do it emotionally.

It did feel in these poems like you were going back to certain foundations of language—for example, by using the Latinate terms—and of storytelling, too, with many Biblical and religious references appearing throughout the book. How did faith influence your process? 

I remember a mentor of mine in grad school, who was very religious, talking about when his parents died. His sense of faith was very much shook—by just the unfairness of having to lose people. That's very much wrapped up in the story of Job. How do we keep faith after we keep being tested by God? I think for many of us, the question is, why? Why is this happening now? Why is this happening at all?

My father was Catholic, my mother was raised Methodist and she departed from the faith when she was a young hippie and rebellious, as many Boomers were. But we still sort of grew up within this sort of Judeo-Christian reality. And I think that was one question—why God, why is this happening to me? And if I can't make meaning from my thinking and my experiences, what can God tell me? Will God answer my pleas?

I was struck by the lines in "Elegy Beginning with the Birth of a Mountain," where we see a child’s early grappling with language and the ways she uses it to describe her environment, noting, "to love a mountain is to hold a language of violence in your mouth." It also mentions other imaginative phrases that the child plays with, the "animal-sky” and “dusk-raw” among them. I wanted to hear more about how you arrived at that portrayal of a child’s language and the ways children conceptualize violence.

This poem went through several different drafts. When I was writing it, I had just been teaching Geffrey Davis's first book, which is this beautiful bildungsroman about a childhood that comes from a sense of brokenness—a father that was at once a truck driver but also an addict, a mother who is pushed to the brink of divorce—this child having to see himself as a man way before he should have. I was thinking about that a lot when writing this poem, specifically because of the way children are so unfiltered and so unfettered in how they link language and the imagination. Everything is new. They are creating their own imprints for the world.

Growing up in and around the Smoky Mountains, I went to a Montessori school, and we were taught Greek myths and Roman myths—the gods as kind of comic heroes. I formed deep relationships with these notions of Greek and Roman gods because I thought they were cool. Before you have the language for science, you have the language of imagination. I had the language of a relationship with that mythic knowledge. I internalized a lot of that stuff.

I was raised in a home where I saw a lot of violence and I didn't have language for what violence meant. It's very sad when a child sees something and normalizes something, like someone pushing someone against a wall, or someone yelling at someone in a drunken rage. This is something that is systemic in our society, unfortunately—addiction and violence are oftentimes cyclical. I’m particularly moved by places like the Badlands in South Dakota, or the Grand Canyon—these places that are beautiful because they are forged through eruption, volcanoes, erosion. They're beautiful because they're broken. And I think even as a little girl I understood that. 

Were there certain poetic choices you made that helped you explore these questions about grief and identity after your mother died?

I was reading an interview with Patricia Smith, and she was talking about writing the poems that would become Blood Dazzle, about Hurricane Katrina, and her absolute rage about the injustices and treatment of African Americans in New Orleans during that time. She said that she was so full of rage that she needed a way—and I’m paraphrasing, she said it better in many interviews—she needed a way to order reality. She needed a container of sorts. She said, “concentrating on the syllable count gave me a way to confront the body count.”

It just moved me, reading that, because I thought, when you don’t have a container, you go back to this idea of where does my body end, where do I end. If you give yourself a container like a sonnet, like a sestina, like a villanelle … it helped me to be able to discuss those difficult things by forcing myself to have an established order. And that forcing wasn’t a punitive forcing. It was, okay, until I can hold myself up, I need a form to hold me.

“The Boy,” a sestina, brings up some very painful topics, including the drug overdose of an early love. The form seems to slow down these images in a kind of dream-like sequence. Can you speak to the ways that the sestina form served your vision for the poem?

The sestina is a highly repetitious form that has these grand origins in different places, but I think it's fascinating how those six words, those end words, are almost like a binding contract. You have to think within them, or you have to find word inversions that reference them to make it work. To calm myself down, sometimes I'm like, “I just need to write a sestina right now,” the way that someone might go to a Sudoku, a crossword puzzle or something—it feels like a way to work out one's anxiety. What’s fascinating is that you can really create a kind of landscape that is contained within the wild world of the sestina, that is very determined by the binding contract of the six words.

This poem was written after my husband, a high school teacher, had experienced one of the kids in his school threatening gun violence. It was a passive threat—it was etched in a bathroom wall—but it shut the school down, and he was terrified because he had never experienced that before. We were not too far from the Santa Fe High School shooting in Texas, and watching the gun violence that was proliferating was scary.

I was taken by how these acts of violence shatter people and shatter lives, and the intense rage that some students have, that moves them to violence. I was trying to use the container of the sestina to not only explore that—the casualties, the horror—but what underlies that horror, who those children are that are moved to violence. I think it's very easy, as a society, to villainize those people. I don't think it's fair to polarize our reactions to things—that person is evil, that person is an angel, that person is bad, that person is good. I don't think that's true. I think people are a product of their choices. A lot of us come from difficult circumstances, and we have to choose darkness, or we have to choose light. That's why I ask in the sestina, “What makes a child go dark?"

[…] A boy, lost,
after all, is not a killer unfurling in the dark.
Something lingers beneath him, some sweet,
brash hunger, some ribbon-
smooth call for help.

I believe that. I believe that sometimes people who are moved to violence, there's something that could be saved if someone would intervene.

And I thought about this relationship I had. I lost an early first love to an overdose. I thought about that person, and how that person may have been moved to violence against himself, and the way we either implode or we explode.

Is there anything else on your mind at the moment in regard to poetry, what’s going on in the world, or anything else?

I know that, in a lot of ways, I’ve done the sin of conflating the speaker with the poet. We teach students, don’t do that—don’t assume that the poet is the speaker—and I think this whole time I’ve sort of circled around that idea, that in fact I am the person talking in this book. I do so, though, not out of a sense of carelessness. I believe that writing books about our experiences can save lives.  I feel oftentimes that when one is in a state of deep grief, it is easy to believe it’s just mine, this has only happened to me. I really do want folks to encounter Terra Incognita on its own merits, as a book of poems, but I also want to bring to light a sense of advocacy.

I also wanted to say that my heart is with Ukraine right now.