Sarah Conover
Sunday, February 22nd, 2009
Meet Sarah Conover, WA. state author, poet, and teacher…
I’m delighted to have the opportunity to interview poet and author Sarah Conover as part of her blog tour. Sarah lives in Spokane, WA. and is the founder and editor of the This Little Light of Mine series, a series published by Eastern Washington University Press.
M: You were a religious studies major in college. What drew you to this field?
S: Like many of us, I can trace the trajectory of my passions from childhood adversity. Having lost both parents and grandparents in one fell swoop at an early age, I saw the multitude of ripples tragedy can have upon family systems. Our family religion at the time was not up to the task. It just wasn’t lived as a source of true solace or refuge for anyone in my family. So, early on I became a seeker, looking to make sense of the world—both the agony and the ecstasy. I traveled to Asia, and I studied comparative religions with excellent professors at the University of Colorado. I’m not sure what I thought I would do with a religious studies degree, but I couldn’t seem to stay away from it! Call me a slow learner, but I am still, to this day, astounded by the fact that people negotiate their worlds in so many varied ways, that religions with such fantastically different worldviews can buoy us effectively through life.
M: Then for many years you worked in media production and education. How did you end up writing?
S: I enjoyed the stimulation of media production a lot, as well as the freedom to pursue any topic I thought was important enough to garner funding. And of course there was the element of tremendous luck in finding a passionate group of global thinkers who hired me without any media experience. I think they liked the fact that I was a New Yorker and bossy—a quality that seems to work in the media arena, but not in many others.
However, when I became a mom, it became too much of a disincentive to travel far from home to film, and also, there was not enough time left in the day to produce a film, raise the money to produce a film, and raise a family. Again, I lucked out and took a beginning poetry course at Gonzaga University and the professor encouraged me to pursue an MFA. Finding poetry was like coming home, a home I despaired of ever finding. Poetry is that wonderful cusp between the sacred and the secular I had always searched for.
I also found that writing—poetry and other genres–still afforded me many of the same blessings as media did: the ability to be a public educator (that’s the nicest way to frame media production) and the freedom to pursue topics important enough to garner funding (in the form of a publisher).
Working in public education came directly after my MFA. Now I had two “useless” degrees, a degree in comparative religion and an MFA in poetry. However, help was nearby. I live with an educator, and our national task of public education became too compelling to stay on the outside, so I raced my way into a teaching certificate. During that process, it quickly became clear I could bring all my loves into the classroom—media studies, world religions and writing.
M: Your most recent books are for children. Why and how did you move into writing for children?
S: Well, I kind of stumbled into it. I was in the middle of pursuing an MFA in poetry, and had two small children at home full of insistent ontological questions, which sort of lead me back to religious studies. We were living on a small farm north of Spokane, surrounded by somewhat of a monoculture. I wanted my kids to be exposed to the banquet of multicultural religious and wisdom traditions. As my own orthopraxy is Buddhist, I began there, looking for just the right book. I couldn’t find it, but I did my research (I developed some skill in this from my producer days) and saw that there was a need for books on world wisdom traditions for children. Developed a nice proposal and a marketing survey and took it to two publishers, both of whom wanted the book on Buddhism.
M: It’s unusual to find a publisher so quickly. Why do you think you were successful?
S: Both publishers recognized the publishing niche. It really paid to do my homework on the marketing. I chose the local publisher, so I could be more closely involved.
M: Tell us about the This Little Light of Mine series that you have founded.
S: The books in the series are intended to engage children, young adults, educators, and parents alike to help us look beyond our own understandings of life, and to consult and to profit from the wisdom traditions of humankind. The series seeks to broaden our knowledge of and perspective on world traditions of spirituality. By gathering and adapting material from primary texts, poetry, proverbs and stories, many of them quite ancient, I hope to open windows onto wisdom as it was, and continues to be, conceived and lived in cultures around the globe.
M: Your books are all collaborative how does the process work?
S: Well, almost all are collaborative: Kindness: a Treasury of Buddhist Wisdom for Children and Parents was solo, and so is the next one I’m writing on Hinduism because I feel fairly comfortable in both those landscapes—there’s a lot of overlap. That being said, I absolutely love working collaboratively. When I’m presenting cultural values, philosophies, and religions that are totally foreign to me, I feel it is my duty to be very, very careful. Even though the books are crossover books—for both children and adults—it’s critical to me that they are well researched. I try to make each book relevant and accurate not only for Western audiences new to the tradition, but also to families whose traditions I’m representing whether in their home countries or as part of a Diaspora.
In writing my book on Islam, for example, it took me several years to find someone who was an academic but also a practicing Muslim with the depth of knowledge to guide us through lots of potential problems of offending one group or another. When you’re outside the culture, there’s no way to know. Dr. Crane and I feel somewhat validated in our approach—our book on Islam, Ayat Jamilah, Beautiful Signs: a Treasury of Islamic Wisdom for Children and Parents has done extremely well in Islamic catalogues. When I’ve done readings in the Middle East, people tell me the stories and sayings in the book are the values that have guided their lives.
Essentially, I try to keep one foot in the two worlds I’m trying to reach when I work collaboratively: I want to reach Western audiences whose youth are much in need of exposure to multicultural religious traditions, and I want to reach the families from the cultures I represent, the Diaspora, who feel their tradition is misunderstood or ignored in the West.
M: How do you find collaborators?
S: It’s incredibly helpful and fun to work with someone from another tradition or culture, just as it is to travel to another country. We each bring a lot to the work–it is truly a bridging of cultures. For instance, I met Chen Hui while researching Harmony: a Treasury of Chinese Wisdom for Children and Parents early on. She was teaching Chinese at a private school, St. George’s, in Spokane. The Chinese government (the PRC) began an initiative several years ago making available a number of Chinese teachers to teach Chinese at private schools. They saw the need for much more Chinese language instruction in the US, and have been proactive about it. Chen is an ancient Chinese literature buff, and a middle school teacher with her ed degree from a US university. It turns out Chen’s life’s work has been building bridges between English and Chinese speakers, and she was thrilled to consult with me about aspects of Chinese culture she thought Americans should know and understand. One of my functions is to be the “cultural translator” if you will, for what Americans would find interesting to know and understand. Once we decided on our approach to “Chinese wisdom,” the use of four-character idioms, it was a total collaboration of finding the stories we both agreed upon were important, her translating the stories into clunky English, my working them over into something, hopefully, more elegant, and then her checking for authenticity of meaning. And there was, and always is, lots to do on resources, maps, timelines, pronunciations, and more.
M: Do you find common themes as you study world religions?
S: Well, this is the million-dollar question isn’t it? After my childhood experience, I was somewhat of a skeptic concerning Christianity. But then I worked for Catholic Family Services and met true saints, people who walked their talk, and turned upside down all my views about who had “it right,” who had the corner on spirituality. Religions are vastly more different than I ever imagined thirty years ago when I was a seeker, when I traipsed through the Alps and Himalayas, studied Aikido in Japan, and spent time in India. The orthodoxy of the Abrahamic religions, for example, couldn’t be more starkly contrasting from Buddhist orthodoxy. And yet, they are all similar in their orthopraxy—not in their rituals per se, but in their concerns and questions about life, about human suffering. Flannery O’Connor said something I think about a lot—be kind to everyone for we are each fighting a great battle. I don’t care if we frame that battle with Zorastrian terms, Jewish terms, or Hindu terms, or if the redemption we work towards is liberation from the wheel of Samsara, or to stand before God as the final judge: I just know it’s hard to be human. It is a battle indeed to live to our potential and ideals. That fundamental predicament of humanity is the common thread of all religions.
M: You are also a widely published poet. How does poetry inform your writing?
S: Writing poetry feels like the most risky activity that I do in some ways, and also the greatest soul soother. It always feels like rapelling off a cliff when I begin a poem, because you have to be willing to lose control, lose your footing, and be in the world in a very unfamiliar way. Whether writing or reading poetry, to be within poetry is to know the world differently. It helps me stop time, and usually delivers me from chronos, quotidian time, into some kind of kairos, sacred time.
M: I love that distinction.
S: I am often stunned by the way meanings trade and shift between words, and awed by beauty and mystery and interconnections poetry reveals in unexpected ways.
M: The topics of your books seem especially timely, what are a few truths you would like readers to take away from your books?
S: There may be no absolute truths, but there are always absolute questions. All of humanity, from every religion, from child to elder, is asking many of the same questions. It’s a phenomenon that I find very moving.
M: What are you working on now? What new directions do hope to try in 2009?
S: Next book is on India—soon to overtake China as the world’s most populous country. Whether the book will be on Hinduism specifically, or on a broader look at Indian wisdom traditions—including Jainism and Sikhism—is yet to be determined. In certain ways, India has been host to more wisdom traditions and religions than any other geographical area (i.e. the first Jewish and Christian pilgrims went to India before Western Europe), and the way it has incorporated heterogeneity into its culture is fascinating (see The Argumentative Indian). On the other hand, Hinduism is so vastly different from the Abrahamic traditions that I think solely focusing on it would be useful to the series. It’s a great dilemma to be working my way through as I research it!
M: Any news on the poetry front?
S: I’ve also recently plunged back into poetry, something that was very peripheral when I was teaching. I’m absolutely in love with it again, and so I’m working on a manuscript to enter in a number of contests. I also have a non-fiction proposal out of interviews with teens called Raising Parents: Adolescents Reflect Upon the Spiritual Journey of Being Parented. I’ve gotten lots of good feedback on it, but there’s a little uncertainty about what “shelf” it would go on in a bookstore, so it hasn’t sold yet.
Thanks again to Sarah Conover for appearing, courtesy of Provato Marketing. For other stops on the tour please check provatoevents.com
