Sometimes You Just Have to Take a Leap of Faith: A Conversation with Sandi Stromberg

Interview by Amanda Sturgeon

Sandi Stromberg has been nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize and twice for Best of the Net. She is an editor for The Ekphrastic Review, an online journal dedicated to an increasingly popular way to write poetry. Though a Texas native, she spent two decades in Europe working as a freelance writer, editor, translator, and columnist, and raising her two sons. On returning to the Lone Star State in 1992, she found her intellectual match and soulmate, her late husband, Bill Turner.

I conducted this interview through emails and a recorded phone call. When I spoke with Sandi, she was preparing for a trip to Singapore to celebrate her grandson’s 8th birthday. Due to their nomadic lifestyle as children, Sandi’s sons live abroad. One in Singapore and the other in France. She currently lives in Houston, Texas, in its thriving arts community.

So, to start off, I’d like to get a little background information. I’m a mom of two young boys so when you said that your sons live in Singapore and France due to your nomadic lifestyle, I knew there was a story there. So, do you mind sharing a little bit about how they ended up living abroad?

SS: It started in college where I met my first husband. We both wanted to live abroad. I was a Russian major, and I've always loved learning languages. This was back in the late 60s. We spent two years in Cleveland, during which I got my masters in Slavic languages and literatures. Then we were sent to Geneva, Switzerland where I started to learn French. Then we moved to Spain, so I learned Spanish and then we moved back to Geneva, and our first son was born. We ended up moving 17 times in 21 years. After Geneva the second time, we moved to Minnesota, then London. From London, we went back to Switzerland. In total, we ended up spending nearly 21 years in Europe. Between Switzerland, Spain, the Netherlands, and England. So, one of my boys was born in Minnesota, and one was born in Switzerland. They lived the majority of their lives in Europe.

How would you describe your origin story as a poet? What are your first memories of reading and writing poetry? Which people, teachers, and poets were most influential to you in the beginning?

SS: My amusing first poem was written when I was in 5th grade, working on a project for class. My mother suggested I write a poem about mushrooms. The teacher loved it, and she turned it into the local weekly newspaper, which published it.

On her bedside table, my mother had a book of poems. And I remember reading the poems in it, but especially Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees.” I would read it over and over and can still recite parts of it!

After the one about mushrooms, I didn’t write another poem for years! If you look at the Special Thanks at the beginning of my book, Frogs Don’t Sing Red, you’ll see the people to whom I owe the most for my growth as a poet.

While I was a successful magazine feature writer and editor for years, winning several awards, I didn’t start writing poetry, or expressions as I called them then, until 1999. I called them expressions because I was afraid I would kill them. I never thought I was a good enough writer to write poetry. So, when poems started coming, I was afraid they would go away, that they would just fade out. And so, I just tiptoed through the poems and wrote them.

You mentioned your publication position at MD Anderson Cancer Center helped form your relationship with poetry. Can you tell me a little bit about what it was like writing for that job?

SS: Yes, I was hired to write about the human-interest side of cancer, and that was extremely rewarding. Being a magazine feature writer had combined well with my husband’s job as an international businessman. But it was my second husband who was so encouraging of the poetry. I became obsessed and took classes and workshops. But mostly I’ve learned by osmosis. Reading lots of poetry, discussing poetry, and writing poetry have helped it soak into my bones.

Since my husband and dear kindred spirit died in September 2021, poetry and art have helped me get out of bed each day.

While reading Frog’s Don’t Sing Red, I noticed a lot of affectionate and tender poems in the third section that I can only imagine were inspired by your husband. I also noticed a change in imagery and emotion as I read through the poems. Do you have any other comments on the way the poems were arranged for publication?

SS: Yes. The first section is really about life with my parents while trying to put distance and gain an understanding of them. And then in the second section, you start to see that there is an arc that has a semi-autobiographical aspect: my first marriage, living abroad with the kids and all. In the third section, there's the poem, “A Checkered Floor,” and that is about the divorce from my first husband.

And then you met Bill Turner?

SS: Yes, we met in 1994. We had a deep caring for each other. We had 25 years together and felt very fortunate. That's why there's that change in the book when you get to that poem, “Daydreaming”, which I think is the third section. We were both so amazed to find each other. What we loved to do on a Saturday night was, if we weren't going to a play or a concert or something, would be to sit in a bookstore that had a coffee shop where we would write in our journals or read, and just feel absolutely fulfilled. And we said we at least kept two other people from being bored to death.

As a native West Texan, just like all over the world, we have our own culture, right? And so, when I read your poem “Night of the Pump Jacks” on Texas Poetry Assignment, I felt at home. I'm wondering what else you might want readers to know about you and your background as it relates to you and your poetry.

SS: I have two poems in the Texas Poetry Assignment, “Time Zones” and a pantoum, “Night of the Pump Jacks.” They are the only two that I’ve submitted. Dr. Musgrove comes up with new topics too often for me to submit as much as I would like! My grandfather on my mother’s side was a ranch hand and cattle driver in the Panhandle. He had seven children who each had big families so I have plenty of relatives spread across West Texas.

You are an editor for The Ekphrastic Review, ekphrastic is a new word for me can you explain it?

SS: Sure, it is something written in response to a piece of visual art. It can be an art event, an installation, a painting, a sculpture from any century or style. It has become an increasingly popular way to write poetry.

I might have misunderstood, but is that how you wrote the poem, “Frogs Don't Sing Red”?

SS: Yes. I was looking at the Max Ernst painting of the same name at the Menil Museum here in Houston. In a strange way, it spoke to me so I wrote the poem to capture those thoughts and memories of childhood. It is a red painting, hanging in a red room, but there were no frogs.

I am definitely new to that style of poetry. I am relatively new to most poetry, are there any other styles you could enlighten me on?

SS: Prose interests you so let me let me broaden your horizons even further. There's a whole lot going on now that has blurred the lines between the genres of poetry and prose. There's what we now call prose poetry, micro-fiction, micro nonfiction, flash fiction, and flash nonfiction. They are all short, and they're written in blocks of copy like prose, but they're using a poetic conceits—symbolism, repetition, the sound of words, the internal rhyme. These are a few things happening in the broader poetry world. I'm just mentioning this for you to keep it in mind and that one does not exclude the other.

Are there other experiences in workshops or readings or publications beyond Texas Poetry Assignment you want to share?

SS: I have around 45-50 poems at The Ekphrastic Review (ekphrastic.net) if you search my name on the site. I’ve done several readings from my new book: as the featured poet at Houston’s First Friday event at Inprint House (a real honor to read there), a launch of the book at The Jung Center in Houston, and a Zoom launch with Kelly Ann Ellis via an instructor with whom we’ve studied, David Meischen, one of the duo that runs Dos Gatos Press and published the Texas Poetry Calendar for years.

How would you describe your writing process when it comes to poetry? How do you know when you are ready to write a poem and how does the drafting, revising, and editing process work for you?

SS: I don’t necessarily write every day. What spurs a poem? Being in a workshop, being given prompts, reading a poem that touches on something inside me. I absolutely love having a poem going. Revision and editing are so rewarding! I can be a bit like a dog with a bone when I’m in the revision process. Or to mix metaphors, it’s like having dough to knead into something tasty and beautiful.

What topics or issues frequent your poems? Have those changed over time?

SS: One of the poets with whom I worked once told me that my poems were about survival. And I realized she was right. Then, when Bill died, processing grief saved me. Now, I’m finding how rewarding it is to consider the small gifts of being alive.

I have read your poem "Time Zones" on Texas Poetry Assignment. What do you recall about the inspiration for this poem? How does it reflect the choices you regularly make in crafting your poetry on the page? Shape? Line? Music? Comparison? Balance? Were there any new craft choices you made?

SS: I’ve always loved the idea that the Greeks have two different words for time, while as Americans, we only have one that is so strict and stressful. I speak a couple of other languages and have studied many so words fascinate me.

I wrote “Time Zones” right after I retired when I began to have time without deadlines. It was so liberating. Then, Dr. Musgrove had a call for poems about time, so I pulled it out and really worked on it. It was the first time I wrote a diptych, a poem with two parts. I’ve since done it a few other times.

I was so pleased when “Time Zones” was included in the anthology.

I've noticed your different uses of form for your poetry. I saw a lot of choices in shape and line. Is that something that as you're writing you can kind of tell you want to use, or do you go back and kind of tweak it once you have it all down on the page?

SS: You know that's an interesting question. I meet with a group once a month, and these are questions we still ask ourselves. When I was starting to write poems in the early 2000s, I didn't feel secure about what I was doing. Did I choose the right form? If I break the line here, should I break the stanza here? How should it look on the page? And the thing that's happened over the years is I started to become sure of what works for the poem. How I want someone to read it. And one way to do that is to look at where you leave space because part of poetry is also the silence. It's the white space around what's being said.

Take my poem, “Fourteen Kinds of Loneliness.” I picked out fourteen kinds of loneliness because Wallace Stephens has a famous poem “Thirteen Ways to Look at a Blackbird.” And so, I started out and I thought, OK, fourteen kinds of loneliness. And I got these three and I thought I can't do fourteen kinds. Then I thought these don't go together! But I felt they were together. This was written quite a few years ago. But I took a leap with this poem and allowed myself to know that each part is really about loneliness. I didn’t have to weave them together. I could just make it into three parts. This was a poem where I really took for the first time a leap into having a three-part poem. It was a long time ago, but it was a pivotal poem because it gave me the courage to try new things.

What advice would you give to young people who are interested in reading poetry, writing poetry, and publishing their work?

SS: Love writing poetry and playing with language. Love reading poetry as well as other good writing.

For me, the true joy of poetry is in the writing of it, the shaping, the expressing, the doing. If you’re slogging through it all to get it published, how sad. There are no guarantees about publication. The joy has to be in the doing.

If you had to recommend one or two Texas Poetry Assignment poets to other readers, who might you suggest?

SS: Oh dear, I’m not good at recommending poets to others. We all have different tastes. The ones who win the big prizes are already out there. For the rest, there is a huge community of poets in Texas. I enjoy coming across their work at a reading, in a bookshop, referred by a friend.

How would you distinguish contemporary poetry from poetry from earlier eras?

SS: Contemporary poetry is less constricted. Rhyming is no longer necessary although internal rhyme is much admired. Form poetry is less interesting for many literary journals unless it’s done very well. Yet, a poem still needs to have rhythm and music, image, and language, and some poetic tropes to lift it off the page.

I read that you have translated works. It sounds like quite the task to translate someone else's poetry. Could you share about that experience?

SS: Yeah, when I lived in the Netherlands, I learned Dutch. I had two Dutch friends who were poets and they translated some of my poems into Dutch and published them in the Netherlands. And I made friends with this woman poet and translated quite a bit of her poetry as well.

And that's an interesting thing to get into—translation. Because when you begin to see what an incredible challenge it is. Poetry is nuanced. You know the words that you choose are nuanced. When you translate it, like when I was translating from Dutch, a word might have three or four different meanings. So, the meaning I take for the translation of a single word may determine the direction the poem is going to go.

So, when you were doing these translations did you read through it and make the determination that everything still kind of flowed the way that it was originally written it?

SS: The one book that got translated was my Dutch teacher’s. He was a well-published poet and novelist. He wrote a book called Linguisticum. He had all these students who spoke different languages. He had me translate these poems into English. Someone else translate them into French and someone else into German. That was published in a four-language format. He would sit with me while we went through the translations and try to give it exactly those five things that Dr. Musgrove talks about, where was the music and the form. Because I knew Dutch from four years of studying it, but not as a mother tongue, there were certain expressions that I didn't know and so we would argue over some translations. It was interesting, but there was a tremendous amount of give and take in in doing that.

If you had a chance to ask a question to a poet you admire (living or dead), who is the poet and what would you ask?

SS: One of my best friends in Houston is Kevin Prufer, a nationally known poet. When I have a question that I want to ask, I have the freedom to ask him.

Thank you for your time. It has been my pleasure to interview you. I'm hoping that maybe one day we'll cross paths, and I'll get you to sign this copy of Frogs Don’t Sing Red for me.

SS: This has been a real pleasure for me too. It is very seldom that someone sits down and reads your book and then pulls out lines and tells you what they love and how it touches them. So, you don't know what an incredible gift it is to me. I just want to say thank you.

Amanda Sturgeon is from San Angelo, Texas, but now lives in Boerne, Texas. After completing her undergraduate degree in business administration, she is completing an advanced degree in English that will allow for more creativity while still expanding her professional capabilities. She would love to combine her passion and skills to work in the entertainment industry as a producer, screenwriter, or editor.