"About the Work" with Sarah Fawn Montgomery

In our "About the Work" series, Savannah Trent asks recent contributors for insight into their writing or for current sources of inspiration. Read Montgomery's essay, "In Flame" in SER vol. 38.2.

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I wrote “In Flame” after several years of what seemed like a world figuratively and quite literally on fire. Friends lost their Massachusetts home in a fire on New Year’s Day, another friend lost her grandmother in the California wildfires, my home suffered faulty wiring and smoke detectors rang out regularly, my brother worked as a firefighter and saw a number of atrocities, and even Notre Dame burned. At the same time, however, I sought comfort through metaphors of flame in literature and art, and by the fireside during long New England winters. So, while this lyric essay reflects on the destruction of flame, it also seeks to understand the ways it offers the redemption.

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SARAH FAWN MONTGOMERY is the author of Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir (The Ohio State University Press 2018) and three poetry chapbooks, including Regenerate: Poems of Mad Women (Dancing Girl Press 2017). Her work has been listed as notable several times in Best American Essays, and her poetry and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in various magazines including Bellingham Review, Brevity, Cincinnati Review, DIAGRAM, Electric Literature, LitHub, The Poetry Foundation, The Rumpus, Split Lip Magazine, and others. She is an Assistant Professor at Bridgewater State University. You can follow her on Twitter at @SF_Montgomery