Today we’d like to introduce you to Sarah Rose Nordgren.
Hi Sarah Rose, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I’m a Durham-based poet, writer, and teacher who also founded The School for Living Futures, an experimental project dedicated to creating new knowledge and possibility for our climate changed future.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a love for the beauty and power of language as well as a connection and sense of wonder and curiosity about the living world. When I think of my childhood, I think of running around in the woods and playing in the creek behind my suburban neighborhood, and also hearing fairytales and memorizing poems at the Emerson Waldorf School where I attended kindergarten through 8th grade.
After getting extra encouragement and instruction in poetry writing from a couple of great English teachers at St. Mary’s School in Raleigh during high school, as well as a year abroad in Ireland, I attended Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY for creative writing and dance where I began to really call myself a writer and deepen my craft. After that, I returned to North Carolina for an MFA in Poetry from UNC Greensboro where I met my longtime friend and mentor, the poet Linda Gregg, who was a visiting faculty member while I was there. Linda taught me — or rather reminded me — to stay with the heart and mystery of the poem, to ignore poetic trends, and to be skeptical of writing for publication or recognition. She was playing the long game in her work: dancing with the ineffable, courting eternity. I learned a lot from her, and though she passed away in 2019, I still speak to her and hear her when I’m writing.
I left Greensboro because I was offered the best gift a poet could possibly receive: time. In what seemed like a miraculous turn of events, I was offered a 7-month poetry fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, a wonderful artist residency and community that has been welcoming writers and visual artists, providing them apartments, studios, and a small living stipend for over fifty years. It was during this time that my first collection of poetry — Best Bones — began to take shape, and where many of its poems were written. I returned to Provincetown two years later for a second fellowship, during which I began writing poems that would later become my second book, Darwin’s Mother.
After three years of teaching literature and creative writing at Miami University of Ohio (outside Cincinnati), I decided to return to graduate school once again and earn my PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Cincinnati. A lot happened during my five years in that program, including writing my third and fourth books, The Creation Museum and Feathers: A Bird-Hat Wearer’s Journal, collaborating with choreographer (and my best friend from St. Mary’s School) and video maker Kathleen Kelley to create dance and poetry videos, gaining a husband and a stepson and giving birth to my son, Oliver, and getting deeply involved in climate activism in Cincinnati.
I had always considered myself an environmentally-aware person. It showed up in the books I read, in my poems, in lifestyle choices and habits like composting, minimizing waste, the fact that I’ve been a vegetarian since age 12. But after my son was born I had what people call a “climate awakening,” which often shows up as a dark night of the soul when one actually begins to absorb the extent and gravity of the harm we’ve done—and continue to do—to the planet, and the ramifications now and in the future of that harm. In seeking relief from my extreme distress about planetary warming, I connected with a direct action group in Cincinnati who was leading a campaign against Proctor & Gamble to get them to stop clearcutting the boreal forest in Canada to create their paper products. I only got to work with them a few months before the pandemic temporary shut them down and I moved back to the Triangle, but it was a great lesson to find how much anxiety can be alleviated through action and community connection.
I brought that learning with me when the pandemic brought me and my family back to Durham to be closer to my parents and sisters, and – with no funding or institutional affiliation – I created The School for Living Futures with the help of my sister Krista. We wanted to create a place for people to come together and learn from each other and build more climate resilience, to make climate action accessible, to inspire people to become changemakers in their own areas of expertise and arenas of influence, and to connect people beyond disciplinary lines – artists, scientists, healthcare workers, activists, writers, designers, farmers. What happens, we wondered, when knowledges and resources mix in a welcoming, creative space?
Over two years – 2022-2024 – we created an array of programming exploring these goals and questions. Our main offering was a monthly event series – Living Futures Saturdays – that combined presentations from climate-engaged folks of different disciplines along with community connection and discussion. We also co-hosted a big Climate Social with Sarah P. Duke Gardens, offered creative writing and gardening workshops, commissioned an art show called Future of Water featuring three local artists in partnership with the Durham Art Guild and funded by the Durham Arts Council, and presented readings of the eco-thriller The Children by playwright Lucy Kirkwood in partnership with Theater Bookclub. It was a big adventure, and we met so many amazing people doing important, creative work in the Triangle and beyond.
The School for Living Futures has been on a bit of a hiatus for the past year. As an introverted writer at heart, I needed some time away from the public nature of SfLF—especially the need to publicize on social media, which I strongly dislike—and to dedicate more time to my writer life. I was on tour for my book Feathers last fall, and now I’ve been writing a new book—a guide or craft book for creative writers wanting to engage more deeply with ecological themes. The book, Wilderment: Creative Writing in the Time of Climate Change, will be published by West Virginia University Press in spring of 2027. I’m also going to be co-editing, with Mia Alvarado, a new series at WVUP called Lionstooth that publishes shorter works of fiction and creative nonfiction that “stay with the trouble” in an age of ecological crisis. So, if any readers of this feature have novellas or short creative nonfiction manuscripts that might be a good fit, please reach out!
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Trying to make a life as an artist is rarely smooth sailing. I lived on very little money for a lot of years – scraping by on graduate student and fellowship stipends. There was a lot of beans and rice, a lot of declining dinner invitations from friends who were meeting at nice restaurants, years of driving old cars that were constantly breaking down. I still don’t make great money from my writing and teaching, and I think it’s important to acknowledge that I’m able to spend as much time as I do on writing, activism, and community-building as I do because I’m now partnered with someone who has a more conventional day job.
There’s also a lot of rejection built into being a publishing writer. Since I started publishing my work in literary journals and magazines when I was in my early twenties, I’ve built up a thick skin about rejection, and I’m actually grateful for that. I think any writer who wants to really stick with it has to be pretty tough. We get so much criticism and so much rejection, it will drive you crazy if you let it get to you. And I’ve seen multiple writer friends over the years get sidetracked by self-pity and jealousy, and it’s a hard loop to get out of once you get stuck.
Despite the challenges, I feel extremely fortunate for the opportunities I’ve been given—access to great education and talented teachers, the freedom to take up opportunities when they’re offered, gifts of time and financial support from institutions, and an ever-supportive family.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
Perhaps what I’m known for as a writer is bringing my various interests—evolution, biology, history, ecology, fashion, the divine, nature and technology, consciousness, climate change—into my poetry and prose in interesting and vivid ways. Or, at least I hope that’s what I’m doing. I do have a reputation for being interdisciplinary and bringing ideas and forms together in new syntheses. I do this in my subject matter as well as through formal experimentation—my two most recent books combine poetry, prose, and image, and my collaborations with Kathleen Kelley combine poetry, dance, and video.
This interdisciplinarity and my wide-ranging interests also came through in my approach to The School for Living Futures, which I thought of as a long, collective, public poem co-created by all the folks that our programming has brought together.
I’ve also built a reputation in recent years as a writer who helps other writers explore writing about climate and other ecological crises through the online workshops I teach. My hope is that this book I’m writing for writers now – Wilderment: Creative Writing in the Time of Climate Change – will offer adult (and even teen) writers of all levels new ways to approach both the tragedies and possibilities of this moment in their art.
We’d love to hear about how you think about risk taking?
Yes, I think I’ve always been a risk-taker, or perhaps “brave” is the word that’s been most often used by family and friends to describe me. Deciding to be a professional poet is a huge risk to begin with, and especially in my early adult years there was a lot of risk-taking as I moved from place to place for different opportunities, fellowships, jobs. I had to be flexible, low-maintenance (few belongings), and able to come back quickly from heartbreaks and disappointments.
Starting SfLF was also a huge risk, and it was definitely scary to venture out with this big public thing and not know how the community was going to receive it, if people would care, if people would show up. I was often biting my fingernails up until the room was full each month at our Living Futures Saturdays events, and only then could I take a breath and enjoy myself.
Again, I want to acknowledge that my bravery or risk-taking capacity as an artist or public person is not just an individual quality of mine or a personal philosophy. Rather, it’s supported by the foundation of support I feel around me from my parents, family, friends, the trees, the animals, the earth. There are beloved people in my life that didn’t start out with a safe or stable home life, and that can have a big impact on their ability to feel safe while taking risks.
Contact Info:
