Sarah Ameigh is a recent graduate of Penn State University. After backpacking across Australia, she moved to the Washington DC-Baltimore area, where she currently works in publishing.
Her story "Hip to Knee" appears in Issue Thirty-Eight of The Collagist.
Here, Sarah Ameigh speaks to interviewer Melissa Goodrich about what sentences are doing, James Baldwin, cluelessness, and the kind of spills we take as we attempt to become adults.
1. Did this story originate with the image of the bruise? How did you start conceiving it?
It did, I started thinking about the way kids hurt themselves growing up, the bangs and the scratches, and the recklessness . There’s something taboo about wearing those kinds of bruises as you get older. You don’t want to show them off to friends, you don’t want to see them in the shower, but they’re still there. You’re not proud; you’re marked. That spun into reconciling with the kind of spills we take as we attempt to become adults, little bumps that turn out to be large and ultimately ugly. There’s a kind of shame in it, a bruise coloring the skin.
2. I’m in-love with your halting half-sentences, like “Something about long hair and brown eyes and cruel beauty and ‘no chance’” and “The ‘I shouldn't’ and ‘too much’ and ‘always’ and ‘never’ and ‘I can't’ and ‘I won't’ and ‘I will.’” Such lines feel very stop-frame, plunging off a cliff, or into clouds, or stepping forward into a wall you didn’t realize was there, that you pause to reckon with. How cognizant are you of the ways in which you like your readers to twist inside your sentences? Do you approach your work more on the sentence level, scene-by-scene, or more telescopically?
Well thank you, I like to play with rhythm a lot when I write. I think because I’ve played various instruments over the years, I find myself splitting my time between how a sentences sounds, what the sentence is doing, and how it sounds beside the other sentences. Once I’m satisfied with those details, I try and move the story forward. I’m able to focus on that kind of thing more with shorter stories, the longer the piece the more I work more scene-by-scene. I tend to treat shorter pieces like songs, if that makes any sense.
3. What is your relationship to intent and reception? There’s something about rehearsing, apologizing, “lean[ing] in the doorway like a dare” that denotes this character as much as writing itself : “What had my hands done, I needed to know…” or “Like I have answers…I don’t.” Are you ever plagued with a similar crisis, craft-wise?
I know when I set out to write something, I always end up asking more questions than I answer, which can sometimes feel disappointing, and sometimes invigorating. In think in the case of this story, there’s a sense of wanting to know how you’re impacting another person. Am I crossing a line? Am I making an impression? Am I learning from all this, or better yet, should I be? I think it’s difficult to fully understand our effect on others day to day, and I think in terms of writing, that’s especially true. You throw something out in the world, and have no idea how it’s going to be digested.
4. Best thing you’ve read the past month, week, hour?
I recently read “Screenwriter” by Charles D’Ambrosio and it completely knocked the wind out of me. I also reread Cloud Nine by Caryl Churchill, just as stunning as when I saw it produced at Penn State. I found some really great essays in Nobody Knows My Name by James Baldwin, who I think is as close to a perfect writer as any can come.
5. What are you writing now?
I’m currently working on a few projects, one about an Australian outback bar, and another about a woman who stumbles on a car accident. In terms of comedy writing I’ve been working on a new non-fiction blog that essentially makes fun of my friends and I, living in different cities and figuring it out. Let’s be honest, if we couldn’t laugh at the fact that we’re completely clueless twenty-somethings, we’d probably never laugh.