Sasha Steensen (she/hers) is the author of six books of poems: House of Deer, The Method, and A Magic Book, all from Fence Books; Gatherest (Ahsahta Press); Everything Awake (Shearsman Press); and Well (Parlor Press, 2024). Recent essays have appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Interim, and Essay Press. Steensen teaches Creative Writing and Literature at Colorado State University, where she was named the 2023 Stern Distinguished Professor. She is a poetry editor for Colorado Review and an editor for the Test Site Poetry Series. Living in Fort Collins, Colorado with her husband and two daughters, she tends a garden, a flock of chickens, two standard poodles, and a very fierce barn cat.
Lisa Olstein: What questions or obsessions urged this particular work into being or revealed themselves in it?
Sasha Steensen: Well is both a chronicle of my own experience in a body objectified by the cancer industry and an exploration of the language and forms that became available as a direct result of my treatment. In particular, I became interested in the ways permeability, which may have been partially responsible for my illness, was also full of healing potential. As I underwent treatment, I researched toxicity and detoxification, care and cure, and I found that while my female body was particularly susceptible to toxins, it was also very well cared for by other women, some of whom were personal friends and relatives, and others of whom were writers whose words buoyed me. I became interested in how women talk and write about their bodies to one another and to themselves, and thus I began exploring the letters, diaries, and journals of women writers whose bodies had undergone similar experiences. My hope is that Well is a testament to female connectedness and female centeredness during a time in which the female body, like the very earth that sustains us, is simultaneously revealing its wounds and recommitting itself to the care of other vulnerable bodies.
LO: Did you have in mind any identifiable recipients for the utterance of this work? Did your sense of how or to whom the work was speaking evolve?
SS: This particular book was written for loved ones, mostly women, whose care has been crucial at different points throughout my life. For years, I have been fascinated by Audre Lorde’s claim that “the erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling.... For women, [oppression]...has meant a suppression of the erotic as a considered source of power and information within our lives.” This expansive sense of the erotic feels most connected to a collective bodily knowing. With my female beloveds, intimate bodily experiences (such as birth, for example) that resist articulation still somehow feel shared. Breast cancer, of course, is not a uniquely female experience, but the cancer industry’s treatment of women with breast cancer reminded me of the ways my body has been objectified throughout my life. I am deeply grateful for my treatment and for my doctors, but giving over control of one’s body, even for the sake of healing, can be reminiscent of the lack of agency one feels in the face sexual objectification, and sometimes these forms of objectification overlap.
As an example, the first surgeon I consulted urged me to consider a double mastectomy with implants, though this approach was in no way medically necessary. While I could be adequately treated with a lumpectomy, he was concerned that I was “still young and would want to wear a bathing suit.” He looked at my husband and said, “your implants can be any size you want.” Needless to say, I did not use this surgeon. The female surgeon I consulted next had been a potter for most of her life, and she recommended a lumpectomy, discussing the ways she used not just sight, but touch to identify and remove the tumor. I imagined her hands carefully forming vessels from clay, and I immediately felt she had access to a sort of knowledge that the first surgeon, obsessed with the way my breast would look, did not.
In another sense, my audience was a group of women writers who would never read the book, women who themselves experienced similar, but often more invasive, treatment—Audre Lorde, Kathy Acker, Rachel Carson, Fanny Burney and Susan Sontag, among others. What I noticed was that they often wrote letters to the women who cared for them and/or they were writing to themselves as a form of self-care. In Carson’s case, she was concerned Silent Spring would be discredited if her readers knew that she was battling cancer, and she kept the details of her illness between her and her closest friend. While she was one of the first writers to insist that certain types of cancer could be directly tied to environmental toxicity, she also understood that a woman writing from personal experience runs the risk of being dismissed as biased.
Finally, we all, I hope, have been cared for by another in loving and selfless ways. Those relationships offer a kind of healing that we all desperately need, and perhaps Well pays homage to this form of healing in ways that resonate with my larger audience.
LO: “Form sets the thought free,” says Anne Carson, and I believe her. How did form and thought co-evolve in the unfolding of this work?
SS: What a beautiful question! Sometimes this interaction is quite mysterious. I think of a skein of geese in migration. One goose leads the group, lessening their load by creating currents that make migration easier, but then they shift positions. The epistolary as subject was crucial for me when considering the formal life of this book. This is, in large part, because I was reading so many letters by other women, but also because I was writing to women directly. The journal also felt important in part because I was reading other women’s journals, but also, I was journaling to process this entirely new world of illness and care. I was diagnosed a few weeks after the 2016 election, and things felt dire. I was thinking mostly about my daughters, and the idea of leaving them in a world in which Trump would become their president was terrifying. Because they still were young girls, there was so much I hadn’t yet shared with them about being a woman. Now I see that my journals were, in large part, letters to my daughters.
Immediacy and a sort of daily awareness felt important as well. Life continues even in times of crisis. As a form of personal resistance, it was important to register that other things besides treatment continued to happen: my closest friend had a baby; a gift arrived in the mail from another friend; Christmas and New Year’s came and went. As forms that admit intimacy and immediacy, the journal and the letter allowed me to make space for such life-affirming relationships and events in the face of uncertainty.
LO: What’s the relationship between the speaker’s “I” and you, yourself? How is the book’s “I” informed by your I and/or eye?
SS: This is, in many ways, the most personal and intimate book I have yet to write, so perhaps it easiest to say that the speaker in this book is me. At the same time, as your question suggests, I do believe that writers experience a sort of permeability that expands the sense of who is speaking. As I mentioned above, permeability became an important subject in this book because just as cancer is often caused by the body’s response to outside factors, such as exposure to chemicals, it is also treated via other kinds of permeability such as surgery or medicine. Receptivity is crucial for the human body, but it can also be dangerous. Similarly, when it comes to cancer treatment, it isn’t uncommon to be cured by something that is deeply harmful. The receptivity that harms can also cure.
LO: What’s your sense of the aural life of this work?
SS: Repetition, which is an aural poetic device, of course, operates as a healing litany and a paean, a song of thanksgiving and praise for the power of friendship. There are other instances, though, when repetition is meant to highlight the accumulation of toxic exposure as well as the far-reaching damage this exposure can cause. At one point, my oncologist, stymied by the fact that I was diagnosed at a relatively young age without any family history of breast cancer, asked me if I grew up on an industrial farm. Clearly, he understands that pesticides and herbicides can cause cancer. We often talk about extinction as it relates to certain beloved species, but I have noticed that we less often talk about the impact of toxicity on those we consider pests. Yes, pests can often lead to life-threatening illness for humans and other species, but pests often serve important roles in the ecosystem, and to try to eradicate them is not only dangerous to humans and fatal to the so-called “pests,” but this can be devastating to other species who rely on these pests for their own survival. In the book, repetition is often an opportunity to list all threatened lifeforms in hopes of emphasizing that sense of permeability and interconnectedness that we often overlook.
LO: What felt riskiest to you about this work?
SS: When I started writing this book, I worried I didn’t have a right to talk about cancer. My cancer, and its treatment, was far less aggressive than those of other patients I met along the way. In my mind, the term “cancer survivor” diminishes the great efforts made by those who don’t “survive” cancer. I didn’t do anything that allowed me to survive, and in fact, so many people who don’t survive fight much harder than I did. At the same time, this book isn’t so much about my experience with cancer as it is about my experience with intimacy, particularly between women. Writing about intimacy also felt risky, but once I realized that cancer was the just the impetus that drew attention to the power of intimacy, those initial fears disappeared. We are all given opportunities to reflect upon, and celebrate, those sustaining relationships, and to not do so runs its own risk. The risk of undervaluing, and therefore not harnessing intimacy and care is a risk I certainly don’t want to take.
LO: What kept you company during the writing of this work? Did any books, songs, art works, philosophical treatises, snacks, walks, or oddball devotions contribute to a book-specific creative realm?
SS: I love this question, in large part because even after years of writing, I am still discovering activities, people, mediums, etc. that feed my work. I have already talked about friendships, but I haven’t necessarily talked about what I did with these friends that felt particularly important. Friends accompanied me to appointments, brought food, ran errands. Long phone conversations and long walks with these friends sustained me. There is a poem in Well called “The Walk,” and it explores the ways in which the act of synchronizing steps and sensing (seeing, hearing, feeling, etc) the same thing as a fellow walker deepens a relationship.
Swimming, too, became important for me as I recovered. I learned from my OT that swimming can serve as a compression sleeve for the entire body. It is as if the water circulating around the swimmer encourages circulation within the swimmer. I had so much stiffness from radiation, and after the removal of several lymph nodes, I wanted to encourage circulation in whatever way I could. I took swim lessons to improve my technique, and I would practice open swimming in a nearby reservoir. While doing so, I thought so much about breathing, both as life force but also as a compositional principle. Here we might think of Olson’s “the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE.” It felt so good to breathe purposefully and rhythmically as one must do while swimming, and many of the poems were driven by this renewed awareness.
LO: How has it been to shift out of the creative space of this book? What are you working on now?
SS: After finishing Well, I experienced an excruciating period of writer’s block, something I hadn’t faced to this extent before. It was the beginning of the pandemic, and I was trying to figure out how to mother my two daughters in this new reality. It wasn’t just homeschooling and isolation; it was also the fact that both my daughters turned 13 (one in 2020 and the other in 2022) during this period, and they were desperate to differentiate themselves from their parents, which was particularly hard to do during the pandemic. I just didn’t have the bandwidth during that time to do much writing, and I was in a panic that I would never write again.
Thankfully, I have emerged from the other side, and I now have several projects in the works. I am completing a book of long-form essays. But in terms of poetry, I really had to let go of a lot of expectations about how writing happened. For years, I thought I need large expanses of time and silence to write. Once I began writing again, I realized I didn’t need those things at all. I needed to find joy in the activity; I needed to play, to have fun. I began writing a book of poems called Handbook for Abandoned Poets. As of right now, it is really unhinged, and that alone has given me permission. There are writing exercises; there are prompts that I created using lines from Beverley Dahlen’s multivolume A Reading; there is a long poem I wrote while sitting in Julian of Norwich’s cell for a full day last summer; and there are a series of counted verse poems using the numbers we associate with hands—10 line poems with 10 word lines broken in half by a caesura.
The other project occupying my time, Overland: An Incomplete History of Three Acres and all that Surrounds, is one I started over a decade ago when my family and I moved to the land where we currently live. For years, I took photos and videos, made sound recordings, wrote poems and prose, and visited the Colorado State University’s and City of Fort Collins Archives, but I just kept amassing material without any sense of what to do with it. Overland sat dormant for several years, but I was called back to the project after encountering a High Country News investigation through which I learned that our particular parcel was part of a larger 160-acre plot “purchased” from the Arapahoe and Cheyenne for 86 cents. Around this same time, my neighbor showed me an overgrown trail leading to Colorado State University’s Foothills Campus. With all the researchers and employees working remotely due to the pandemic, my dogs and I roamed the campus and its wide-open expanses freely. A portal of sorts, the path led me back to this abandoned project.
There is much I will never know about this land, but here are a few things I do know: it was once ocean; pre-ice age indigenous tribes had campsites nearby; via the Morrill act, this stolen land was then given to the state of South Carolina as seed money for their two land grant universities; it was on the Overland Mail & Express route; it is adjacent to CSU’s Foothills Campus where the University conducts research that aims to mitigate the very effects of the colonization and exploitation that brought the land into CSU’s care over 150 years ago; at least 48 Native and Indigenous tribes, bands, nations and peoples have ties to nearby land. And, it is beautiful and volatile; it is injured and full of regenerative power. I suspect that Overland lay fallow for so long because I needed to learn this history, and, perhaps most importantly, I needed to dispel the idea that I was tending to the land when, really, it was tending to me.
When I did return to Overland, I realized that I wanted to create a website to accommodate all the different mediums I was exploring. In addition to poems, prose, images and film, the website includes installations, grave rubbing poems, and sound recordings. I have no idea if Overland will ever live as a book. For now, the website feels like the perfect space as it is provisional, accessible, and immediate. I add to it regularly, and whenever I do, it seems I always immediately have a new idea about what might be included next. It truly is one experiment after another, which after that miserable period of writer’s block, is a welcome relief.
Lisa Olstein is the author of five poetry collections published by Copper Canyon Press: Radio Crackling, Radio Gone (2006), Lost Alphabet (2009), Little Stranger (2013), Late Empire (2017), and Dream Apartment (2023). She has also published two books of nonfiction: Pain Studies (Bellevue Literary Press, 2020), a book-length lyric essay on the intersection of pain, perception, and language; and Climate (Essay Press, 2022), an exchange of epistolary essays co-written with Julie Carr.
Olstein’s honors include a John S. Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, Pushcart Prize, Lannan Writing Residency, Hayden Carruth Award, Writers League of Texas Discovery Book Award, and Sustainable Arts Foundation award. She is the Ellen Clayton Garwood Centennial Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Texas at Austin, where she teaches in the New Writers Project and Michener Center for Writers MFA programs. She is also the lyricist for the rock band Cold Satellite and curates an interview series with poets about their new books for Tupelo Quarterly.