Q&A with Sarah Solomon

This week we had the opportunity to publish a new piece of fiction, “Back to the Earth” by Sarah Solomon. One of our managing editors, Emily Linehan, discussed with Solomon the experience of writing loss, grief, and religion.

Back to Earth deals intimately with grief. Where did you draw your inspiration from? 

I suppose the answer comes back to family in a few different ways for me. My first time leaving the rural United States was when I spent a semester abroad in Dublin. My grandmother passed away unexpectedly during that time, and it was my first exposure to a very specific grief that comes with missing a moment. Grief of her death, of course, but layered with the painful knowledge that I was somewhere else entirely when it happened. That feeling of being apart, it binds itself to the grief, makes it take on a different shape. I didn’t know it then, but that feeling has come to dominate my twenties: the beauty and pain of a life that spans continents, the way the sheer distance shapes every experience just so. 

Around the time of her death, I met the man I would end up marrying, who is from Kildare. His father comes from County Carlow and his mother comes from Abadan, Iran. When we got together, this legacy of international family not only continued, it expanded. Loving people across time zones, languages, and distances measured in the thousands of miles can be humbling work, to say the least. It makes the world feel at once much bigger and smaller than I ever could have imagined.

Which is all to say, for me this story is inspired by the intimate grief of a life shaped across continents. Exploring it at the end of a life – an abrupt end – is a bit of a way of a holding a magnifying glass to these questions of home, family, belonging. When you have roots in more than one place, you may spend an entire lifetime without an easy answer, it may elude even in death.

I was particularly fascinated with not only the philosophy of the life cycle but the intertwining motif of religion within the natural imagery presented. Why did this cross section of ideas appeal to you? 

Lately I’ve been toying with this idea of being an expansive agnostic. When I first left organized religion, I thought that not knowing meant my spirituality had become off-limits, which left a bit of a holy void. These days I’ve felt empowered by not knowing. It allows me to be far more open and curious in my spirituality, able to integrate it with the things that I feel are sacred, regardless of what they are or where they come from. The beauty and rhythms of the natural world are an example of that for me. By taking this more expansive view, religious imagery sits comfortably alongside ideas about nature, or community, or things that don’t usually have that kind of language applied to them. To me, they seem to all belong together in that way, more so than any other I’ve found yet.

Towards the crescendo of your story, the narrator deals with the ineptitude of words when describing the impact of loss and how sympathetic platitudes, though generically simple, “become[s] sacred”. Do you ever struggle to find the right words you’re looking for when writing about such harrowing experiences as death? And do you think any phrase (‘time heals all wounds’ for example) can ever become too cliched to use in one’s writing? 

Well, what I love about the use of language is how we can tailor it endlessly for the circumstances we find ourselves in. And sometimes, unfortunately, the circumstance we are in is as simple as: this sucks, I’m sorry, I love you. Is it cliché to say that, or is that just what the moment calls for? In that particular part of the story, I’m poking at the power of the collective – arguably more important than any individual words are the many people showing up at the right moment to say them. 

But in a different circumstance, words become something else. They become a tool to process the world around you. Which, yeah, can lead to a struggle to find the right ones! But I enjoy trying to find the right words, and I enjoy reading other people trying, too. We’re lucky we get as many chances as we want to find words that resonate through literature, poems, songs, whatever. We keep having experiences and we keep looking for words for the experiences, and the cycle carries on forever. How cool is that?

As for your final question: I think every writer gets to decide how they want to use language, so I would never say any phrase is strictly off limits. It’s more about if it works in the context – maybe it will, maybe it won’t. It’s a risk any writer is allowed to take, and any reader gets to be the judge for themselves. That’s just part of the deal.

Has your many years living in Ireland impacted the way you view religion? How do you feel about the Irish attitude to death; attending wakes and drinking pubs after mass?

I do think living in Ireland has impacted my view on religion. This whole expansive agnostic concept was born here for me. Part of that, of course, goes back to family. My husband and I joke that whenever our families pray for us, we are reaping the benefits of the combined power of several major world religions. I allude to something like that in the story, this lovely notion of getting covered by all these different beliefs through prayers from loved ones. 

I just find that to be a much more comforting thought of what religion could be, rather than what so often it is – a reason for conflict, even war. Ireland of course is no stranger to this history, and living here I see evidence all the time of the hard work of building peace and co-existence across religions, which itself is a sacred act. Perhaps it is the most sacred of acts, really, to labor for peace.

I have great respect for the Irish culture around death. When I’ve been invited into those moments, I’m always struck by how intimate and communal it is. There is a rhythm to the ritual that seems to wrap around the family, support them through those first few impossible days. It creates opportunities to acknowledge the contradictions of our shared existence: joy alongside sorrow, laughter alongside tears, life alongside death. It truly is a beautiful thing.