Sarah Sophia Yanni / DA Denckla

Jul. 6

Interview with poeta Sarah Sophia Yanni about her book Ternura / Tenderness by DA Denckla

"There no way to answer that question": an interview with writer Sarah Sophia Yanni

I met up with Sarah for an afternoon coffee on a cool Sunday afternoon in April 2023 at Coffee Commissary in Franklin Village (on the boundary between Glendale and Burbank in Los Angeles County, Alta California, EEUU in the unceded territories of Qich-speaking peoples). This interview is intermediated by quotes from Sarah's poems that give our interchange heft and rhythm.

"In / Between ... Nothing is close here"

DD: Thanks for meeting me.

SY: Thanks for your interest in my book. It's had a few years in print, so it almost feels like it was written by another person at this point.

DD: Who is that person? What was she like?

SY: She was in grad school, full of confidence and optimism about making a body of work to share with the world dealing with disengagement from a love and a new sense of self that emerges afterwards.

DD: She sounds like someone we should talk to about her book, right?

SY: I suppose she's the only one who could talk about it. (Laughs.)

DD: OK, let's do it.

SY: Yeah, and I have to be kind to myself because I'm a bit critical of certain aspects of this book these days. I have a lot of respect for everyone that writes about their identity, as I did. But, I think there's a certain kind of diaspora poetry that I'm really turned off by — that feels somewhat reductive or like it's trying to be legible for a wider audience.

But, who am I to say this is the right way or the wrong way to do it? So rather than me judge myself unfairly, I'd rather hear what you think.

DD: I'd be honored to delve into the book together. First, Let's talk context, OK?

SY: There is no writer without one.

DD: True. Let's talk about the cover and work our way inside its pages.

"My presence, an American taint... I teeter a liminal / culture"

DD: Great. You write on the back cover that you are "an egyptian-mexican-japanese writer."

SY: That's right.

DD: In that extensive list of hybrid and hyphenated identities, I noticed that you do not hyphenate yourself with what could be deemed your fourth hyphenated identity: "American." Was this intentional?

SY: Yes. I don't always feel like I am so "American."

DD: But, of course, you were born and raised here in the United States, right?

SY: Yes, and I spent every Summer going to visit family in Mexico as well. And, Spanish was my first language, spoken at home.

DD: And, also, you grew up in Los Angeles too, right?

SY: Yes.

"The air in Los Angeles smells like dirt and heat. / A place I call home"

DD: I see that. I see that. There is a way that Los Angeles is both part of America and not part of America — like many Europeans consider New York to be different than the rest of the United States.

SY: Exactly. Los Angeles is both American and not American, both in terms of its present home to so many ethnic cultures that remain in distinct areas, like the Armenians right here in Glendale. And then there is the history of Los Angeles being part of Mexico for long time before it was part of the United States.

For all my disdain for what it means to be an "American," I've been writing more and more about what it means to be from Los Angeles.

DD: That's why I was asking you earlier about the "fourth leg" to the chair of your identity being American. That's because your work is grounded in place and that place is in America.

SY: My "fourth leg" is that I am an "Angelino".

DD: That makes sense as an identity within a place that creates space for so many hybrid or hyphenated identities.

SY: And, I think because most people who interact with my work will know that I was born in America and that I'm living and working in America. It's, like, an assumption. So, I put those other things on the back cover to show the many diasporas that brought me to America.

DD: That makes a lot of sense.

SY: But, when I'm traveling abroad though, I'm just American. And, that's embarrassing.

DD: Let's talk later about why you feel embarassed abroad.

"I sometimes jumble my languages"

DD: So, let's move on to discuss the title. It's a word that is written in both English and Spanish with a backslash between them.

The book is mostly written in English with Spanish words presented occasionally. So, I took the title to present your sense of being in between languages and cultures.

And, there is a five poem cycle, entitled "In / Between," returning to the use of that slashing punctuation — all of which frame and weave the book together. That slash has a violent resonance as well as an inclusiveness of being "both / and".

SY: Yeah, at the time I was just really focused writing about being between cultures, first generation, saying yes, it's all hard and confusing. I'm between languages. But I've really never wanted that to be the whole thing that I write about, because it's not my whole self.

DD: OK then what is the missing parts of your whole self that "tenderness" or "ternura" speaks to?

SY: I don't know. I've always been really emotional, really romantic. That feels like it's the driving force for why I want to write. So, I think the title grounds the book in what I'm interested in exploring — first these soft feelings and then these in-between poems. My age at the time I wrote those poems is part of that in-between — in-between childhood and adulthood.

DD: Okay, yeah, so maybe you're trying to de-center from that eternity of becoming, not having that be central to the narrative of who you are while also accepting that it's so.

SY: Yeah, that's an inevitable part of when I write about myself. That's a huge part of it. Discovery and acceptance. But, yeah, I didn't want it to be, you know, just a book about, "Who is Sarah?" Right? Well, every book is sort of that anyways — even there in the reductive geographic binary— from here, not from here.

"do i still count as arab ... my father's birth certificate tell me i am"

DD: But you have so many multiples in the "In / Between" pieces that I think you could safely escape that risk of reductivity. I was just intrigued — and I don't know if you would agree— but I think the book's grapples with trying to, land upon a construction of identity and not necessarily finding one.

SY: Yeah, this collection is about trying to construct a sense of self.

DD: Yeah, constructing a self from a fractured self. Speaking of multiplicity of selves, constructed from things like discomfort with body, with gender norms, like the skirt-length poem. Others think you hit upon all these different layers of the construction itself, especially a young self, you know, trying to come into being in a certain way.

"I read online that/ pain is a spectrum/ where on the scale / are you?"

DD: What readings inspire you?

SY: I read self-help, poetry and nonfiction.

DD: I've noticed this trend where poetry and self-help seem to be merging. On Instagram, I see people declaring that writing poetry is a healing process. Does that relate to your book?

SY: Tender refers to a sensitive place or memory that still hurts from a previous injury and it also refers to a sense of sympathy for injury or warmth for another. Like a tender spot or tender feelings.

Writing has been absolutely very healing. It's one of its gifts. I gave a talk about this in grad school (at Cal Arts). Writing for me has been a way to really sift through chaos and give language to unnamed things.

"complaints about composing / the words they'll never have"

DD: Like what things?

SY: I felt like this book was an assertion of my self and, at the same time, it was a way of taking care of myself, this former self and finding ways to like her, my self.

DD: In my writing, I find that there's a fine line between something that's helping me and something that's art. There is a difference between, like, a diary entry and something that has some kind of universal feeling to touch other people.

SY: I think that difference is less important than what we think. It it's relevant or helpful to me, it may be relevant or helpful to someone else.

"Spacious guilt" ... "sorry is a word I say too / much so sorry for saying"

DD: Let's return to the theme of embarrassment as being between comfort and discomfort. Why do you feel embarrassed to be from the US when you are abroad? I feel that way too, by the way.

SY: I used to go visit family in Mexico every Summer, And my cousins would always be teasing me, making fun of me and my sister for being the "Americans".

And, in the Trump era, my cousins would be asking me, "What the hell is going on in America?" And, would answer, "I don't know, like, I'm not 'American,' not really."

At least, I am not one of the Americans who wants to make it "Great Again" or something.

DD: That sort of comes full circle to another thing that I wanted to ask. The book is dedicated to your "family (blood and otherwise)". Who are the "otherwise"?

SY: So many of us who are brown or first-gen and who are queer or pursuing something creative are estranged from our families. And many people who I'm not related to by blood have been like family to me.

DD: I feel like that is a very queer construction, you know, like the sort of "House of..." model for queer and trans youth. A collective of otherness.

SY: Yeah, I'm queer, and chosen family is a real thing.

DD: Let's move further. I'm thinking about the bilinguality of the title and the occasional Spanish word that comes into the text. Is Arabic or Japanese part of your lived experience?

SY: Not really. I still speak Spanish at home, but I've always written in English. So, this split between what I speak and what I write is another in-between.

"you are the custodian of / my small pieces and large empties"

DD: Let's jump back into the book. Where did it come from?

SY: At the time when I was writing the book, I was in a particular point of my life, figuring out certain parts of my identity and relationship, so I was really driven by that search.

DD: What was so different then?

SY: I was 23, living with my parents, with the same boyfriend I had had since I was 19. I don't know, that's a big difference, right? Reading these poems now is like meeting my former self. They are, they are reflective of the time.

DD: Well, I think that former Sarah is deserving of some tenderness.

SY: She is. She is. (Laughing).

"Abuela / slips an extra bill in my pocket"

DD: A theme that returns in the book is the narrator's relationship with your abuela. In the poem, “I know the room in abuela’s house,” there’s a very tender sentiment but also an ambivalence. The good smells of her house and “the air stale but familiar”. There are “the white linen curtain, greasy from / years of hands”.

This speaks to me of an imagistic as well as sentimental ambivalence. But it's also reflective of an ambivalence as she does not seem to accept the narrator as she it.

SY: That was more about my discovering my Mom's identity in my abuela's house.

DD: Oh, she is the one the narrator addresses stating "lace trimmed blouses and faded blue denim/ it's strange to think that you wore them / before you were big and made me small"?

SY: Yes, that's right. Discovering my mother's childhood things before she was my mother, when she was small.

"my mother's temper...her dazzling fire"

DD: We are always working out these sort of things.

SY: Yeah, "mommy" issues. I think it's always interesting to remember that your parents were once people before you were born, they were once children.

DD: Yeah, that’s so weird.

SY: I think being in my mom's childhood bedroom is always this weird thing where I'm, like, "You were this little girl in this room." And it feels a little complicated to extend that sympathy because my mom and I have such a have had such an up and down relationship. It's good thing to do but also hard hard thing to do. And going there, to my abuela’s house, I really have to see her here as a whole person.

DD: I get that. It almost makes your parent too real. Almost icky closeness.

SY: Exactly. No comfortable distance in a parent-child hierarchy. Your parent and child dynamic collapses that dynamic and confuses it.

DD; My friend says that your Mom pushes all your buttons because she installed them.

SY: I'm a Gemini and she is a Sagittarius.

DD: Volatile. Is that a thing you are dealing with, the split self. Is that feeling you had pre-linguistic.

SY: Yes, I think that’s my fundamental way of navigating the world.

"my hollow skull oozing canon ... i grew up believing love was / violent bloody crucifixion"

DD: Let's talk a little bit about the poem "Pink Guilt". I feel like that poem picks up where “why isn’t there an option for mixed race kids” leaves off. Maybe you could speak to what that term "pink guilt" means to you.

SY: Yeah I think that pink and ternura relate. This book and all my writing is all about girlhood and softness. For me, emotions are not always black and white. It is always very muddled and in-between, for lack of a better word.

DD: Well, that’s your word. Own it.

SY: Yeah, well, turning to the “guilt” part of the “pink guilt” speaks to one of these feelings that’s been always present and sometimes sneaks up on me and it’s tied to my femininity, a certain sort of complacency, performing gender. Guilt is all wrapped up in a subtle way behind a lot of the emotions that I’ve gone through.

DD: I see that in the work.

SY: This particular poem is about guilt over so many complicated feelings around my parents, my identity and my culture, about them going through all these things that I cannot even image, so I could have this good life.

DD: Right.

SY: Wait a minute. Can I look at it?

DD: Isn’t interesting the way that we once we create the work, it’s no longer ours. It came from us, it is of us, but it no longer belongs to us. The work belongs to the past and to that past self.

SY: Yeah, I’ve heard people say that.

DD: It’s a gift to ourselves and go others because it’s an encounter with ourselves that we may no longer continue to have or ever have again.

SY: Yeah. And, another thing that I was thinking with this poem is what it means to be an immigrant. It is there in the closing lines “composing / the words they’ll never have”.

I guess it arose from self-awareness and a nagging sense of guilt that being a poet is a challenge for a child of immigrants. Why did my parents come to this country and struggle? So that I can go get an MFA in poetry?

DD: Yeah, that’s the ever-present “art guilt”.

"was it ok for me to do that? ... was it okay for me to breathe?"

SY: Yeah, I have guilt over acknowledging the privilege and I am kind of grappling with that, like, knowing that I get to do things that they never have had the opportunity to do. There wasn't an option for them, right? So I think that's really like this tricky thing because part of my family is immigrant and part of it is so, you know, American.

DD: I think this is something that all people who come to America grapple with — they're all running away from something. And, so, I think all Americans have embedded within us this notion that suffering is an important part of work and if we're not suffering, we're not doing it right, you know?

SY: Yeah. That resonates.

DD: I come from a Jewish background, and if you're not working hard, even at your art, then it's like, disgraceful. Guilt is our "Love Language".

SY: Yeah, it’s like “excellence only”.

DD: I have to shed that, shed that big time, You know, our parents and our previous generations, they worked hard so that we could enjoy the freedom.

"interior flowers / spacious / full of bloom"

SY: But, it's very hard to remember that and not just feel guilty. And, feeling like you did all of this for me so I could work from home and write poems on something that may not yield any success.

DD: Sometimes our parents forget why they sacrificed for us too. So, I've gotten some heavy-duty guilt trips myself, parental voices asking me, "What are you doing exactly?" I almost feel sometimes that I can't make the art because I feel like if it's not great, then it's not worth doing.

SY: Yeah, my Dad is always asking me, "Are you getting paid for that? He just wants me to be OK.

DD: Yeah, it's true. I get that.

SY: I will just say on the record that, in general, my parents have been — despite all the shit I give them — they've been really supportive of my writing. Ever since I was a little kid, like since I was like four, I want to be a writer.

DD: That’s amazing.

SY: My mom reads all my stories. My poems are still taped up all around the house.

DD: So cute.

SY: I started out in college studying Poli Sci and I thought I was going to go to Law School. Then I told my parents that I wanted to switch to creative writing. They were really supportive.

DD: That’s really lucky.

"some might say i'm / self obsessed but really / i'm obsessed / with legacy / destiny"

DD: Let's talk about the poem "inheritance". It has a funny line that I think relates to that guilt we have been discussing, "it's not my fault/ i'm a narcissist / it is the fault of my / inheritance".

SY: It’s supposed to be funny.

DD: OK, good, I was reading that as your intent. I thought it was funny because it was absurd circular logic. Only a narcissist would say that it wasn’t their fault for being a narcissist.

SY: Yeah, yeah, absolutely

DD: But it’s also kind of a loop because it’s only someone who is aware that they might be a narcissist who would actually admit it

SY: Yeah, right, and then like deflect it

SY: Yeah, this is addressing what I have received from my parents and what's mine. It's just that my Dad and I are really similar. Like, we recently went on a family vacation.

DD: Good source material.

SY: Yeah, I've been writing poems about it. And, we're both like little divas. If we don't get our way, we get all huffy. We have no poker face. If one of us is upset, you know it. During the whole trip my Mom kept saying, "You two just cannot go with the flow." And, I said, "Come on, it's not my fault, look at my genetics!"

DD: Where did you go?

SY: Granada, Spain.

DD: So cool.

"those are memories I wish I didn't have"

DD: Your work is fairly narrative, isn't it?

SY: Yes, I am drawn to a storytelling approach.

DD: I find that refreshing as opposed to the willful obscurity of some writers who seemed determined to hide their intent, like it's some sort of game with the reader.

SY: Yeah, this was an eternal conversation in my graduate program that leans towards being more experimental. There's a disdain for narrative as being to "simplistic" and that creativity, genius, and intelligence is shown in abstraction.

DD: Is that critique a justification for people who can't be bothered to write narratives?

SY: [Laughing] I suppose that could be said.

DD: I know that subaltern stories in poetry tend to be narrative. If you are from a group whose stories have not been told, you are going to be more likely to want to tell them in narrative form. That's why I think the poetry written about the lives of non-dominant peoples and cultures tend to be more narrative.

SY: There is an urgency to constructing that identity as a counterpoint to its non-existence. There is an energy spent on narrativizing the untold stories and lives.

DD: I think narrative tends to be more attractive to people of color for that reason. And privileged, white writers tend to embrace obscurity and abstraction, not needing to recover and heighten untold stories.

SY: Well, yeah, my friends and I in grad school would sometimes see a writer really focused on form and we'd joke that it's like a white person who didn't have anything to write about. So, they just made weird things on the page.

DD: More charitably, I think, if the stories of a group to which you belong have been told and told again, like a White writer, you may be drawn to experiments in form to expand the expressive power of the medium because you may want to make room for other peoples whose stories have not been told.

"what do you do with sensation / the particulars of it / untethered from place and living"

SY: I definitely see that about experimental work in form and there is a kind of leading-edge poetry that I do really like. I think it's just sometimes it's done in this indulgent way that I question.

DD: I get that. I often see writer's creating ambiguity for ambiguity's sake.

SY: And my affinity to narrative precedes my attraction to poetry. I started as a nonfiction writer. I always wrote stories growing up. I've always been a narrative writer. There was a time in grad school where I tried not to be a narrative writer because I thought I’d sound smarter if I'm doing these more formal, experimental things. But, I’ve come back again and again to a narrative. That's how I write. That's what feels true to me.

DD: Yeah, I feel like sometimes people respect your work if it looks like you are dropping crumbs in the dark forest instead of actually drawing a clear easy-to-follow map.

SY: Right, like, I'll say thing I want to say, rather than dance around it for the sake of sounding impressive.

DD: And, I think if your point is not centrist or familiar to most readers, then you may have to be more narrative so that readers have some path to follow.

"...I promise / myself I'll write a poem about it later, but I / almost always forget"

SY: I've reached a point where I have respect for all the variances in poetry.

DD: Yeah, me too.

SY: I just know that I am a narrative poet. I like narrative poetry. And I am not going to apologize for that.

DD: Alright, thanks for standing up for narrative poetry.

SY: Yeah, "safe space" for narrative poetry. (Laughs).

DD: So, despite what you just said, you do experiment with form a bit with a list poem, in "good morning los angeles".

SY: Yes, I was really into lists at the time.

DD: Yeah, yeah, that's a form that I feel sanguine towards too. Is that a form that you are still drawn to create? Or, was that a one-off?

SY: Ah, I did some "listy" stuff afterwards. I did a dictionary poem after this one. I think I was just drawn to lists because I am drawn to accumulation in form. I like poems that play with pre-existing forms and make them poetic.

"the hollow party girl ... the daughter who chose different"

DD: I do see another thread throughout the book that I wanted to discuss, to see if this resonates with you. I see the personal exploration poems as going with the identity poems. But, I think I detect a wrestling match in many of the poems, including this one, between the narrator's sense of pleasure and sense of obligation (and sometimes danger).

SY: Oh, yeah. Say more.

DD: And, I think this poem typifies that theme. It's broken in half between these sensuous experiences of the geography of Los Angeles followed by a realization that the geography is just about getting shit done.

SY: Yeah, that's definitely in there.

DD: I see thematic connections throughout the whole book with poems like "pleated uniform skirt" and the series of "In / Between" poems.

SY: Yeah, that's a really good point. I don't know whether this comes from growing up in a first-generation family where you can never have that much pleasure without obligation (or guilt). You know, I don't know, there is always some presence of ghosts of guilt or obligation floating around. You can't just be having fun.

DD: Maybe this goes back to what we were saying about how it is hard to believe that you deserve to be an artist.

SY: Yeah, yeah, that is true. That's exactly what this is about.

"still empty you ...you hurl a rock / to capture a feeling, power"

DD: When you're thinking about talking about this, what was a question you might have wanted to me to ask?

SY: That's funny, before we met today, I was sitting with my friends by the river. And, I was asking them, what sort of things should I talk about. And, I couldn't think of anything I wanted to talk about in this book. I guess the book does the talking for me? And, my friends said to me "That's OK, he's going to ask the questions. I was very open to where this would go. And I was curious about what you find there.

DD: Well, I really enjoyed the read. And I think you should be proud of this work -- not at all embarrassed. I think it's really bold and brave to put the work out yourself, to share it and to talk to me about it.

SY: Thank you.

DD: Thank you!

SY: It's funny, I am a really sensitive person but for some reason I have no problem having others evaluate my work.

DD: That's good. I can tell. That made for a very easy-going interview. Thanks again.

"do you remember / the feel of my mouth, the taste"