Core Memories: Saba Keramati
We believe the origin of our work as creators is important to consider and hold. In CORE MEMORIES, we ask artists and writers about their own creative beginnings. What led them to operate in their genre of choice? Was it a specific moment, an errant thought, a movement? Was it an insight, a person, a place? Years into their work, does it continue to resonate?
In this edition, we interview Saba Keramati
Saba Keramati is a Chinese-Iranian writer from California. A winner of the 92NY Discovery Poetry Prize, her work appears or is forthcoming in AGNI, Adroit Journal, The Margins, and other publications. She is the poetry editor of Sundog Lit and currently working on her debut manuscript, titled Self-Mythology, about multiracial identity, diasporic notions of home, and poetic consciousness. You can find her, and her work, at sabakeramati.com, on Twitter at @sabzi_k, and Instagram at @sabadilla15.
What is your CORE MEMORY?
I don’t think I am the only poet who started off wanting to write fiction. After all, fiction was how I first encountered language. I felt writers were magicians: able to transport me and create vivid images in my mind. I got lucky—in order to take a fiction workshop at my undergraduate institution, I was first required to take Introduction to Creative Writing, which included a unit on poetry. During my first poetry assignment, a core memory flashed back:
For a while in my childhood, I had to share a bedroom with my parents because my grandparents came to live in the United States with us. One night, in the dark, I wrote a poem about a tiger in my mind. I don’t remember what inspired it, only that I repeated its words over and over in my mind until I could not bear to lose the poem. I woke my parents up in the middle of the night and asked them if I could turn on the lights so I could write down a poem. Luckily, they said yes.
How has that moment impacted your current work or current artistic practice?
It’s helpful for me to remember that moment when I am in a fallow period of writing. I trust that the intrinsic need to write—to say something with poetry— has stayed within me since childhood, and that a poem may arrive when I am least expecting it. It also helps me to remember a time when I didn’t think I was a poet, and prove it otherwise to my former self.