Sarah Kain Gutowski on the Extraordinary Self
In Conversation with Lindsay Hunter on I'm a Writer But
Welcome to I’m a Writer But, where writers discuss their work, their lives, their other work, the stuff that takes up any free time they have, all the stuff they’re not able to get to, and the ways in which any of us get anything done. Plus: book recommendations, bad jokes, okay jokes, despair, joy, and anything else going on that week. Hosted by Lindsay Hunter.
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Today, Sarah Kain Gutowski discusses her book-length narrative in poems, The Familiar, the way she’s made space for her Extraordinary and Ordinary Selves, figuring out how to market herself and her work, finding the meaning in darkness, collaborating with Texas Review Press, and more!
From the episode:
Sarah Kain Gutowski: There are those parts that you don’t give up–your ambitions, your dreams–and you haven’t hit them; that’s the Extraordinary Self for me. And she keeps popping up. […] It’s a book for people who, I think, feel the weight of a responsibility to something they were told in their youth.
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Sarah Kain Gutowski is the author of Fabulous Beast, winner of the 14th annual National Indies Excellence Award for Poetry and a 2019 Foreword Indies Finalist. With interdisciplinary artist Meredith Starr, she is co-creator of Every Second Feels Like Theft, a conversation in cyanotypes and poetry, and It’s All Too Much, a limited edition audio project. Her poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Threepenny Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and The Southern Review, and her criticism has been published by Colorado Review, Calyx, and New York Journal of Books. Her new collection is a book-length narrative in poems titled The Familiar, which explores female mid-life existential crisis through two characters, the Ordinary Self and the Extraordinary Self, who send a single household into chaos as they vacillate between the siren call of ambition, the necessity of the workplace, and responsibility to love and family.
