“I feel really alive in poetry while I am teaching workshops, so I’m eager to be in this creative space with the writers in my group. The world can be noisy and hard. Poetry is a way to come together during that and still lean into our humanity and our hope.” -Sasha West
This July, join us for our virtual 2025 Summer Writing Retreat featuring four classes on fiction, memoir, poetry, and revision, plus lots of special events throughout the month, including a Saturday Craft Seminar with Henry Lien (July 12), lunchtime craft presentations by notable authors, meet-ups with fellow writers, dedicated writing time, and our Student Reading Night.
Our poetry class, taught by Sasha West, will focus on “Attention and Transformation: How Poetry Helps Us Live.” In this class, students will practice some of poetry’s key techniques—voice, metaphor, form, revision—to transform their observations and experiences into meaningful, memorable language.
Sasha West is the author of How to Abandon Ship, finalist for the 2025 Kingsley Tufts and winner of the Texas Institute of Letters Burdine C. Johnson Best Book of Poetry Award. Her first book, Failure and I Bury the Body, was a National Poetry Series selection and received a Texas Institute of Letters First Book of Poetry Award. Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies, including: American Poetry Review, Ecotone, Georgia Review, The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood, and Out of Time: Poetry from the Climate Emergency. As eco-arts collaborative Hammonds + West, her multi-media shows with visual artist Hollis Hammonds have been exhibited at the Columbus College of Art and Design, Texas A&M, ArtPrize Michigan, and elsewhere. She is an Associate Professor at St. Edward’s University in Austin, where she founded the Environmental Humanities program.
Here’s what Sasha had to share with us:
Scribe: Tell us a little bit about yourself. What do you write? How did you come to writing?
Sasha West: When I was little, I felt held by certain poems. They gave language to emotions I couldn’t yet name and they helped me understand the layers of the world. I would repeat certain lines like talismans. I started writing to stay in that space. Over time, I’ve grown attached to how writing lets me figure out what I’m thinking and feeling. I care a lot about humans and how we work through the world. Poetry is a really old art that speaks to that, but it’s also really malleable, so each generation finds new ways of using it.
Scribe: In your own work, how do you approach overcoming the challenges that come with writing, be it writer’s block or craft or business-related challenges?
SW: Time is my biggest challenge. It helps me to find sticky questions about the world: the kinds of things I want to keep turning over and thinking about. I carry those questions with me, which means I’m always accumulating little observations and connections. That way, when I return to my desk, I already have things I’m excited to explore. It also keeps me connected to my own curiosity as I move through the days.
Scribe: Has there been a moment of epiphany in terms of your work, when you thought, “This is it! Now I know what I’m doing?” How long did that feeling last?
SW: It comes and goes! As a new writer, I’d feel it right after a first draft that surprised me. Then I’d come back to the poem a week later, notice the problems, and feel discouraged. Now I feel this epiphany much, much later in the process—usually in the last draft. When you earn this feeling through revision, it’s more likely to last.
Scribe: What piece of advice do you find yourself giving to writers again and again?
SW: I wish I had stopped asking if I was good enough sooner in my writing life. It’s not a useful question—and there’s no stable answer because there’s no way to please every reader. Now I ask: How do I become a better writer? How do I get this poem closer to what it could be? Those questions make me happier and more settled across the writing process, and they’re also what led my writing to improve. No one starts learning plumbing by asking if they are a good enough plumber. Why do we?
Scribe: What excites you about teaching “How Poetry Helps Us Live” for the poetry track of the Summer Writing Retreat?
SW: I feel really alive in poetry while I am teaching workshops, so I’m eager to be in this creative space with the writers in my group. The world can be noisy and hard. Poetry is a way to come together during that and still lean into our humanity and our hope. That always feels good. Plus, I just love reading other people’s work. We are making these lines from nothing and then we get to share them. That’s pretty amazing, right?
Scribe: How would you finish this sentence: If the students in my class take away one thing from the course, I hope it’s…
SW: Can I cheat and make a list? I hope students gain more control over their art, more compassion for their own process, and a deep sense of connection to the words (and world) around us.
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Thanks, Sasha!
Click here to learn more about Sasha West upcoming revision class during the 2025 Summer Writing Retreat.
