An Interview with Sarah Minor, Judge of the 2025 Ray Ventre Memorial Nonfiction Prize
Sarah Minor is a writer and interdisciplinary artist. She's the author of Carousel, forthcoming from Yale University Press in 2026, Slim Confessions: The Universe as a Spider or Spit (Noemi Press 2021), Bright Archive (Rescue Press, 2020), and the chapbook The Persistence of The Bonyleg: Annotated (Essay Press, 2016). Learn more about Sarah on her website.
Nonfiction/hybrid team lead Barbra Lounsbury sat down with Sarah Minor to ask her a few questions about the essay, form, and experimentation.
Barbra Lounsbury: What is your personal definition of creative nonfiction? Of ‘essay’? What draws you to this genre?
Sarah Minor: Last March I spent a week in France, nursing the dredges of a bad virus, through a collaboration with the Université Paris 8. In that fevered haze, at a restaurant that served a dessert called île flottante (floating island), I laughed for too long when a French colleague explained that Americans have an unusually broad, flexible definition of “the essay” which remains a firmly academic genre in France. I remember my eyes watering faintly as I finally blurted “But…TO TRY!” (essayer).
I feel at home in the essay because of, I know now, an American mistranslation of the French essay’s flexibility which, far from being academic, has allowed the form to become even more omnivorous and poem-like over the last two decades. But I’m primarily drawn to the essay because its central engine is the writer’s mind—not their voice or their storytelling ability, not what has happened to them, but how they think about it. I don’t find myself using the term “creative nonfiction” anymore—not just because I think the modifiers “creative” and “non” negate each other and leave behind the whisper of “fiction” as an old badge of merit—because I think the thing I’m writing and teaching is slightly more specific. For me the essay is only “nonfiction” in the sense that fabrication is counter to its propulsive engine. The essay is not trying to conceal the person who writes it, nor their occasionally vulnerable process of discovery, nor is it making those features primary. The essay is a mode of thinking towards the privilege of a reader’s attention, an explicit invitation to collaborate with an unveiled, working mind.
It took me about three weeks to recover from the cold I brought to France, but after I got home, during a conversation with that same French colleague, he explained to me that the etymology of the verb essayer, which Americans like to translate from the French as “to try,” actually has a weirder origin in the old French word for “hive,” as in a group of cells working together, not as one voice but as many simultaneous actions. This has become my personal definition of the essay. There is something live and therefore true about the essay because it is an exercise in presence. The essay calls out to the reader by modeling the kind of collaborative presence it invites.
BL: Because your work exists in so many forms, modalities, shapes, and places, could you describe what your writing “bone-yard” looks like? What fragments, ideas, concepts, outlines, stencils, jars of scrap paper with random lines, etc. do you hold onto?
SM: This is a fun question. On my desktop I keep an enormous folder called “Writing” that contains only slightly more .docx files than lists of .psd, .html, and .jpgs, none of which I’ve ever purged. I’m also a pdf hound, and that folder is teeming with half-highlighted academic articles and broken links to digital sources. I sometimes start writing in a word document, then move that chunk of text over into Photoshop or Illustrator, and I save consecutive, numbered, versions of those files in case I do something I can’t undo, so those contribute to the great detritus. My partner, who is also a writer, is continually baffled by the amount of storage space I require to continue working with giant scrolls, wooden cranks, vinyl backdrops, staple guns, sewing machines, and windmill arms. All of that work is "published," but where should it go?
BL: At what point in your creative process do you see the medium of a particular piece, be that on the page, a wall, textiles, image, or elsewhere? Does it ever begin somewhere and then become another medium entirely?
SM: Research is always my starting point, and that process of reading and hoarding pdfs leaves me with a long pile of notes in a word document that I begin to shape with my own voice into smaller chunks. I usually don’t think of something as a draft until I’ve situated it in a constrained textbox, or a shape drawn with a pen tool in another program. I used to joke that majority of my writing hours were spent tapping the ⇩ ⇦ ⇧ ⇨ keys, rather than the alphabet, which has only recently shifted to include the < > symbols as I’ve tried teaching myself some code when I modified my essay “Lunette” as an interactive piece online.
One story I like to tell myself is that working across programs that are not designed for word processing puts pressure on my sentences whenever I start a new file from scratch and am forced to re-edit a piece of text that needs to be adjusted for a new shape or format. I remain very interested in the idea of an essay that can have multiple lives. My essay “Foul Chutes: On the Archive Downriver,” has been formatted vertically as a digital pdf sized for a laptop screen at Ninth Letter, suspended horizontally on a 40 foot paper scroll from a gallery ceiling in Washington, displayed horizontally again on a 4 foot scroll and ran through a crank mechanism in Ohio, and most recently performed against the backdrop of a screen recording of my own cursor tediously designing the snake-like visual essay in Missouri. In each of these cases, I re-read and edited a significant portion of the text to allow it to fit its new physical constraints. I sense that these shifting mediums make the writing better simply because I have to touch the sentences so often, and this forces me to make edits that I’ve known need to be made all along.
BL: In a world where printer ink, toner color, and physical page shape were “no object” so to speak, what is the first experiment you would want to try in mass print?
SM: I’d love to see what more writers would make if they began with this question. It’s a sign of great luck and misinformation that up until this point, I have been making writing that shirks the traditional page and figures out how to disseminate and display itself later. I’ve dreamed of a book that folded out into a screen for an essay that could be projected from a cell phone through a drinking glass, or an essay with perforated edges that could be punched out and folded into a functional object. I think the horizon opens up immediately whenever we take the “mass” out of “print,” whenever we look at what small presses are doing rather than towards the limited outlets whose primary aim is to sell. I’m reminded of Ander Monson’s two versions of Letter to a Future Lover, which came in both a traditional paperback and a limited run of clamshell boxes. Right now I’m working on a project that engages vintage postcards, and I’m talking with the folks at Container about how to produce it for reading through a vintage View Master, as well as in a more traditional book format. Hope to see you that way someday.
Barbra Lounsbury is an essayist, MFA candidate at Northern Michigan University, and team lead for nonfiction, hybrids, and visual essay at Passages North. She grew up in a small town on Lake Huron and in her father’s art show van traveling America. In another life, she was probably an astronaut or a steelhead trout. Most of the time she is writing, staring out the window, reading about grizzly bears and gravitational lensing, or walking the Lake Superior shoreline—her pockets heavy with pretty rocks.
