Sandra Seaton

(This story has been updated to correct the spelling the last name of Sarah "Sally" Hemings.)

Sandra Seaton is the winner of the Mark Twain Award from the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature. The author of 14 plays, opera librettos, a spoken-word piece and short fiction, her best known work explores the life of Sarah “Sally” Hemings, a woman who was owned by Thomas Jefferson. Seaton taught creative writing for 15 years at Central Michigan University and lives in East Lansing.

Tell me a bit about your background.
My family was in show business and my grandmother, not as a paid profession- al because women of her generation didn’t do that, but she did the min- strel shows. She went around reciting poems by Paul Lawrence Dunbar to raise money for her church. As a child I was always taught to recite poetry and to perform. I read constantly in high school and would read while walking down the street. When I went to col- lege, at first I was going to major in journalism, but then I took this creative writing course and it just clicked. I taught fiction writing and novel writ- ing, but I was drawn to plays because of my family and poetry.

Please, say more about that.
I wanted to write about my grand- mother because I had tried to record her, but when I got back the tape recorder hadn’t worked. I never was able to record her so I wrote “The Bridge Party” to bring her back to me. I’m really interested in Black history and in recovering stories and voices. My family came to Columbia, Tennessee, in the 1830s. Cyrus, my great-great-grand- father, and he was a “free Black.” Well, obviously Black people weren’t really free at that time, but he wasn’t a slave. He bought farmland. He and his wife, Elizabeth, raised 22 children. Then the land was taken from them. They had a son named Israel who sassed a white man. And he was forced to leave town, hiding in a wagon. They dressed him up as a woman to disguise him and sent him out of town. My play, “The Will,” was about that.

Do you write poetry?
I’m a librettist, and that means you write words to sing. Being a poet is different from being a librettist, because the librettist collaborates with the composer. The poet writes on her and his own. The poem is a complete thing. But in the libretto you have to leave room for the music. Which is similar to plays, because you have to leave room for the people to move around, for the subtext and all that.

Did you ever consider moving back to Chicago or one of the coasts to pursue career opportunities?
The contacts are clearly in New York and on the West Coast. This piece I wrote called “The First Bluebird in the Morning” is only six minutes long. It’s about a young man who’s about to go on parole and he has conversations with a bluebird who flies in and out of the yard. It was a finalist for this Opera America Award about a week ago and they had a big party in New York, and there was a reception. I never get to
go to things like that. I have a lot of friends who are in those places, but my husband’s job was always at MSU, and so that kept us here. East Lansing is actually a great place to write, and it’s worked for me. I’ve written a lot at my home office, and I’ve gone to residencies. I really recommend Ragdale for writers.

What are you working on now?

Do you think about the audience when you write?
No. But I have to believe in it. It has to have integrity. It has to be something that I’m not ashamed to have out there and it has to have some truth to it.

What about the Sally Hemings story has captivated audiences?
I’m trying to tell stories about African Americans and to humanize them, to treat them as complicated characters in a way that gives them some depth. My great-grandmother was the daugh- ter of the son of a man who had an estate and she was raised there as a member of the family. She could’ve either stayed there and passed for white or she could have left and mar- ried a Black man, which she chose to do. There are a lot of stories like the Sally Hemings story.

Do you have a writing group?
I have a silent writing group that meets every Thursday on Zoom.

What is the most important part of being a writer?
It’s just the revising.

— CHELSEA LAKE ROBERTS