Five Questions for... Sean Carlson

Chandler Cruttenden, Unsplash

Seán Carlson’s poem ‘Anger is a fishing trawler’ appeared in Elsewhere’s Trespass issue, and has since been featured in Verse Daily’s online poem-a-day anthology. The last line in his first stanza (“alone, adrift, at sea.”) flowed rather naturally into Elsewhere’s Adrift issue. 

What does home mean to you?

For years, I would have answered this in personal terms around the house where I spent most of my childhood in the suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts. Even when I lived elsewhere on my own — in Ireland, San Francisco, Australia — the question of “home” placed me, well, back at home. But during nearly a decade in New York City, where I had been born, where my wife Cathlin and I met, and where we welcomed our first child, our life there also anchored me very much at “home.” Now I feel grateful, and sometimes torn, to have known that feeling with my family across both Rhode Island, where we are at present, and Listowel, County Kerry, where my mom was born and where we were living at the time of my contribution to Elsewhere. What I’ve come to appreciate is that “home” can be less a particular place and more a sense of safety and belonging and continuity found within a place. For many, this is tied intimately to a plot of land or particular community. But when that grounding is lost or taken, is it even possible for it to again be found? Root systems can’t be transplanted if they aren’t sustained. We’re no different.

Which place do you have a special connection to?

I’ve been revising a layered essay about mushroom foraging in Poland, which has surfaced rich memories of my Polish-American grandmother (who passed away 20 years ago) and sent me revisiting old notes and photos from my travels over the years. Since first visiting roughly half my lifetime ago to our latest family trip to experience the Christmas markets there, I could catalog so many moments that stand out — from meeting cousins for the first time, returning to celebrate their weddings, and introducing my children to their children to encountering the poetry collections at Massolit bookstore, singing Johnny Cash as the sun came up at a friend’s house party in Kraków, trying a zapiekanka for the first time in Rzeszów, hiking in the Tatras, touring my sister around on her first visit, bringing Cathlin to the family farm my great-grandfather had left behind, buying our oldest daughter a balloon from a Branicki Park vendor in Białystok, waiting at bus stations and train platforms across the country during off hours, sweltering through the heat of summer with ice cream melting in Warsaw, plodding through fresh snowfall at night in Wrocław, deepening in my understanding of the struggles and horrors of history as well as the rapid changes and tensions of more recent years. I could go on.

What is beyond your front door?

Back in autumn, I was admiring three milkweed plants I planted out front a couple of years ago that between them now have thirty seed pods that will soon be ready to crack open. At the same time, my kids and I also can hardly leave the house without checking on the growth of our first pumpkins! Now, with the approach of spring, we’re getting ready to plant some new seeds, too.

What place would you most like to visit?

Too many places, for different reasons and in different ways! Working remotely before the Covid pandemic, Cathlin and I traveled around the world for a year and half with our first daughter and co-wrote a family travel blog called Bond & Thomas. Your question sent me back to re-read one of our posts, “Five places we could have gone and wish we did.” My picks at the time were Abel Tasman National Park (New Zealand), the breweries along the Dingle Peninsula (Ireland), and Traverse City, Michigan and Sleeping Bear Dunes (United States). I’ve since savored a pint at Tiġ Bhric Pub and the West Kerry Brewery, so maybe Abel Tasman and Traverse City should be next! For now, I’m hoping to eke out as much time, and writing time, as I can wherever we are.

What are you reading / watching / listening to / looking at right now?

Reading: I’m still thinking about Oona Frawley’s breathtaking essay collection This Interim Time, which I reviewed last year for The Common, another fantastic journal focused on place-based writing. Watching: I hope to write something before too long on the film Secret Mall Apartment, a documentary about the artists who built a hidden residence within the walls of the Providence Place Mall here in Rhode Island. Listening to: I caught Sumac, Chepang, and Patrick Shiroishi at the Pyramid Scheme in Grand Rapids, Michigan the last time I was back visiting Cathlin’s family. Shiroishi’s experimentalism with his saxophone was simply jaw-dropping, Chepang were an absolute force with such palpable positivity and pride in their Nepali roots, and Sumac threw me back to the early days of Hydra Head Records and late-’90s Boston, in the best of ways. Looking at: Since I was young I’ve dreamed of seeing a bobcat in the wild, and I only recently had the chance to witness one hunting in our yard. My wife and children and I were all in awe while watching quietly out a window from the safety of our home.

Seán is working on a family memoir of migration, and his poetry has also been published in Crannóg, Image, The Irish Independent’s “New Irish Writing,” Ninth Letter, Ragaire, Trasna, and elsewhere. His essays have appeared recently in The Missouri Review, Modern Language Studies, and New England Review. He received a 2024 Elizabeth Kostova Foundation poetry fellowship in Bulgaria. Follow Seán’s writing updates by subscribing to his newsletter here.