Episode 131: Reading Sabrina Orah Mark’s Happily

Author

Commonplace Podcast
January 21, 2025

Dear Fellow Commonplace Listener—

Rachel has asked me to write a newsletter to accompany Episode 131, a two-parter featuring Sabrina Orah Mark, first in one-on-one conversation with Rachel, and then in discussion with the salon Rachel led on May 26th, 2024 during last year’s Reading with Rachel cycle. My only qualifications for writing this newsletter to you all is that I am a longtime listener, and through that am lucky to have also become a friend of Rachel’s.   

(credit: Chase Brantley)

Raised in Brooklyn, NY, Sabrina Orah Mark earned a BA from Barnard College, Columbia University. She also earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a PhD in English from the University of Georgia. She is the author of the poetry collections Tsim Tsum, and The Babies. Her collection of stories, Wild Milk, won the Georgia Author of the Year Award for Short Story and was a finalist for the Townsend Prize for Fiction.

Mark’s accomplishments include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, a fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center, and a Creative Capital Award. In addition to teaching private workshops she currently teaches nonfiction, fiction, and poetry for the Bennington Writing Seminars. She lives in Athens, Georgia, with her husband, Reginald McKnight, and their two sons.

As many of you who read this newsletter know, in July of last year Rachel’s middle son—23 at the time, now 24—was diagnosed with stage 4 metastatic Ewing Sarcoma. From the early weeks of shock and uncertainty, to the more recent months of intensive treatment, Rachel has been and remains his full-time primary caretaker. Over time, it has become clear to her that she does not, right now, have the capacity to produce episodes of the podcast. And so, with the release of this episode, she has come to the difficult decision to put the show on hiatus.  

Even after years of listening and re-listening to Commonplace, it is hard for me to articulate what it is about the show that continues to feel so nourishing, so sustaining. But part of it is surely the candor and generosity to be found in the conversations, in Rachel’s distinctive lines of curiosity and unfailingly generative questions, always interested in and embracing the messiness, unpredictability, and interruptibility of our lives as artists and caregivers. 

It feels beautiful and fitting that the episode that will carry the show into and through this pause is a repeat guest, Sabrina having first talked to Rachel for Episode 33, back in April of 2017. There is something in this that speaks to the ongoingness of these essential conversations across time and changing circumstances, as well as the overlaps and pauses, the rhythms of ebb and flow that exist in any creative life. 

It also feels very apt that this special episode includes the recording of Sabrina’s visit to Rachel’s reading salon, since the very existence of this online community—welcoming and inclusive, non-academic and entirely non-hierarchical—of incredible poets, writers and artists of all kinds is another testament to the big heart of the show, and its creator. 

In this context, we might be able to reimagine a hiatus as something more quietly generative: of care and sustained community, of art, of ease when needed. What Commonplace has become is so alive in the community it has created and continues to nurture through the school. I guess what I really want to say is, I know I’m not alone in wishing that in ways large and small, visible and invisible, some of the vital energy Rachel has put into the world through Commonplace and the Commonplace School comes back to her now, as she navigates this extraordinarily difficult terrain. 

Warmly,

Claudia