In Flint They Don't Name the Streets for Us

This is a conversation with Sarah Carson about her book of poems, How to Baptize a Child, in Flint, MI. Carson's poems are a jarring portrayal of life in a declining, once mighty, and still proud American rustbelt town, Flint, Michigan. 
 
"How to Baptize a Child in Flint, Michigan" is a heartwarming and thought-provoking exploration of faith, family, and community in the midst of challenging circumstances.

The book tells the story of a young mother, Sarah, who is struggling to raise her child in the midst of the Flint water crisis. As she navigates the complexities of living in a city with contaminated water, Sarah turns to her faith as a source of hope and strength.

One of the book's most powerful aspects is how Carson portrays Sarah's faith as an active and essential part of her life. She doesn't shy away from the challenges of raising a child in a difficult environment but instead leans into her faith as a source of resilience and strength. This is particularly poignant as Sarah grapples with the decision of whether or not to baptize her child in the midst of such uncertain and tumultuous times.

Ultimately, "How to Baptize a Child in Flint, Michigan" is a profoundly moving and thought-provoking exploration of faith, family, and community in the face of difficult circumstances. Carson's writing is engaging and heartfelt, and her portrayal of Sarah's journey is inspiring and relatable. This is a must-read for anyone interested in exploring the role of faith in times of crisis.

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This book won the 2022 Lexi Rudnitsky Editors Choice Award, a poetry collection that portrays quintessentially American struggles and hopes.
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Carson peeks inside the windows of Flint's working class with a searing indictment of a society responsible for the ghastly moral failures resulting in massive unemployment and poisoned water. 

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Sarah Carson was born in Flint, Michigan. She now lives in East Lansing, Michigan, with her daughter and two dogs, who make a guest appearance on the podcast. After college, she spent ten years working with literary organizations in Chicago, including the Poetry Foundation and Switchback Books. 

Sarah is the author of two prose poetry collections,

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Transcript

State of MI Archivist 0:12

This is Radio Free Flint. You're listening to Arthur Bush, your host, and we have as a guest today, Sarah Carson. Welcome, Sarah.

SPEAKER_00 0:21

Hi, thanks for having me.

State of MI Archivist 0:23

Sarah is a poet who has written a very interesting collection of her poetry called How to Baptize the Child in Flint. And that's our subject today, her book, Her Poems and Flint. Sarah, before we get started, I'd like to take a moment to read one of your poems from the book How to Baptize a Child in Flint, Michigan, which was just released this month. Ode to Flint, Michigan, on December 30th, 2014, the 78th anniversary of the Great Sit Down Strike. This city is a fire, extinguished, reignited, scraped knee, skinned knuckle. She loves a good fight. This morning she's on the back stoop, listening to archival tape of our grandfathers. Me and three or four other guys climbed the gate, they say. They'd been making weapons out of spare parts. A great slingshot to throw heavy things. The story we know best, of course, is the one in which our fates reverse. There were whole years where we rode our bikes uphill if only to turn around and look back. Now I dream of other towns and this city shakes me upright. Says you were saying their names again. Fine city. Sit, I say, in your jacket, on the porch rail. Put another two by four on the fire. It is not without precedent. Sarah, tell us a little bit about uh where you're from.

SPEAKER_00 2:05

Sure. My family is a we're a multi-generation Flint family. My great grandparents' grandparents all worked in the factories in Flint. Um I was born when I was born, my family was building a house in Flushing. So I only lived in Flint when I was a kid for a few days, and we moved out to Flushing, and then we moved around a little bit, but ended up moving back to Flint when I was a young adult, finishing college. I feel like I have a a bit of a mixed relationship with Flint, where I was back and forth, started there and left, and came back and left again, and then came back again when I had my daughter. So that's kind of what the book is about, is is my relationship feeling kind of this pull between being grounded there with my family and and wanting to go elsewhere and feeling pulled back.

State of MI Archivist 3:00

You began to write this book a number of years ago, actually, and your first book, as I understand it, was called Buick City.

SPEAKER_00 3:08

Mm-hmm. Yep. When I uh I started writing Buick City when I was in graduate school, so I um I was living in Flint right after college and then decided that I wanted to learn more about poetry and thought that going to Chicago might be a better place to connect with people who were writing poems. I wrote Buick City while I was finishing graduate school in Chicago, and then um which was really kind of about those poems are more of when I was growing up and the relationship I had to the city as a child, and then this new collection I started writing more um as an adult. My mom had just begun a relationship with a man who had two sons, and so there's a lot of poems about um I called them my they're my stepbrothers, but I call them in the book my brothers, and so about half of the book is kind of about that relationship, and then I got pregnant and had a daughter in the middle of writing the book, so then it kind of shifts to thinking about the future and what it might be like to raise a daughter in Flint or whether or not that was going to be practical.

State of MI Archivist 4:18

The title of the book is quite interesting. It's How to Baptize a Child in Flint, Michigan. I mean, when I first saw this title, I never thought about the obvious. Tell us about how you got to this title and what it was that inspired that title.

SPEAKER_00 4:33

Yeah, so I actually stole the title. I was at a writing conference and came across a poem by a woman, a pastor named Liv Larson Andrews, who I kind of knew peripherally. I worked I worked for the ELCA, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, for about 10 years, on and off. And so I kind of knew her through that because she's a Lutheran pastor, but I saw she had written this poem called How to Baptize a Child in Flint, Michigan, which was her poem was about thinking what a pastor in Flint, Michigan might have to do to go get fresh water for a baptism during the water crisis. And when I saw the poem, I knew she wasn't from Flint, and I wanted to write my own version thinking about you know my mother and my stepbrothers who were living through that situation, even while I was in Chicago, and what it might mean to explain the situation to one of my younger brothers. Rewrote the poem from that perspective. I actually wrote it about there was a day I went with my grandmother and took one of my stepbrothers to church in Flint, and I remember the pastor was doing, well, I guess I mean basically like an altar call where he was asking people to come to the front to pray. And my my brother, he was actually kind of he was sleeping, falling asleep during the sermon, but then kind of woke up and was like, What is he talking about? And I was like, just don't worry about what he's talking about.

State of MI Archivist 5:59

Sarah, I'd like to read one more poem from your book, How to Baptize a Child in Flint, Michigan. And the poem is entitled On the Playground, Brother Teaches the Old Testament. On the third day, brother says, God created opportunity. He retells Joshua, and the walls stay up. There's a hole in Rahab's floor for cigarettes and rum. God does not send Jonah to Nineveh. God sends Daddy to get Uncle from the White Horse. There are new commandments. Don't leave your shadows for the darkness. Cross the older boys only once. Brother dips a finger in the fountain. Lunch lady calls him. Problem. Says boys like you become chalk marks on a wall. Girls in the bleachers hold their breath. Like sacrifice can save him. Brother's not gotten to Job or Isaiah. Brother has not covered salvation yet. So let's step back to how you got the title to this book and what does the title mean?

SPEAKER_00 7:15

So it was kind of this imagining of how to explain what was going on in the city, but also kind of cosmically what it meant to be baptized to a child. And so I wrote my own version and then eventually I went to live and I said, you know, I read your poem and then I wanted to write my own. Is it okay if I seal your title? And she was like, I'm honored that you wrote your own version. So yes, please take the title.

State of MI Archivist 7:39

So let's let's read that poem, How to Baptize a Child in Flint, Michigan. Uh this is actually a poem that was written by Sarah Carson. Uh the title is taken as a title of the book itself.

SPEAKER_00 7:52

How to Baptize a Child in Flint, Michigan. First, hold the curve of their head like packed snow, a struck match. A field mouse you catch with the cup of your hand. Say they can be anything. Refill their root beer. Tell them yes. People like us can be great too. If you're going to the firehouse, bring them with you. Say God is good even if a guardsman says otherwise. At home, dinner in the microwave, mountain dew and TV light. When the textbook insists we are already water, say of course we are, Boo, though you don't know the specifics. Just that pastor says river is a holy thing. Jesus himself could walk it in bare feet. On Easter, when they fall asleep during altar call, when they wake and whisper what is brimstone, what's repentance? Send them out to the Narthex. Ask them if they're thirsty. Tell them these reckoning songs are not for us.

State of MI Archivist 8:54

How are the people of Flint to take this?

SPEAKER_00 8:57

I mean that that's a really hard question because I think there are so many different lived experiences in Flint. You know, my thinking was I was living through this time in my life where I had these two younger brothers who I really loved and cared for, but I was in Chicago, but I was having people who knew me as a Flint poet asking me to to read poems about Flint or to speak about the water crisis. And the thing that I was thinking of as I was thinking of my brothers back home was just how people outside of Flint see the politicized issues. People who aren't from Flint saw the water crisis as this kind of power struggle. There were people like my mom and my brothers who were still back home who really needed clean drinking water. And so I think that poem in particular was kind of thinking about where does redemption come from in a situation like that? What does it mean to be the person that needs the water when the rest of the world is kind of arguing about whose fault it is that the water is dirty, who are we gonna blame, and who's gonna go to jail for it when the people who don't have any power in those situations just need the water? I don't have an answer. I was just kind of meditating on what it means to be at that level.

State of MI Archivist 10:19

But your story is one of harnessing whatever came out of Flint. Flint could be flushing and could be the whole area, and is the whole area. What is it you took from Flint that went into this book? That's a that's a different question than asking what are Flint people going to take from this book after they read it. But I'm asking, what did you take from Flint and put into your work and what it what it is that that's behind it to you personally?

SPEAKER_00 10:45

When I think of Flint, I think of my family's story. You know, my my great-grandfather brought his family to Flint so that he could work in the factories. You know, my grandmother My grandmother got married to a man that her parents told her to marry, and when she needed, she wanted to get out of that situation, the first thing she did was go down to the factory and get a job. And so my whole life, I think I saw Flint as this place of opportunity. That was the story that was kind of told through my family, and then by the time I was kind of old enough to know what was going on, those factories were closing and opportunities were becoming more scarce. So I I think I left Flint with this idea that I came from this place that once was so full of promise, but that did not have that promise for me anymore. When I as I was writing and trying to work through what it meant to be from Flint and to want to be close to my family, but to feel like there wasn't any opportunity where they were. What I was bringing with me was this idea of there were generations behind me who had really tried to do the best that they could for themselves, and that was in Flint at one time. But you know, I needed to grow up and make a living in Flint. So my grandmother, she actually during World War II when lots of men had to leave to go fight, and they were letting women work in the factory for the first time, went down and she they were making airplanes instead of Buits at the time. But um, yeah, she got a job, and that's where she actually met my grandpa. They met on the assembly line and eventually started their own family.

State of MI Archivist 12:26

Your book and your story really is a is peeking in the window into the white working class in Flint. What's happened in Flint and other places around this country, and it's still happening, and that story is uh one of opportunities lost and uh solutions not found and help not brought. Because it appears to me that you're speaking to a post-Rust Belt region or regions across the Midwest in particular. You speak about you know your faith and how it influenced you. You made reference in some of the things I read about essentially lost promises, that as you were growing up, there was sort of an unwritten code that you'd end up with the promise of a good job and a good future tied to what essentially is the American auto industry. Tell us about your feelings about that. You the fact that you listened to this preaching about uh the American industrial values that you titled it, w which were individualism and self-reliance. And then you went on to speak about how it was buttressed by your church experiences or your Christianity your belief in Christianity. I find that fascinating. The church actually played a role in getting you to believe that capitalism can make things come true. Your your belief in and throughout this book is that may very well not be true. It may be a myth.

SPEAKER_00 14:07

I think, at least my experience, uh, I grew up first in the Baptist church with my family, and then when I was a teenager, I started attending a Nazarene church, and then I ended up going to an evangelical Christian college for my undergraduate. And I think that I heard a lot of messages in those churches about how you had the power, if you they focus on kind of the individual relationship with Christ, right? Like you, you are connected with God, and if you are doing the right things and saying the right things, things should go well for you, right? There's almost like this contract with Christ that you your life is gonna work out. You know, you you say your prayers, you leave it in God's hands. I remember being told at the Christian university that I was going through a lot of things, my family was kind of falling apart, and this was my family's fault, like that we didn't pray hard enough. I think that there's some of that same um message running through the idea of the roast belt of the factories closing. That heard people say, you know, you see people holding signs asking for change, and you say, Well, why don't you just get a job? Why don't you just work harder? And there's there's aspects to that. I mean, everybody has their own story, but I feel like the Christian message and the individualist message I got as a kid of a factory worker was just like everything that your future is always in your hands. Like everything that that you want, pray hard for it, and it can be yours. And that's just not true. Like there's so many forces outside of yourself, especially when you come from a working class or a poor background that are just working against you.

State of MI Archivist 15:55

What you were talking about, the false promise of the American dream for everyone today, in places like Flint or Akron or you know, wherever you might go. What you're talking about has been labeled the prosperity gospel. In other words, God wants you to be rich. So if you're not rich, it's your fault. You're not doing what God wants. So go find yourself a bag of Amway products and start selling it. The only one gets rich is the pastor and his friends above. And your story really illustrates that to me. I don't know, maybe I'm off face.

SPEAKER_00 17:25

No, no. I ended up by accident finding the Lutheran church. I'd have given up on church after feeling like the messages I was hearing were simply not true. I didn't lose faith in that there was something bigger. I actually just got an email out of the blue I think to um do some freelance work for the Luther the ELCA, the Lutheran Church, which is a progressive arm of Lutheran denominations in the United States. It was the first time that I kind of saw that you could think about faith differently. That it wasn't about what you did that made the world shape up around you, but that there was a thing called grace and mercy, and that what was happening to people was not their fault. You know, especially like the poem that I just read, I was back home and going to church with my grandma, and things that I was hearing just didn't didn't align with the way that I felt about the world and about there being a bigger, bigger meaning to all of this.

State of MI Archivist 18:27

One of the things that you do write about has to do with trauma and maybe even generational trauma that and you talk about it powerfully. I've had the occasion to interview some other poets, and they write about Flint as you have, and they're drawn to this whole notion of trauma in the city. I don't know why that is. Maybe you can explain that. I don't think that trauma and poetry all in the same sweep. I mean, that obviously is something you've taken from your beginnings and brought to this poetry and your writings and how you believe and how you see the world. Can you talk about that a little bit?

SPEAKER_00 19:08

Yeah. For as long as I've been able to write, writing has been a way that I process what I'm thinking about and what I'm feeling. And I think that when I started studying poetry, you know, I I I wrote poetry all throughout my childhood and through teenage years just as a way to write down the crazy things that were going on in my head as a child. But when I started studying poetry and learning more about how people put language to ideas or to feelings, that we really don't have ways to articulate what goes on inside of us. We you know, we come up with language as a way to symbolize what we're thinking, but when I say that I'm feeling down today or I'm feeling excited, you you you don't know how I feel. The way that I feel might not be exactly the way that you feel about a particular situation. And so I think poetry is a way to try to find the images, the ideas that can really try to communicate what you've been through. And for me, the process of finding that language, I feel like healing is like a trite way to say it, but it helps me understand how I got to the place that I am. And unfortunately, in my family, that has meant a lot of difficult challenges. To write about them and to find the right language to represent them has been a way for me to kind of make peace with the things that I've seen.

State of MI Archivist 20:36

In some of my other interviews with some poets, they they've talked about the healing power of poetry. So poetry actually, and your expression in poetry really exposes that need. Do you agree with that, or is that just some way out thought that I came up with? One day.

SPEAKER_00 20:54

No, I think you know, another of Maslow's needs is the need to connect with others, right? And so I think poetry is one way to do that. Poetry is not one of the most popular art forms. There's other ways to connect. We can make a make a film or paint, but you know, when you are able to share what you've been through in a way that connects with another what someone else has been through. I don't know if you feel safer, but you certainly feel like you're a part of something bigger than yourself. When you think about the water issue, it's been going on so long that taught like the words water crisis don't have a lot of meaning anymore. But when you think about what water is and what water does, when I came across Liv's home, how to baptize a child in Flet Michigan, the image of having to have clean water for a baptism really helps you see how difficult it is to live in a place without clean water.

State of MI Archivist 21:54

One of the things that I see as a theme in some of your work is uh a certain amount of working class alienation that goes on. And we we talk about how political leaders have capitalized on this uh to get themselves elected. You you're expressing something that Michael Moore expressed in some of his films. Uh and I've seen this expressed in other venues where people are relating their working class backgrounds to uh the reality they had in the streets of Flint, Michigan, and the reality that exists today. You talk about the streets. The streets that and the poems entitled Where They Don't Name the Streets for Us. Where I grew up in Pengalley Road in the south end of Flint, they named the streets after noble poets of the uh 18th century. Looking back at it now, with the emergence of all these working class poets, it might might be it might it might have been for you know they had foresight to do this, perhaps. Most of us didn't know these poets, didn't read them, uh, didn't write poetry, and didn't feel any connection to them. In in the movie Roger and Me, uh Michael Moore takes a spin around Beecher and looks at the names of the streets and says, Oh, these are named after all the great Ivy League schools like Harvard and Yale and Princeton. And this is today one of the you know, it's one of the poorer neighborhoods in Flint. You write this poem and I'd like you to read it to us. It's called Where They Don't Name the Streets for Us. And I want to know why you wrote that and what it represents, and we've gotta make it zippy.

SPEAKER_00 23:34

Okay. Where they don't name streets for us. This neighborhood, these boulevards, these streets named for carbohydrate, where some kids wild out school days, centuries, these avenues barely know the sound of one box truck from another. You, me from other girls, early spring shoots of grass, for whom neighbor boys' long legs count cement stoops, whose daddies warm motorcycles on the driveway, whose mammas can't leave hard table, tell these men to ride along. When we were young, we dug tubes beneath burning barrels, left waving flags for other kids. Now the patrolmen in the park would not know our names if the dispatcher spelled them letter by letter. Now these girls, these boys, have not found on Reddit of us. Not one foul word we wrote in wet cement, not one foul ball we did not chase into the street. In the city where we were born, God set a star above the river as if to leave a light on. As if we could go home again. But now we are the rangers. The garage where we burned evenings has left town two by four by two by four. Even stray dogs won't grasp from our hands. I guess to answer the question that you posed about a particular piece, my once I was older, my mom bought a house in Carrigetown. She that's where she was living with my brothers when the water crisis began. And I I wrote that poem because I was driving away from Carrietown past Kedring, looking at just how Carrichtown is we we say it's a historic part of Flint, but it it's mostly nothing's there anymore. They're ripping down the homes and so I I guess I wrote that poem just as a way of thinking about like what happens when the place that you remember um doesn't remember you, right? Like all the most of the signposts of my childhood have been ar aren't there anymore. You know, I tried to go back to the trailer park where but my family where I was born, where my family lived when I was born, and it's just there's nothing there. I mean, I don't think that that's just a there's a lot of people that go through that, I think.

State of MI Archivist 25:42

So if you'd like to get a copy of this book, How to Baptize a Child in Flint, Michigan, by Sarah Carson, go to Amazon.com, which will have a link in the show notes as well, at Persea Books, which is at www.persea per seabooks.com and uh order your order your copy. The book will be released on November 1st, 2022. Again, the book is How to Baptize the Child in Flint, Michigan by Sarah Carson. The book was a winner of the 2021 Lexi Rodensky Award, Editor's Choice Award. If you'd like to get a copy of the book, you can also contact Gabriel Freed at G Fried, F-R-I-E-D, at Percia Books. That's P-E-R-S-E-A books.com. Again, thank you for listening. I hope you get a chance to read this book. It's a it's a treat. Thank you. Goodbye.