Featured photo: Sarah Carson, writer of the poetry collection “How to Baptize a Child in Flint, Michigan,” recently talked with the Courier.
Written by Tanya Terry
Sarah Carson, writer of the poetry collection “How to Baptize a Child in Flint, Michigan” recently shared with the Courier she is Christian, attending a Lutheran church that emphasizes Christ’s message about the upside down kingdom—that the least of these on earth are first in God’s eyes.
“While I heard this message growing up in churches of other denominations, I felt as if there was sometimes too much emphasis on what a relationship with God could do for the individual—rather than God’s will for all of us to love and work for the dignity and security of all,” Carson said.
To Carson, lies seem to pervade much of American culture about the need to be self-reliant and pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps.
“When we focus on ourselves and come to believe that our success is in our own hands—or that God’s will for us is personal, individual prosperity—it becomes easier to ignore Christ’s mandate to love God and love our neighbor,” she said.
As a white woman who is the mother of a biracial child, Carson said these “lies” impact the lives of people of color.
Carson is of the third generation of her family to be born in Flint. Her great-grandfather brought his family to Flint so that he could work in the auto industry, and three of her four grandparents all worked in the auto factories at points in their lives.
“But I was also raised knowing that there was a history of violence and abuse in my family. When I was born, my father worked for Buick, and the first 10 years of my life were a fairly typical American middle-class life. But when the Buick plant closed in the ’90s, my family was plunged back into poverty. Watching my family struggle to navigate this change (and to try to break the cycle of trauma and abuse that can become exacerbated by the stress of one’s socioeconomic status) complicated my relationship with Flint. It was a place full of my family’s history, but also became a place where I couldn’t see a future for myself.”
Carson said the poem “Where They Don’t Name Streets for Us”—and the book as a whole—is her attempt at putting language to the feelings she’s had of being from a place that has become unrecognizable from the place her grandparents and parents knew.
“While I wouldn’t call my childhood dark or dreary, I grew up knowing my family’s relationship with Flint was different than mine. While my grandparents and parents had seen prosperity, I came of age as Flint was being known for violence. By the time my daughter was born, Flint was known for the Water Crisis. The poem is meant to compare those worlds. The streets, in particular, have remained the same, but they are not the place I remember or the place my family remembers.”
Carson currently lives in East Lansing. She moved to Chicago after college, where she lived for 10 years, and then moved to Flint Township in 2017, when her daughter was born. They moved away in 2021.
“The poems that reference ‘the city that is not my city,’ are about feeling between homes when I lived in Chicago. Neither Chicago nor Flint ever felt like ‘my city’ once I’d moved.”
According to Carson, there are poems in the “How to Baptize a Child in Flint, Michigan” collection she has been writing since she was a teenager. She expressed the collection began to take shape in 2016 when she discovered a poem called “How to Baptize a Child in Flint, Michigan,” however. Carson wanted to write her own version of the poem, which is included in her “How to Baptize a Child in Flint, Michigan” collection.
“The author of the original, Liv Larson Andrews, graciously let me use the title for my own poem and for the book. Her original poem was written from the perspective of a pastor who needs clean water to baptize a child. Mine is written from the perspective of a parishioner—both in the pew and going about their life in the city.”
The first half of the book follows a roughly chronological order that begins with Carson’s own childhood, then her own experiences with generational trauma and violence, then the birth of her daughter. The second half of the book offers reflections about how she see the city and her own family as she looks back as a mother.
“It’s organized intentionally because becoming a mother changed the way I viewed my relationship with my past and my plans for the future. While my family still lived in Flint and I had good memories there, the poems were written as I figured out whether or not I could raise my daughter in the city—or even near the city. Eventually, I decided not to.”
The word “brother” is used in the titles of several of the poems in the collection: “In the Playground Brother Teaches Girls About the Old Testament,” “Ode to Brother’s Best Friend in the Trailer Park,” “When I Am 14 1/2 Years Old, Brother Gets Taken in For Questioning,” “Brother Says in 1996, He Saw His Buddy Shoot A Girl” and “Brother Gets Transferred Out of Solidary & Swears Jesus Planned It All.”
“The brother character in the poems is a combination of three boys I was close to—my two stepbrothers and a third boy with whom I had a close relationship when I was a teenager and young adult. These poems were important to me because they were a way of working out how it felt to so deeply love these boys as they navigated their own childhoods and made decisions that impacted their futures. These poems helped me contemplate both my deep love for them but also the sadness at the way their lives unfolded.”
Carson shared with the Courier her favorite poem is “Telling My Daughter the Story of the Woman at the Well.”
“It’s my favorite because it looks back on my family’s past in order to look forward with hope for the future. In that poem I’m trying to celebrate the fact that there is always an opportunity to begin again, regardless of where you’ve been or what you’ve gone through.”
Carson thinks there are places and events in the poems that people from Flint will recognize and feel connected to. But she hopes the themes of the poems are universal enough that anyone can see themselves in them.
“The poems touch upon Flint’s particular history but also celebrate the experience of being human. I hope that in the particulars of my own experiences others can see themselves and their own capacity to begin again.”
The collection will be released November 1. For details, visit stuffsarahwrote.com.
