The Double Feature

Selah Saterstrom is the author of five books, including three celebrated novels that explore the lives of a Southern family over multiple generations. Her debut novel, The Pink Institution (Coffee House Press, 2004), was praised by HuffPost for its “poet’s economy and eye for visceral detail,” calling it “brutal, almost impossible to take,” yet “impossible to put down.” In her second novel, The Meat and Spirit Plan (Coffee House Press, 2007), the same narrator continues her journey, with writer Katherine Dunn calling it, “ferocious and dazzling, the work of a savage poet” with “a force of piercing tenderness.” Her third novel, Slab (Coffee House Press, 2015), enters the post-Katrina South, earning high praise from the Los Angeles Review, which described Selah as “one of America’s premier narrative archaeologists.

Selah has also written two nonfiction books, including the award-winning Ideal Suggestions: Essays in Divinatory Poetics (Essay Press, 2017), which has received critical acclaim and is currently being translated into Norwegian. The Atticus Review describes the work as “a radical approach to literary production and reception,” diving into “the crosscurrents of divination, narrative, and writing.”

Her most recent nonfiction work, Rancher (Burrow Press, 2021), is a powerful meditation on sexual assault, narrative construction, and the role of community in trauma and recovery. The book is complemented by evocative images from artist H.C. Dunaway Smith, creating a layered and immersive experience. In a conversation with Abby Haggler and Julia Cohen, Selah reflected on the storytelling dynamic that shaped Rancher: “That is how it was [growing up in rural Mississippi]—everything was shot through with so many, to use Kathleen Stewart’s phrase, animated strands of potential. The uncanny drift in which we were situated vibrated; the needle would skip across the surface of the record. Things were relational. Categories were punctured. As I experienced it, in every space, the conditions were hospitable to narrative because in every space there was the potential for emergence.”

She is currently completing a novel, a theory book on Divinatory Poetics, and a collection of essays that all seem to reference God and the county dump. Selah believes writing provides ways to abide with complexity, uncertainty, and mystery without trying to solve any of these things and she believes it is possible to write the thing that feels impossible. She believes in the potential for stories to restructure the heart of the world. She believes in the alchemy that emerges inside the practice of composition. She believes in the lyrical intensity animating the field of the sentence. She’d love to write with you.