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Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing Kami Westhoff recently won the 2023 John Pierce Chapbook competition for “Sacral,” which was published this spring by Floating Bridge Press.  

She is the author of the story collection “The Criteria,” and four chapbooks including “Sleepwalker,” winner of Minerva Rising’s Dare to Be Chapbook Contest and “Your Body a Bullet,” co-written with poet . Westhoff’s prose and poetry have been published in various journals including “Booth,” “Carve,” “Fugue,” “Hippocampus,” “Passages North,” “West Branch,” and “Waxwing.”  

University Communications recently chatted with Westhoff about the award-winning “Sacral,” and where its inspiration came from.  

FB: You’ve published a short story collection and four poetry collections. Are you most at home with prose or poetry? Or are they both equally important to you? What is different about what you express in each genre? 

KW: Right now, I’m writing a poem a day for National Poetry Month, so I’m focused on how I can make a poem out of what I see, hear, experience, resist, etc. I love how poetry permits me to write about things I wouldn’t normally explore: “Severance,” excrement, turkey vultures, punctuation, etc. Though I’ve always written poetry I’ve never really considered myself a poet. Creative nonfiction, mostly in the form of flash and braided essays, is the genre that I feel most inspired by these days and I’m currently working on a collection of essays.  

FB: What was the inspiration for this collection? 

KW: “Sacral” explores my mother’s struggle with dementia from her diagnosis to her death. Well, more honestly, it explores my struggle with slowly going from daughter to stranger.  

FB: Being a parent and caregiving for your parent are both some of the most difficult, but rewarding, things we can do. Did you find writing about that experience to be cathartic? 

KW: Absolutely. Poetry, both reading and writing it, allows me to grieve, resent, forgive, find grace, beauty, and healing in ways I find difficult to do in other aspects of my life.  

FB: In Sacral there’s a thread from your mother to you to your daughter — hence the title — is that theme something you return to in your other books as well? 

KW: I’m definitely exploring that thread in the creative nonfiction I’m currently working on. Two of my essays, “Directions for After Care”, forthcoming in  “Grist,” and “The Daughter’s Guide to Being Forgotten,” forthcoming in “Quarter After Eight,”examine permeability of mother and daughterhood.  

Westhoff will read on May 6 at , and is teaching at the upcoming Chuckanut Writer’s Conference which runs from June 26 to June 28. 

Frances Badgett covers the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and the College of Fine and Performing Arts for Western's Office of University Communications. Reach out to her with story ideas at badgetf@wwu.edu.