BIO: Samantha Claire Updegrave writes creative nonfiction, micro-essays, profiles, book reviews, and poetry. Her writing career began with cut n' paste 'zines and now her work appears in JMWW, Atticus Review, Seattle's Child, Bitch magazine, The Rumpus, High Country News, Crosscut, Brain Child, Literary Mama, Bacopa Literary Review, Hip Mama, and others. She wrote the foreword to Ghosts of Seattle: An Anthology of Lost Places (Chin Music Press), a finalist for the WA State Book Award. She holds an MFA from The Northwest Institute of Literary Arts, where she was an Elizabeth George Foundation Scholarship recipient and the nonfiction editor at Soundings Review. By day, she is an urban planner, and lives in Berkeley California, with her son. She is a cofounder of The Looseleaf Reading series, an evening of music and storytelling that puts emerging and established women & non-binary writers on stage, and teaches prose writing at the Hugo House.
Born in the 70s female and to alcoholics, I was the youngest of eight kids courtesy of one teen pregnancy, three divorces, and a lasting remarriage. I grew up listening to other people’s music, sitting at the crack in the kitchen table where the leaf was unevenly joined, and with a desperate need to belong. And below the appearance of a very Brady life – a smooth meld of his and hers – I knew how to carry family secrets, burying shame deep inside the nooks of my little girl body.
Perhaps that frame created by my youth could have held me for life, but art snapped me out of that familial sentence of isolation, silence, and east coast suburban boredom. In middle school I discovered photography. The silvery images of Sally Mann’s children caked in Virginia dirt, naked in lakes and ditches, fascinated me. As a teen I wondered, how can one be so visible, and yet unknown? So vulnerable, and yet exude agency, an agency that eluded me? I was drawn to how life was made visible, the splendor of the ordinary. Photography became my first foray into the world of nonfiction.
When punk music first entered my world, I spent uncountable hours listening to my various boyfriends’ records. Then the music/activist riot grrrl movement brought me into the folds of feminism and bedroom-bred fanzines. Armed with cut-and-paste pages and spoken word poems, my own voice began to accompany my images, and I began to grow, to become. To write.
In the beginning, I wrote about music and teenage feminism, about friendship and making art, themes that stayed with me. Music became a gateway to understanding the past and present, and cast a line toward a different future. Becoming a single mama when my son was still an infant led me to pry open cultural contradictions and write toward the intersections of experience and expectation, and privilege and oppression, to how we break and mend. My writing is anchored in relationships and acts of transformation, in the reclamation of missing connections to the body, self, our children, lovers, homes, places, voices.
While my early life left me disassociated from my body and with pockets full of ambiguous grief and shame, there was an underlying drive for something more than survival. As I spent decades stripping through my own layers, I began to ask, What if the stories we needed to hear when we were (fill in your blank) existed for the next generation, and the generation after that? Could we thrive, not despite our past traumas but because we’ve walked through them?
Writing became my way of moving from disembodiment to embodiment. Words could walk, skip, slide, tumble across and down a page. Words could build new bridges out of old stories, bridges that could bear the weight of our experiences and hearts, and bring us back to ourselves. My current work is defined by the willingness to step into both the light and the shadows and reveal the squishy beating mess of life that we’re always trying to reconcile with our dreams.
Instagram: samanthaupdegrave Facebook: bysamanthaclaire Twitter: @scupdegrave
Perhaps that frame created by my youth could have held me for life, but art snapped me out of that familial sentence of isolation, silence, and east coast suburban boredom. In middle school I discovered photography. The silvery images of Sally Mann’s children caked in Virginia dirt, naked in lakes and ditches, fascinated me. As a teen I wondered, how can one be so visible, and yet unknown? So vulnerable, and yet exude agency, an agency that eluded me? I was drawn to how life was made visible, the splendor of the ordinary. Photography became my first foray into the world of nonfiction.
When punk music first entered my world, I spent uncountable hours listening to my various boyfriends’ records. Then the music/activist riot grrrl movement brought me into the folds of feminism and bedroom-bred fanzines. Armed with cut-and-paste pages and spoken word poems, my own voice began to accompany my images, and I began to grow, to become. To write.
In the beginning, I wrote about music and teenage feminism, about friendship and making art, themes that stayed with me. Music became a gateway to understanding the past and present, and cast a line toward a different future. Becoming a single mama when my son was still an infant led me to pry open cultural contradictions and write toward the intersections of experience and expectation, and privilege and oppression, to how we break and mend. My writing is anchored in relationships and acts of transformation, in the reclamation of missing connections to the body, self, our children, lovers, homes, places, voices.
While my early life left me disassociated from my body and with pockets full of ambiguous grief and shame, there was an underlying drive for something more than survival. As I spent decades stripping through my own layers, I began to ask, What if the stories we needed to hear when we were (fill in your blank) existed for the next generation, and the generation after that? Could we thrive, not despite our past traumas but because we’ve walked through them?
Writing became my way of moving from disembodiment to embodiment. Words could walk, skip, slide, tumble across and down a page. Words could build new bridges out of old stories, bridges that could bear the weight of our experiences and hearts, and bring us back to ourselves. My current work is defined by the willingness to step into both the light and the shadows and reveal the squishy beating mess of life that we’re always trying to reconcile with our dreams.
Instagram: samanthaupdegrave Facebook: bysamanthaclaire Twitter: @scupdegrave
