formative role her father ’ s activity with the Coast Guard played in Sandy ’ s childhood . “ We would have a marine police scanner on 24 / 7 . You would just watch it go from station to station and if it would stop sometimes there would be a mayday call from somebody who had gotten stranded in Long Island Sound , or it would be the police or the Coast Guard . Sometimes we would actually hear my father on the radio transmitting the information about the search and rescue .” Her connection to the anchor of this book , the Titanic , has been of interest to her for most of her life in part because of this . “ That was a thread that I chose to follow when I started writing about disasters and the Titanic but that was really born I think out of the fact that I grew up in this household where I was surrounded by this every day possibility of there being a distress call .”
In 2020 , Sandy was able to engage firsthand with the ways we survive and save each other through disasters . This last year has been especially hard on artists and writers , many of whom rely on in-person events to promote their work and meet new people . “ It was mid-March 2020 ; my sister calls me up on the phone from Philadelphia and says ‘ hey , I have an idea and I don ’ t want you to say no ’ and I immediately was like ‘ oh brother .’ She was telling me that all these readings I had set up for that year were going to evaporate in an instant . And then what ? How could poets like myself continue to promote their work ?” Her sister went on to describe a group of musicians sharing work through a virtual open mic , suggesting they do a similar event for poetry . Sandy was skeptical about it at first ; we were all skeptical about our new micro-worlds formed in online spaces at the beginning of 2020 .
“ I was like ‘ why ? I hate technology .’ I didn ’ t want to have anything to do with this ; the last thing I wanted was to be reading online .” Concerns about technical difficulties , Zoom fatigue , and difficulty cultivating meaningful online experiences have been barriers for a lot of us this past year but Sandy agreed to try , and created the “ Cultivating Voices ” Facebook group , mostly for friends and poets she knew personally . In March of 2020 , no one was doing anything quite like it .
“ She said let ’ s just try it . Let ’ s just invite all your Facebook friends and see what happens — and because I had people in Ireland , because of my book ’ s connection to Ireland and the fact that I published with an Irish press — you know my Facebook friend group already had an international flavor to it .” For their first program twelve people signed up to read to a small but lovely audience over Facebook live . It began as a tiny sanctuary at the start of quarantine that snowballed into a far reaching , international network of poets . “ We said we would just keep doing this every week . We didn ’ t think it would go on and on and on . I thought maybe we ’ ll be doing this for a month but it was amazing to hear the stories , just even in that first month , of how people felt like the ability to come together and hear poetry when they were in shutdown wherever they were in the world was a lifeline to them .” Later , more poetry reading series and online spaces would emerge , but for those first months of lockdown “ Cultivating Voices ” was one of very few opportunities of its kind .
“ So here we are talking about survival and disaster , again . It always comes back to it .” In growing from a small get-together to share poetry , the “ Cultivating Voices ” group became a clear way for people to feel less isolated . Something else unexpected emerged from the group as well . As the readings continued , poets started creating and sharing new work , mostly about the unprecedented events they were living through . “ We were hearing some of the very first poems that were being written about living in a pandemic because we had a platform for it . People could come on and
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