Sandra Berris has been living in a literary world her whole life, starting with undergraduate studies at the University of Nebraska, where she met her first poetry mentor, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Karl Shapiro. Her new volume, Indelible Shadow, is her second book of poems and a direct response to losing someone to suicide.
“Shapiro taught me to be specific,” Berris says, “to write about cereal and/or a magazine. Not to take on the whole world.”
It was graduate study that brought Berris to California. After that, she became a teacher and continued as such when her husband’s job took them to Chicago, the city where she was born. There, she taught creative writing for high school and co-started a literary magazine.
Berris and her husband decided to retire in Carmel and they found a special place, the Old Murphy House, constructed by Michael J. Murphy. Berris knew that Murphy was the contractor for Robinson Jeffers when the latter was building his Tor House.
Berris’ work has been published in various literary journals and university magazines. She gathered all this work into a collection titled Ash On Wind, published in 2017.
A couple of years later, a tragedy happened.
“We lost someone very close to us,” she says. “A teenage boy who decided to take his life. He was handsome, athletic and had a lot of friends, but he chose to be killed by a train.”
To release her emotions, Berris started to write poems about it, throwing them into a drawer. Soon, the drawer was full. The poems were ready, but “who wants a book about suicide?” Berris asked herself. Eventually the book was published by Finishing Line Press in March 2024.
“Ever since then, at first every day, now maybe once a week, I keep receiving handwritten letters, texts or email where people say: We lost our sister, or mother, or brother, to suicide,” she says.
The stigma around mental illness bothers Berris a lot. “I had no idea that so many families were torn apart because of that. I had no idea about the universality of it.”
For the title of the volume, Berris was inspired by the yellow warbler drawn on the cover by her friend, April Pacheco.
“The boy [lost to suicide] was Chinese,” she says. “In his culture the yellow bird is an important symbol of all good things.”
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