Spotlight On Writers – Katy Santiff

I think I hail from a few different places, and these places all weave their way into my poetry.

I was born to parents in the US military–my father was an officer in the US Air Force and my mother was a Civilian Intelligence Officer for the US Navy. I was born on Andrew’s Air Force Base in Suitland, Maryland. Nine months later, we were transferred to Hickam Air Force Base on Oahu and my sister was born there. We stayed on Oahu for 3 years before being transferred back to AAFB. My parent’s were able to live off-base then, and they bought a small farm in Calvert County, Maryland, when it was really just undeveloped countryside. I spent the rest of my childhood running through the woods and playing with my sister and the animals on our 15 acre farm. We were about 5 miles away from the Chesapeake Bay, so a lot of my memories are of time spent on the water with my mom’s Navy buddies too.

A part of me is also “from” the Shenandoah Mountains, River, and Valley of Virginia. I spent summers there at a camp called “Caroline Furnace”–built in the woods and mountains over a stretch of gorgeous land near several National Parks. There’s a timelessness in that place for me.

So many things. Generosity of spirit, the mystery and magic of nature, regeneration, and the immeasurable things– like our ability to heal and our ability to love.

I’m pretty sure by now that I’m more in love with sound in language, and it’s ability to transfer emotion. I love words that both convey a meaning and evoke a sensation. Like the quiet words that comfort us–Henry Vaughan’s last line of “The Night,” rocked my world when I studied it in college:

Where I in him / might live invisible and dim

Because it argued a radical religious idea that I loved–that man could know his God better in darkness than in light–AND because the sound of the words he chose to convey that thought echoed the hush of night. I’m not a religious person, but I got what he was trying to say. Those soft vowels, and quiet consonants, showed me how he found his comfort in this busy world.