 To know and understand Sara, the child storyteller, who became Sara Dudo, the poet and educator, is to see the world as she might see it – like a journey filled with wonder with peaks, valleys, and every possible terrain in between. Poetry is like that; the writer brings the reader along on a journey to delve into one’s soul. Professor Sara Dudo paints pictures with words. She looks at the world with what can almost be described as a camera’s lens. In her writing, nature is important to her, especially when compared to the body. To imagine her thought process, one might look at some of the photographs she took when she and her husband Ray lived in Las Vegas at the end of 2021 until July 2023 when they moved back to New Jersey. It is at such a place, at the intersection of the human body and nature’s landscape that Dudo found a space for her art. Her poetry dances off the page with a simultaneous ability to pierce the heart with its stark, raw vulnerability and hidden truths. The shared experience between author and recipient can be as intimate as it can be life changing. For example, in her poem "Devotion" the opening line creates imagery that glistens, while it also immediately sets the piece into a specific mood and place. By the last stanza, the poem hits you with the theme of deep familial bonds and an image of a mother and child that plays out almost cinematically.  A flutter of wings, silver echoing shimmer reflects the plastic of the hothouse, a tan moth whirlpools in a browning tub of water. - An excerpt from “Devotion” by Dudo Dudo grew up in the small town of Estell Manor, New Jersey. As a child, she wrote stories and gave them to her teachers. After high school, she enrolled at Stockton University. Initially, she began as a fiction writer until she took an advanced poetry class. It opened up something in her that couldn’t be ignored and would begin to inform her relationship with life and the development of her craft. “It didn’t take very long for me to realize: I think this is a little more so me,” says Dudo, “not that I don’t write stories now. I still love going into different genres. I really like hybrid work too, where you write a little poetry here, a little prose there. So, I like combining things. But I primarily focus on poetry.” By the time she was an upperclassman, one of her professors told her that her work was reminiscent of the award-winning poet Larry Levis and that she should buy his book. Dudo had not yet heard of Levis, but on the advice, she quickly went out and purchased Winter Stars, which deals with the subjects of acceptance and loss. “I bought his book, and I read it,” says Dudo, “I must have read it, I don’t know, twenty times, just taking extensive notes because I was just like this is awesome. This is exactly what I want to do….What I really like about his style. At times it was gritty in content, but it still talked about something that was so beautiful.”
But first, there was the beginning of a lovely romance. At Stockton, Sara became aware of fellow student Ray Dudo from Mays Landing and felt an immediate attraction. She said, “He was a really cute guy who played guitar.” Soon after the two had been introduced by a mutual friend, Sara discovered she was becoming more in command of herself – a person of purpose. Normally, she played it safe. But she began to take risks. She became a radio DJ, joined the school’s track-and-field team with no prior experience, and then there was that cute guitar player she couldn’t get out of her mind. She recalled, “We had a Shakespeare class together my senior year, and I told myself at the end of the class: on the last day at our party, I would make him a mixed CD and inside of it, I would put a 3-page letter telling him that I liked him. I did that,” she adds. She gave Ray the letter in December. For several months, she would bump into him occasionally. He said nothing about the contents of that letter. Then came Spring. “I used to work at a flower farm in Vineland, New Jersey,” says Dudo, “I’d worked there for about three to four years at that point. I was about to go back in the spring and work there through the summer. He heard that they were hiring, and he went and got a job. He worked there for about a month with me. I wasn’t sure if he was doing it because he was taunting me or if he liked me. And then, he finally asked me on a date.”  After Ray took the job, she began to notice he was losing some weight, but she assumed it was from the cardio from all the walking on the job. Then, everything changed. “We started dating in June of 2018, and he was diagnosed in August of 2018,” says Dudo about Ray’s diagnosis of Hodgkin's Lymphoma, at which time he immediately began treatments. Both Sara and Ray continued their undergraduate studies. Ray was still living at home, and so his mother was a huge help to him. Sara accompanied him to as many of his bi-weekly chemotherapy treatments as possible. She also visited him daily to encourage him and cheer him on. When it was discovered that the chemo didn’t really work, he did radiation therapy in the spring of 2019 until about May. Also in May, Sara and Ray walked at graduation together. Relief came in June of 2019 when he was cleared, and radiation seemed to have worked. They celebrated in August of 2019 by embarking on a cross-country road trip, living out of their car - having a wonderful time.  Then, their world was about to face challenges once again. During spring of 2021, the cancer returned. This terrible news came right as the couple was planning their wedding. At that same time, Sara was sick with autoimmune troubles. Still, they were wedded in June of 2021. In July, Ray went in for a complete stem cell transplant. Sara became his full-time caretaker. Luckily, this treatment would be a success, and in the Fall of 2021, he was cleared of cancer. The experience infused Dudo’s writing, creating some of her most personal work to date embodying reflection and introspection on health. “I ended up writing a series of elegies,” says Dudo, “instead of a traditional elegy of someone passing, a kind of an elegy to these ideas of youth and of things not being the same. The idea of parting. In a stem cell transplant, the chemicals and the chemotherapy that the body undergoes, it kills every single stem cell in the body, and it produces brand new ones based on the infusion that they have to get. So even elegies to the stem cells that would have to be destroyed, stem cells that I felt we shared in experience being together. I ended up doing a lot of research in the desert, on the desert and the ecosystem and its landscape, and I got really into doing a lot of comparisons between his body and my body with its autoimmune issues.” The couple relocated to Las Vegas beginning at the end of 2021. At the University of Nevada Las Vegas, where Sara graduated with her MFA, she taught Introduction to Creative Writing, College Composition I, College Composition II, and was the course creator and developer of ENG 451B: American Literature II. In July of 2023, the couple moved back to New Jersey. In 2023, Dudo published a micro-poem in the Cincinnati Review called "Remission," in which the complex work beautifully reinforces the focus of the subject, her husband, by the repetition of using his name. The piece balances reference to the side-effects of his chemotherapy treatments, but at the same time, reflects on and elevates specific moments from his childhood.  ray the bird in you the jade in you the try in you ray the wren you watched from child window ray the flowering-pear phalanx on Main rounding the haste in you ray your voice ray locked in pink brine ray crystallizing the caramel ray rust water and freeze ray the green grass not green land dry dirt desert landscape in you ray the thin hair too thin for your thickness ray ray the plucking huckleberry mouth invite the pies Mary baked ray the name belongs to you, brown moonrays thousand knive an orange creek a secret bridge herring run ray a thickness to reach in to pinch fish at midnight with a hand ray rays hand an old church two hands makes a cathedral rays Holy Thursday candlelight puncture choral mouth ray the sound of your body dredging bees congregation around purple rhododendron bloom ray the sound of love waiting on brick porch barrier island Italian pancakes a nose full of salt a rose bush somehow stays alive ray. "Remission" by Sara Dudo Posted by Cincinnati Review on June 28, 2023 While the work was perhaps cathartic, the emotional repercussions would be ongoing. “Even if he survived, and obviously I was very happy he was doing well, there would still be a sort of death of the relationship that we had, our youth, of things kind of being what they were and knowing that in the future things were always going to be different,” said Dudo, “so grieving is another kind of shift,” she added. Yet, like in poetry, there have been moments in their narrative of not just shadows, but of lightness and enchantment – like on June 4th, 2021 when the two married at her grandparent’s old blueberry farm. At one point in the day, as the young couple commemorated their relationship and celebrated with the gathering of more than two-hundred friends and family, it began to rain. And like a poem, they clung to each other, droplets from the sky nurturing their union, like words planted on a page. Today, Sara and Ray are busy in their careers in academia. Sara is an adjunct professor of Writing at Rowan University. Last semester, she taught College Composition I at Rowan, as well as a College Writing Intensive at Stockton University. This semester, she is teaching The Writer’s Mind at Rowan. Ray is a busy high school English teacher. The couple enjoys road trips and travels with their dog, Layla. They also have a cat, Mosie. They enjoy spending time with family, which is part of the main reason they returned to the area from Vegas. Still, the wanderlust in them may take them on new adventures, destinations unknown with landscapes that will inform new works.   “Talking about the body and the landscape and the land, at the same time I did a lot of thinking about the land here in South Jersey and how that’s where we grew up. And how our bodies are so interconnected to this land. The root of it is, I was afraid to come back here because, in the desert, we both had a period of health where nothing was really wrong. We were healthy. My body was behaving. His body was behaving. He was doing well after the stem cell transplant and a fear of coming back here to the land where everything has always gone wrong,” says Dudo.  She has some tough emotional memories of growing up in the area, including the death of an uncle who died suddenly and the passing of her grandmother. “I finally could grieve for my grandmother who helped raise me and get distance, enough to see her beauty as well as her shortcomings and how she often pressured me as a child to be a third parent for my brother with Down Syndrome.” There was also some hesitation about how the future would play out. “I was also scared to return to a place where, though I hoped everything would be the same as when we left, I knew my sister-in-law was about to have a baby and my best friend as well, and I was nervous about facing the looming uncertainties of our fertility and the possible pain and physical/emotional turmoil that we might face in trying to move to the “next chapter” to assimilate, in a way, with our family and friends.” Note: Sara Dudo has been published in The Cincinnati Review, The Atlanta Review, The Idaho Review, The Portland Review, Southwest Review, Red Rock Review, and Oakland Review. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and a recent “Best of the Net” nominee. In true style of an artist, we can only imagine that Dudo will continue to explore life using her expressive talents for writing words that will form into lines of poetry, images that create lasting impressions, stories that will continue to resonate with readers and honor their own life events with a dignity that comes from one who has reverence for the work.  By: Kelly McCarthy
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