Hello friends!
One of the major perks of book-coaching/editing is celebrating client success. I am humbled by writers who’ve put their trust in me, and have endured what can be an intense manuscript revision process. Book-length manuscript creation is laborious, and nonlinear. An act of faith as much as sweat. That’s why I’m so thrilled that several writers I’ve worked with through these unprecedented COVID times have books coming out this year or in the first part of next year. As much as lockdown sucked, the silver lining for some writers was more time with the pages. And by more time, I don’t necessarily mean NaNoWriMo accelerated word count time. What I’ve seen with my writer clients is a commitment to a deeper, more meaningful relationship with their work. Nowhere is this more exemplified than with this prescient, timely book by the energetic, multi-talented Sara Fischer.
Doreen Dodgen-Magee, author of Restart: Designing a Healthy Post Pandemic Life, says, “Equal parts memoir and guidebook, Open offers exactly what it promises: wisdom (like water) poured out and into the cracks of our parched beings. Fischer paints pictures and spins stories that inspire us to be more curious, seek less perfection, and activate our flawed, human, yet still massive potential for the good of all people, especially those who’ve suffered from a lack of radically hospitable spaces.”
I’ve known Sara for thirty some-odd years, and our paths have crossed in interesting ways, beginning with a shared writing class in 1990. She is a force, ladies and gents, and I’ve always been drawn to her naturally curious personality, as well as her kindness.
Here she is in her recent “unboxing” video:
And here is a bit more about Sara, followed by a brief interview and information on her upcoming launch and readings.
BIO: Sara began writing stories and poems when she was about four years old but refuses to share that early work. After a smoky, beer-sodden adolescence, Sara spent twenty years in a series of jobs from cocktail waitress to technical writer that all left her longing for something more and different. Somewhere along the way she discovered the Episcopal Church where she could sit in the back and cry for a few years. Eventually she attended the General Theological Seminary in New York and became a priest in 2003, the same year she dreamed up and helped to found Rahab’s Sisters, a long-running outreach to marginalized women. Over decades she dipped in and out of what some might generously call “the writing life,” blessed with an array of great teachers and occasional wonderful writing groups. In her day job she has served urban parishes in Portland and Seattle and is currently the priest at Saints Peter & Paul in southeast Portland where she regularly gets into trouble. She is married to Mark Faust, aspiring chef and tennis pro. Mark and Sara are proud parents of Nathan Faust, who lives and writes in Los Angeles. In her spare time, Sara likes to enjoy Mark’s cooking, lift weights, hike, knit weirdly-striped beanies, and go out for coffee with friends.
THE INTERVIEW
SV: Congratulations on your debut, OPEN: ADVENTURES IN RADICAL HOSPITALITY. I’m so thrilled that you get to share this labor of love with the world. As a person who wears many hats, what can you tell our readers how you carved out the time to write this book while working several jobs?
SF: Carving out the time was the hardest part. I wish I could say I spent two hours every morning at my favorite coffee shop, but all the coffee shops were closed while I was doing most of the work on the book. I have terrible writing habits and everyone should do as I say and not as I do. Having a coach was essential, because I had a deliverable of ten pages a week. Sometimes I only delivered six or seven pages, and sometimes those pages took two weeks instead of one. I always have Mondays off from my other work so I often cram all my writing into that one day. If the writing is particularly intense or slow-going, it doesn’t make for much of a day off. I’m also a big fan of packing up my printer, laptop, tape and scissors and heading to the coast or the mountains for three days a couple times a year. I recognize this is an enormous and rare privilege, not available to many writers. If I’ve got copy to work with an am just editing, I will spend a few minutes in the early morning over tea doing that kind of work by hand. It’s generating new stuff that it’s always been hard for me to set aside the kind of time that I hear other writers describe.
SV: One of the (many) things I love about OPEN is the humor in it. You tackle some serious social issues, but there is this undertone of ironic levity to your scenes. Can you talk about when and where in the process you find this levity? First draft? Subsequent? Is it accidental?
SF: I don’t think I’m as aware of it as others are when they read my stuff, so I guess I’d say it’s accidental. Reflecting on this question, I’d say that you don’t get to be 63 and spend as much time on the street and in smoky church basements without learning not to take yourself too seriously. In day-to-day life, I learned a few years ago that some people think of me as “formidable” or “intimidating” and I don’t like the distance that creates, so I always try to let people know right away that I’m human and fallible. For me that comes across as levity. So I’m not even aware of when or how that works its way into my writing, but I’m glad it does.
SV: Much of this project was written during the pandemic, which is an unprecedented and unique time for memoir. But your book is particularly prescient, as part of the community you serve and write about is especially vulnerable. During your revision process, as the socio-economic fallout from COVID continued to evolve, were you tempted to alter or add material even during the copy-editing phase? I ask this because the pace at which things change these days adds a layer of complexity to the writing of narrative nonfiction.
SF: Honestly, I was so eager to get the book off my plate I resisted the urge to keep going and adding updates or new stories. What I did find myself doing during the copy-editing phase was to soften my critique of some people and places in light of what I came to understand the pandemic had done to them.
SV: Now that you can add “published author” to your many “adventures,” will there be more books?
SF: I hope so! I have a couple of ideas. One is more stories about amazing people I meet on the margins, all of which could fall under a heading of “Further Adventures in Radical Hospitality.” And I have long wanted to write a memoir of my father, who was such a huge influence on who I am, through and through. He had a fascinating inner and outer life, and a story he always wanted to tell but never did.
SV: Any tips you’d like to add for our aspiring authors?
SF: 1) Don’t give up. I began working on my memoir over ten years ago. I shelved it a bunch of times. Open turns out to be completely different from where I started, but some of the material was worth keeping and helped fend off the dreaded blank page. 2) If you can afford a writing coach to keep you on task and you find the right person, you’ll never regret a penny. 3) Don’t compare. I used to agonize over how my scruffy, work-in-progress garden looked compared to the gardens I saw in magazines. A friend said: “That’s one garden on one day, with a lot of touch-up.” I think we need to apply the same principle when we compare our work to other writers whom we think are more successful.
Want to meet this wonderful person and get your hands on a copy of OPEN?
EVENTS FOR OPEN:
October 5, 7:00 pm: Book party/reading/signing at Zuckercreme in the Montavilla neighborhood. Come visit with Sara, pick up a copy of Open, and enjoy some enjoy coffee and cake.
November 3, 7:00 pm: Reading and signing at the best, newest local bookshop in town, Arches Bookhouse in the Portsmouth neighborhood. The used book selection and quality hospitality are reason enough to head over to this great spot.
December 3, from 2:00 to 4:00 pm: Rahab’s Sisters annual open house will celebrate the beginning of Rahab’s Sisters 20th year and the release of Open. Sara will be on hand for a short reading and book signing, and all book sales from this event will go to Rahab’s Sisters.
December 4, 9:00 am: Reading, conversation, and book signing at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral. As an added bonus, the Cathedral invites you to treat yourself to a morning of beautiful liturgy and music.
Client Book News
That must feel amazing to see a student (if that's the right word) gain success after much hard work. Like you're a proud parent haha