Biography
Born in New York City, Sarah Blake has a BA from Yale University and a PhD in English and American Literature from New York University. She is the author of a chapbook of poems, Full Turn (Pennywhistle Press, 1989); an artist book, Runaway Girls \ (Hand Made Press, 1997) in collaboration with the artist, Robin Kahn; and two novels. Her first novel, Grange House, (Picador, 2000) was named a "New and Noteworthy" paperback in August, 2001 by The New York Times. Her second novel, The Postmistress, was by Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam in February 2010. Her essays and reviews have appeared in Good Housekeeping, US News and World Reports, The Chicago Tribun and elsewhere.
Sarah taught high school and college English for many years in Colorado and New York. She has taught fiction workshops at the Fine Arts Works Center in Provincetown, MA, The Writer's Center in Bethesda, MD, the University of Maryland, and George Washington University. She lives in Washington, DC.
Good to Know
Some fascinating outtakes from our interview with Sarah Blake:
"In the three summers while I was in college, I tried out three different lives in my summer jobs -- full immersion: intern at an Art Auction house in NYC; kitchen girl at a dude ranch in Montana; jewelry store clerk in a tiny shop on an island off the coast of Sicily. I took the immersion a little too close to heart for my mother -- after the second summer, in my incarnation as a cowgirl, I announced I was thinking about quitting college, marrying the cowboy I was dating there, and becoming a rancher. How could I not? The cowboy left me love letters hidden in the horn of my saddle."
"I am a big gardener and re-arranger of furniture. The two are inextricably related, in my mind, to my writing. When I can't figure out a scene, or when I'm stumped as to why a character makes a certain choice -- I go out and dig, and plot and plan and rearrange. In the winter, handily, there are similar chances to plot and plan and rearrange inside the house. When I get an idea in my head about how a room might look, I am completely obsessed with trying it out, right then and there. One night I was certain that the problem with our living room was the rug and that the answer to the problem lay upstairs on the third floor in my son's bedroom. Never mind that it was eleven o'clock and he was fast asleep, and the bed he slept in lay squarely on top of the rug. I jimmied and lifted and snatched the rug out from under the sleeping child, hauled it down the three flights, and then lifted and lowered and hauled the furniture around down in the living room. By the time my husband came home at midnight, I had just finished rolling the rug out in the living room. We both stared at it. It was completely and totally wrong."
"I come from a big family of singers-around the campfire, in a cappella groups in school, in the back of the car -- and I love to sing, love to hear singing. Similarly, I grew up listening to grown ups talking at dinner, extending dinner late into the night, all of us ranged around a big table in the house my grandparents bought in the "30s in Maine. My idea of happiness is just that: many faces, many generations, much discussion, candles and talk while the dishes shift in the sink."
"I love fog. I love rain. I love the moment right after a play ends -- the second of pure silence when everyone in the theatre, actors and audience, are joined -- before the clapping starts and the actors bow and we pick up our lives again."
Feature Interview
In the fall of 2009, Sarah Blake took some time to talk with us about her favorite books, authors, and interests. What was the book that most influenced your life or your career as a writer -- and why?
There are all the books I read curled up on a couch in summer childhood -- all the Little House books, The Secret Garden, The Little Princess, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, A Wrinkle in Time -- that gave me worlds right there where I sat, while the hot wind of New Haven drifted over the window sill. That feeling of reading worlds, of diving down below the surface of my own life made me a reader, an irredeemable bookworm.
But it was To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf that made me want to become a writer. I read her sentences -- all the beauty and the longing in them -- and I simply wanted to write them myself. The way her characters thought and moved, the light and sound she captured of a summer day -- all this I wanted to make mine. She showed me how to capture what she calls "moments of being" -- clear, resonant times in our lives of pure beauty, caught just as they vanish.
What are your ten favorite books, and what makes them special to you?
This list keeps changing, though there are the stalwarts -- the books I read and reread:
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte; Middlemarch by George Eliot, and To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. Those three were my early guides into the questions that I seem always to be raising: What does it mean to be a woman who wants something more than her world can give her? What does that wanting look like?
The Man Who Loved Children, a little-read masterpiece of family life and marriage by Christina Stead, is a wild ride that nearly bursts out of its own skin -- something I turn to again and again to remember how to push sentences as hard as they can go.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark is exhilarating and essential in the opposite direction. It tells its story so neatly and narrowly, it makes you shiver. It has a take no prisoners stance, which is something I admire.
Holes by Louis Sachar was the first book I read as an adult that reminded me of the sheer pleasure one can take in a beautifully constructed plot, and I return to it again and again --often teaching it to adult writers -- as a way to show how the deep delight of a satisfying read is tightly constructed. Against that I would set one of my favorites, See Under Lov by the Israeli writer, David Grossman. I couldn't begin to explain what it's about -- simply that to read it is to vanish into a vast imagination (at one point the book is narrated by the sea), purely and unabashedly as you read your way into the minds and lives of post Holocaust survivors in Israel.
The Icelandic epic Independent People by Halldor Laxness, I turn to (like Middlemarch) for the pleasure of that large overseeing voice narrating a multi-peopled, multi-generational town and time. And finally, there are two books I have on my shelf that inspire me over and over: Ann Patchett's Bel Canto and Cormac McCarthey's The Road. Each of these makes no bones about the fact that the end for the characters inside them will not be good, and then each proceeds to give us a story so full of life and love and devotion, moving us all forward inexorably toward the end the novels promise. But oh how alive that life before the end is. And how human.
What are some of your favorite films, and what makes them unforgettable to you?
I love the Coen brothers' movies. I loved Fargo because of how many shots there were of Marge sitting inside her car, silent, and thinking. I love the way their movies are plotted.
I love Thelma and Louise, because of the impossible set-up -- that they will drive to Mexico without going through Texas -- and the way it brings the two women to see where they are really going.
I could watch The Unbearable Lightness of Being again and again, because it does seem to capture life, those moments of being, that are true and are gone even as we catch them.
What types of music do you like? Is there any particular kind you like to listen to when you're writing?
Anything that tells a story or has a great voice attached (raw or fine) -- which means I love country music as much as I love Kurt Cobain. I can't listen to anything while I'm writing.
What are your favorite kinds of books to give -- and get -- as gifts?
Cookbooks -- I love looking at the photographs of food, and of people eating food and making food--and novels, and of the latter -- I especially like being given the novels that my friends put into my hands saying, this changed my life. (For whatever reason.)
Do you have any special writing rituals? For example, what do you have on your desk when you're writing?
I have two school-age children, and early on I realized that if my writing day started after I had gotten them up, made their lunches, taken them to school, and talked to the various other parents at the gates, my head was so full of all those voices -- all that lovely and not so lovely commotion -- that when I sat down at my desk often there was simply nothing there. So I began waking up an hour or two before my whole household, making a cup of coffee, and getting to work in the dark, in the solid uninterrupted early morning quiet. Often, I can begin a scene or start to sketch something out and then I have something to return to after the school run; I don't have to climb all the way back up the mountain to get to my work, it's right there waiting for me. This has become so firm a ritual that I find myself now waking up at five whether I'm writing or not.
Many writers are hardly "overnight success" stories. How long did it take for you to get where you are today? Any rejection-slip horror stories or inspirational anecdotes?
To answer how long it took for me to get to this point depends on where you start counting. I think I always knew I wanted to be a writer, but was too chicken to call myself one really until after my first novel was published. My father was an editor at a university press; and books, and the discussion around making them, was very much the currency of our house. I remember sitting beside him -- I must have been quite young, eight or nine -- watching as he took a red pencil to a manuscript, and realizing then that writing a good sentence, let alone a good book, was the work of years.
I wrote stories and poems all through high school, but then in college I had several great teachers of poetry and I started writing poems exclusively. This was before there were workshops in undergraduate English Departments, so the writing of poetry was taught as part of a Literature class. After college I taught American Lit to 10th graders and wrote poems undercover. But teaching was a great way for me to learn more deeply and for myself how a great poem worked, because it was up to me to explain it. After a few years I realized that I wanted to take some writing classes; and at this point I had moved to San Francisco, where there is a really vibrant community of writers. I went to every reading I could, and I slowly screwed up my courage to read myself in some of the open mikes. By a stroke of great good luck, a small collection of my poems was accepted for publication, and I started to think of myself as a teacher and a writer.
I started a doctoral program in Victorian Literature, while also concentrating on writing a book-length collection of poems. But I began to find myself impatient with poems, feeling like I wanted to write past the endings of poem, wanting more space and more room and more voices to come in. And one day I just started writing in someone's voice -- a 19th-century woman who lived in Maine -- and then she had a sister, and that's how my first novel began. I was writing my dissertation on Charlotte Brontė, and I realized that I just wanted to write another Brontė novel, and that was that. I finished my PhD but left academia, a writer -- out from under cover.
The Postmistress took eight years to write (the same age as my youngest child, as it happens. And I don't mention that lightly). Aside from the struggle to create uninterruptible writing time with two children, this novel was a struggle because I had a very elaborate idea in my head, and couldn't write my way toward it. I have nearly 1000 pages thrown out. It took nearly seven years to get a draft that my agent felt could be sent out. I needed an editor, but it took quite a while for this book to find its way to Amy Einhorn. The first time my agent sent the book out it was rejected by 12 editors, though many of them wrote very helpful rejections. I took it back and reworked it. Then the second time it was sent out, Amy read it and passed on it. All the other editors it was sent to in that round passed on it as well. After eight years and many, many drafts, and many rejections, I decided that perhaps it was best to simply bury it, put it in a drawer and move on to a new project.
Six weeks later, Amy called and said she had changed her mind, that she wanted to take a chance on it, that she wanted to see if we could do the work it needed. "I don't care how long it takes, three months, or even a year," she said, "take your time." A year? I remember thinking. No way. I've been working on it already for seven -- how can it possibly take another year!
Many drafts, and indeed, one year later-- here is The Postmistress. It is absolutely the product of that inexplicable magic a great editor performs. It is also a testament to the simple fact of slogging forward -- long after it makes any sense -- just to see if you can get where you imagined going.
What tips or advice do you have for writers still looking to be discovered?
Read. Read. Read. And imitate. And keep at it until you start to hear your own voice through the voices of your teachers, of your literary guides. And then send out your work as much as you can bear to. Send it out by submitting it, but also send it out by finding the writing community in your area and joining the conversation with other writers.
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