Sarah White's Blog
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Feb.01.2013
I got a later start in life than most when it came to love. As a young person, I was reserved, a little aloof to rituals of dating, much more focused on writing and my studies. A gawky teenager with thick glasses, I preferred to read about romance than bother with the mess of...
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Jan.11.2013
On May 6, 1956, a newspaper printed these words: " The death of Mrs. Allie W. White, 80, the former Nellie May Rudd, a long time and highly respected resident of Bennington [VT] who was a charter member and past president of the American Legion Auxiliary, occurred at Warner Nursing Home Sunday."...
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Oct.23.2012
I didn't know her first name. Everybody called her Mrs. Hudson.
Still, I knew her more intimately than many of my closest friends. I saw her at her most vulnerable. An elderly woman of 88, her body failing quickly from aggressive breast cancer. I lifted her...
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Aug.24.2012
Every afternoon, right before supper, she would appear. It was the early 80's, so her cat-eye glasses and sandy-colored (does she, or doesn't she?) beehive did not seem uncommon. Her lips curled downward into a scowl, and she stared straight ahead.
I called her the Chihuahua Lady....
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Jul.13.2012
Nighttime, after the locusts hushed, and the only summer sounds were crickets singing love songs, the rustling of scavengers scratching through scorched leaves...we would lay back in the pokey grass and lose ourselves in the blackened night sky. Why was it such a thrill to find...
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Jun.29.2012
...I'd be smiling, laughing even. I might even smoke a cigar, kick my feet up on my brimstone desk, and sip a hot toddy. Another job well done.
I learned way back in Sunday school that even Satan can quote Scripture. He knows what the Bible says. That's just...
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Jun.28.2012
If you speak to God, is it like singing? Like a cantor or priest, do we pronounce our praise in soulful cadences? Or, do we speak at all? There are wordless prayers prayed everday. Our hearts beat, souls throb, blood pulses with the prayer, "God, let me live one more day." In silence, in...
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May.06.2012
I am the woman you might've called mother, mom, mama, mommy. I carry you inside me, the unmade memories of our life together, little traditions--decorating the Christmas tree together, baking cookies, teaching you to read and write, holding your hand. Your skin woven from the DNA of my...
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Mar.30.2012
If I had known last winter would be the last one I'd see, I would've cupped the snow, patted and balled it, and stacked it in my freezer. I would open my freeze door from time to time and stand, awed by the whiteness of the snow, the last time I would see it outside of a dream.
Maybe I...
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Mar.09.2012
Upon the Extinction of Silverfish
...and the last tree used for paper crackles and thuds to the ground to become the last handwritten letter ever mailed in the last envelop ever made to be delivered by the last mailman to the last mailbox still in existence. The last mailman...
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Mar.08.2012
The story I am about to confess has been my own personal shame for over thirty years. When I was three or four, my local public library showed children's movies for free in a special room on the second floor, just off the "children's section." The library was a magical place. The...
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Jan.05.2012
I heard a theory recently that offered a new twist on the belief in ghosts. Just as supernatural, the claim was that the creaky floorboards, scuffling soles, and muffled voices that we hear in the darkness of night might actually belong to us--to another life, the life that might've been, an...
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Dec.04.2011
When I was a child, the Christmas season hummed with the jingle of bells, the music of carols, the bustling excitement of anticipation. Weeks and weeks led up to that single magical morning when you would open gifts, things you hoped for, but never thought you would actually get...
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Oct.31.2011
Recently, I had a short story accepted for publication in Brink Magazine. The title comes from an actual location in Northwest Ohio, a park where I would go and sit and contemplate the future direction of my life. A person can feel the history vibrating in almost every blade of grass...
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Aug.26.2011
I know the place where I will die. I think I've known it since I first smelled the lilac bushes in the backyard, skinned my knee on the brick wall out front, grass stained my elbows in a delicious summer morning dew.
The day I will die is a Saturday in the early 1980's.
I am standing in the...
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About Sarah
I am originally from Bowling Green, Ohio. I received my BFA from Bowling Green State University, my MA from Iowa State University, and my MFA from Purdue University. I have been teaching English at the college level for ten years. I have also done freelance...
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Sarah’s Favorite Books
Jane Eyre, A Passage to India, Beloved, The English Patient, The Remains of the Day, Tabloid Dreams, The Things They Carried, Black Water, Wide Sargasso Sea,...
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