Sarah Stone's Blog
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Mar.30.2012
In the last couple of weeks, among the books I’ve been reading have been two that combine remarkable risk-taking in subject matter with deep, rich research and gorgeous structures: Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red, which I’ve been rereading as part of my winter teaching, and my friend Melissa Pritchard...
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Feb.16.2012
Since I’ve been writing fiction about people who get what they want and then have to live with the consequences (including people who take the risk of meeting their heroes), I’ve taken the excuse to meet some of my own heroes. The event, "Food, Justice, & Sustainability w/author/activist/chef...
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Jan.15.2012
“To see and hear people lie,” said Ivan Ivanych, turning over on the other side, “and to be called a fool yourself for putting up with the lie; to endure insults, humiliations, not daring to say openly that you’re on the side...
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Dec.08.2011
This is an exercise that I've done with a couple of different classes. I gave out a version of this at AWP a couple of years ago, and someone was just asking me about it again, so I thought I’d share it more widely. This can be done either alone or in a group; it's one of the best exercises I know...
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Oct.19.2011
After Litcrawl, in a Dog-Eared Books as packed as I’ve ever seen it, we were buying John Banville’s Shroud (another dark, interior, narcissistic, fascinating narrator – all I can say about Banville is, “Don’t try this at home.”) Also, I’ve been reading Peter Singer’s Practical Ethics and...
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Oct.14.2011
On my way to a Litquake event – Stories on Stage: Family, dramatic readings of stories by Ann Packer, Melanie Rae Thon, and Jennifer Egan, I stopped at Yerba Buena Gardens and sat down on a stone bench. Groups of people in high business dress marched past, men slept beside their carts of...
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Oct.11.2011
Two of the actors lay stretched out on the floor at the final dress rehearsal for Bill Cain’s How to Write a New Book for the Bible, at Berkeley Repertory Theater: Linda Gehringer, playing Mary Cain, and Tyler Pierce, playing “Bill Cain,” a version of the young Bill Cain, born out of the diaries...
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Oct.07.2011
What I remember most vividly from the week or so I spent in kindergarten: the little playhouse with its kitchen and miniature pots and pans, the terrarium, the fish tanks, the naps, snacktime, storytime, and the rugs we played on. I only semi-remember the conversation in which my mother explained...
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Oct.03.2011
This verbal snapshot project is inspired by the gorgeous blog “What I Saw in Berkeley Today: a photoblog love story.” Photographer Dyanna Anfang (in her other life a miracle worker responsible for many people walking upright instead of crawling around on the floor) writes about her pictures, “...
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Sep.15.2011
I asked a writer-friend (okay, full disclosure, the writer friend with whom I’ve spent dozens of hours watching Buffy and Angel, though, unlike me, he never surrendered a precious, never-to-be-recovered week of life to all four of the Twilight books), “Why vampires? Why right now?”
He said, “It’s...
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Jun.14.2011
Our seat companion on the long flight to Paris was French, I think, though he didn’t talk to us and looked away as if we weren’t there, except for sideways glances. He wore a perfectly fitting turtleneck and high-collared expensive jacket; he was handsome, in his late 20s or early 30s, with an...
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Feb.23.2011
“Aunt Margaret had one single piece of jewelry, besides her fat gold wedding ring. This was a curious necklace which she wore on Sunday afternoons after lunch, when she changed from her drab, black, weekday clothes into her best dress. The week’s work was done and she waited for another hard week...
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Dec.13.2010
I like the article you’ve posted. I like the video you’ve linked to. I like the newspaper article that tells me more about what actually happened in Cancun and whether we’re going to get anything like a climate agreement before we all boil to death. I like the pictures of your kids. Also your cat....
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Nov.02.2010
How hard it is to evoke the real experience of publishing a book, the way one teeters on the edge of losing perspective, the way one regains it (if lucky), the way we (and our characters) enter/re-enter the world. Thaisa Frank writes about the release of her novel, Heidegger's Glasses, with a...
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Oct.12.2010
A king in tears, about to kill his daughter in order to appease a goddess and call up favorable winds for war, moves offstage to make way for girls in tiny dresses singing rock ballads about “Syrian flutes and Lydian lutes” and groaning with desire for Achilles. A young woman in a Louisiana housing...
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If anything I do, in the way of writing novels (or whatever I write) isn’t about the village or the community or about you, then it is not about anything.(Toni Morrison)
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About Sarah
Sarah Stone has written for Korean television, reported on human rights in Burundi, and looked after orphan chimpanzees at the Jane Goodall Institute. Her novel The True Sources of the Nile (Doubleday/Anchor) has been taught in courses on literature, ethics,...
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