Meet Sari Botton
I’d been aware of Sari Botton for
years through her published essays and interviews, her bestselling anthologies,
and her editing work at Longreads. When I learned that Sari was teaching a
class on anthology publication at Catapult, I signed up right away. I’d had an
idea for a literary anthology for a long time, and I couldn’t think of a better
person to give me tips about the process. Sari was everything I expected her to
be, and more—knowledgeable, thorough, wise, frank, funny, and insightful. When
the MFA needed a new Mentorship Lab instructor, Sari came immediately to mind.
I was thrilled when she said “yes.” You will be, too, when you read this
interview with Sari, a self-described “late-blooming Gen X lady” who just happens
to have had an extraordinary life and career.
You’ve
had a varied and interesting career journey, which you’ve been writing about in
your subscription e-newsletter, “Adventures in Journalism.” For those who are
unfamiliar with your background, can you tell us about some of the significant
milestones (or twists and turns) in your writing journey?
I’m 54 and I honestly don’t feel
as if I’m as established or successful as I “should be” by my age. I’ve had a
very varied career in which I’ve sometimes felt right where I belonged, and
I’ve thrived, and other times felt very much in the wrong place, and I’ve
floundered. Sometimes that was a function of whether I had enough faith and
confidence in my own inner directives to follow them; sometimes it was a matter
of market forces and things like recessions killing lots of publications and
jobs, and there was also a little thing called sexism holding me back now and
then.
The first creative nonfiction I
wrote was an essay for a school contest when I was in fourth grade about what
I’d do if I won $1 million. (I can’t remember what I said I’d do!) I won that
contest, and the same one the following year. The summer of 1986, when I was a
junior in college, I managed to get a paid internship on the arts desk at Newsday,
where I flourished writing arts features and profiles. But after college, I had
a hard time finding myself as a writer. An essay writing workshop I took at NYU
in 1992 got me going with creative nonfiction again.
I started publishing personal
essays in magazines in the late 90s and early aughts, and knew that was where
my heart was. I published two Modern Love essays, one about reprogramming
myself away from The Rules and
another about becoming okay with not
wanting children.
My dad wasn’t happy with what I
wrote in the first Modern Love essay, and that began my obsession with trying
to figure out how to ethically write about the other people in your life. In
2010, I started a column on The Rumpus called Conversations With Writers Braver
Than Me, where I interviewed
memoirists about how they handled this.
In 2013, after hearing agents and
editors tell me no for eight years, I published my first of two NYC
anthologies, Goodbye
to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York. The next year I
published its New York Times Bestselling follow up, Never
Can Say Goodbye: Writers On Their Unshakable Love For New York.
Those books
led Mark Armstrong, the founder of Longreads, to reach out to me.
You’re an
editor for Longreads, which publishes a wide variety of longform essays and
features both established and emerging writers. You also created and edit “Fine
Lines” for Longreads, focusing on personal essays about aging in our culture.
And you’ve edited and published three literary anthologies. What do like most
about editing? What is your primary goal when editing an essay?
Editing an essay is like solving
a puzzle for me. I just love the form — love to read and write personal essays,
and to help make other writers’ essays sing. I lose myself in editing them
because it is such a passion. One of my primary goals, though, is to maintain
each writer’s intentions and voice. I try to not do anything unnecessary.
How does editing inform
your writing practice, and vice-versa?
I bring my experience as a writer
to editing. One of the things I’ve hated most as a writer is being edited by
people who are flexing their muscles unnecessarily to justify their jobs. With
that in mind, I try to do very spare editing. And I always invite writers to
push back against the suggestions I’ve made.
As a writer, editing has made me
sharper and more considerate of my editors. I remember in the past filing
pieces that were over word count, telling the editor, “I decided to let you
pick what stays and what goes!” I will never do that again!
Does your work as an
editor influence your teaching practice?
Being an editor, editing two to
three longform essays each week, makes me a better teacher because I am so
deeply immersed in what does and doesn’t work in the writing. I share this with
my students.
Your
writing has been featured in multiple major publications, and now you are
working on your memoir. What brought you to the point of wanting to write a
memoir?
I’ve been wanting to write a
memoir for a long time, but have felt conflicted about revealing things about
other people in my life, so I’ve been kind of…hiding? I’m tired of hiding. And
I think I have figured out how to do this with minimal blood spilled.
Can you tell us what the
memoir is about?
It’s about being a late-blooming
Gen X lady who has zig-zagged haphazardly through life while battling a case of
impostor syndrome, borne of trying to be who I thought people (mostly men)
wanted me to be instead of who I actually was.
What is your writing
process like? What techniques or strategies work for you?
I don’t have as much time for my
own writing as I’d like. That said, sometimes I’ve written the most when I’ve
been the busiest. I try to make it easy for myself to just dive in when a
thought strikes me. To this end, I keep a running Word doc that functions as a
scratch pad. I also like to get in a room with other writers, and set a timer a
few times – for anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes at a clip — and babysit each
other as we race the clock and get a shitty draft down. I also got a lot out of
Jami Attenberg’s #1000WordsOfSummer.
The first year she did that, in 2018, I rough-drafted a lot of the material for
my “Adventures in Journalism” newsletter.
You’re an instructor at
Catapult and now teaching for the Bay Path MFA. What made you interested in
teaching for us?
I was curious about your program,
because I knew my colleague Lisa Romeo teaches there. I had stumbled upon the
Bay Path table at Hippocamp a few years ago. When Leanna James Blackwell
reached out to me, I was thrilled to get the chance to teach here!
What do you hope to give
your students?
I hope to empower my students to
hone and follow their instincts; some tips and tools for overcoming the fears
and doubts that keep so many of us blocked; and skills for developing, fleshing
out, and then reigning in their writing.
Is there any one thing you
love most about teaching? If so, what is it?
I love watching and helping
writers develop. I also love watching and helping them find their confidence,
because it has taken me so long.
What inspires your work as
writer/teacher/editor? What interests you most?
When I was coming up, I had a
hard time finding mentors and teachers, and vowed that I would fill that void
for others.
Who are some of your
favorite (or formative) authors? What do you love to read?
Some of my favorite creative
nonfiction authors are Leslie Jamison, Kiese Laymon, Lacy Johnson, Jesmyn Ward,
Anne Lamott, Sarah Miller, the late David Rakoff, Joan Didion, Maggie Nelson,
Chris Kraus…too many to name! I love reading essay collections and memoirs.
Welcome to Bay Path, Sari! I'm familiar with your work and admire it so much. As an "older" student, I so appreciated it when you initiated Fine Lines at Longreads, too. I love reading those essays. I will graduate in May and I've already taken my Mentorship classes. Reading your interview with Leanna, I couldn't help but wish I was one of those lucky students who will have you for their instructor.
ReplyDeleteWelcome! Another older student chiming in, hoping to get lucky enough to be your student. I'm intrigued by your zig zags, feelings of imposter syndrome, and light-touch editing.
ReplyDelete(My comment was published as Unknown, boo. Kate Haney here!)
ReplyDelete