sarahspy

[sarahspy]

@sarahspy is Sarah Lynn Knowles -- a Massachusetts-based writer, editor, and pop culture nerd who’s bounced between western Massachusetts, Philadelphia, New York City, and back again.

My fiction has been featured in Slice Magazine, Joyland Magazine, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Perigee Publication for the Arts, and Sundog Lit. I was honored to workshop fiction in Tin House’s 2024 Winter Workshop and One Story’s 2023 Summer Conference.

I founded and edited Storychord.com -- a longtime, biweekly fiction journal that featured one story, alongside visual art + a one-song soundtrack, each by a different emerging artist. From 2010-2017, we published 150 multimedia issues (all archived here!) and hosted multiple SXSW and CMJ live music events.

I collect quotes and enjoy dabbling across creative arts like jewelry making, ceramic pottery, block printing, and photography.

Here's some of my very favorite fiction and, more broadly, 50+ of my favorite books 📚

Friend me on Goodreads, Pinterest, and Bluesky :)

PUBLICATIONS

“The Hotel Window” Atlas and Alice (January 2017)

“The Bee Sting” Sundog Lit (April 2014)

“Waitress” Vol. 1 Brooklyn (August 2013)

“Blackbird” Joyland (July 2013)

“Darlene” Slice Magazine (Fall 2010/Winter 2011)

“Camping” Perigee: Publication for the Arts (Issue 25, 2009)

Sparrow, self-published literary/personal zine (2004; archived)

“Elizabeth” Film & History (Vol. 33, No. 2; July 2003)

Cataclysm Girl, self-published literary/personal zine (8 issues, 1997-2001; archived here, here, and here)

AWARDS & HONORS

Tin House 2024 Winter Workshop, Accepted Fiction Participant

One Story 2023 Summer Conference, Accepted Fiction Participant

Honorable Mention, Glimmer Train June 2013 Fiction Open

Finalist, Northwind December 2012 Story Contest

Winner, Slice Magazine Fall 2010/Winter 2011 Spotlight Award

Finalist, Glimmer Train July 2009 Very Short Fiction Contest

3rd Place Winner, Perigee: Publication for the Arts 2009 Fiction Contest

Gold Award for Feature Writing, MarCom 2006 Creative Awards

[sarahspy]

They were always saying 'Take your medicine.' The therapists and the doctors, my parents, the counselors-- anyone with an opinion about my illness. They all told me about people who started feeling good again, or decided they weren't actually bipolar, or missed the energy, and stopped taking their medicine and ended right back in the hospital. Back at the visions, back at depression, back at death. What they didn't say was how much psych meds sucked. They went over the long list of side effects, but nobody seemed to care when I said yes, the medicine made my stomach hurt and hair fall out and gave me diarrhea and turned everything stupid and flat and boring. The sluggishness, the flat gray of the sky and the old snow, the days all the same, same routine, same people, same dramas. I didn't want to go back to hearing things and I didn't want to go back to trying to kill myself, but I also wanted to feel something real and true, life in neon, rather than this dull blanket.

—Juliet Escoria, Juliet the Maniac

[sarahspy]

Even if we write fiction, the most beautiful literary subterfuge, we can tap into certain personal wells and it can feel (to us, at least) like those boundaries become translucent. How do we travel the line between pushing ourselves to be vulnerable, honest, interesting and still make ourselves feel safe? How do we take risks as artists and still protect ourselves? How do we stay steady even as we explore and exploit the wildness of our minds?

Jami Attenberg, in Craft Talk newsletter edition "Steady and Inspired"

[sarahspy]

I know this about myself: I finish things. Most people can’t start things or most people can’t finish things, but if you can start something and finish something, you’re going to be fine. As for status, riches, fame, and splendor? Those are out of reach for everybody.

Min Jin Lee, author of Pachinko, interviewed by Alexis Cheung for The Believer

[sarahspy]

If somebody gives you a really good critique or a really bad critique, all they’re doing is diagnosing something off in the energy of the art. If the critiquer has taste you agree with, maybe you should try to “fix it.” But only you will know the true answer to finish your art, no matter what they prescribe. Every once in a while they happen to say it is a great diagnosis, and miraculously, the medicine to cure the illness too.

Bud Smith, author of Teenager, interviewed by The Creative Independent

[sarahspy]

I write stories where whiteness is not the center. I think that when you are not white in America, you are not at the center. Asians definitely aren’t at the center: they’re not even part of the binary of black and white. If you’re Latinx or Asian or Native American, you’re on the fringes. In my little space, in my pages, I want to be the center. I’ve met Asian Americans who come to my readings and will break down in tears. I tell them, 'I wrote this for you. I want you to know that I see you because I see myself.' Maybe it’s crazy that I say this, but I see how much we can suffer when we believe that we deserve to remain in the margins. My education didn’t put me at the center, and I don’t have to accept that this should be true. To say that I am at the center of my narrative is not to say I am more important than anyone else. No. I am saying that I am equal to all who are in the world; I am saying that I am no less a person than anyone else. I am correcting this failure in my Western education in my writings.

Min Jin Lee, author of Pachinko, interviewed by Alexis Cheung for The Believer

[sarahspy]

When I read something I legitimately like, from an author, especially an underground writer, I reach out to them and let them know. It isn’t just like, 'Here’s a chance to network so I can gain their favor.' It’s a way to find the most interesting living artists working today and be in communication with them the way I wish I could talk to Tolstoy, because, listen, some underground artists are operating at that level of genius, but the dead are dead and we need to seek out our living geniuses, and at the very least say hello.

Bud Smith, author of Teenager, interviewed by The Creative Independent

[sarahspy]

I've been in a long process of trying to understand the difference between loneliness and solitude. Part of that is not being afraid of being alone, and then getting past that fear, and then starting to separate out what is loneliness, and what is solitude, and what is privacy, and what is secret? What is a natural separation of time and schedule, and what is abandonment—or rejection? What is rejection and abandonment, and what is just people taking space to do their own day or whatever? So, no. Now I don't feel lonely at all. It feels like a big injury that healed.

Jenny Slate, interviewed by Dana Schwartz for Marie Claire

[sarahspy]

I felt different as a child. I was nearly mute, or expressed myself in timid monosyllables. But then my moment arrived and it seemed to me that I lowered a bucket into my head and pulled out words. The words carried a story with them. The more the story advanced, and the wilder the pace of the bucket as it went up and down, bringing me pleasure and unease, the more enthralled the other children were. But was I really different? No. Just think of when, in ordinary conversation, we proceed in disjointed phrases, either weighing our words or using an ironic tone that drives out a melodramatic one. Then, unexpectedly, suddenly, something breaks through the margins and speech becomes a flood, liberating, moving, passionate, fierce, until we’re embarrassed, we’re sorry, we say: I don’t know, something got into me. Well, that something – an 'I' crouching in our brain – grabs us and tears us away from a prudent or calculating 'I', dragging us along, imposing its rhythm: it’s a common experience for us all. We know it, whether we’re writers or not.

Author Elena Ferrante in conversation with Elizabeth Strout (The Guardian)

[sarahspy]

Change will always be both noun and verb; it is a thing that happens to us and also a thing we make happen. Stability is less of a reasonable expectation than an ideal or illusion. There is no limit on the number of times we can course-correct. Even if moving around doesn’t yield the results we anticipate, it’s bound to feel better than being unable to see the point of moving at all.

Stacia Brown in "I Changed Everything. Now What?" (The Cut)

[sarahspy]

Have no hierarchy of importance when it comes to your work. Make whatever. Be at play, always. Get comfortable doing sloppy work, malformed, phoned in, wonky work—believe you can fix it later. Because you can. And then when it does pile up, actually fix it later, as if harvesting a crop you get to correct once more, twice more, impossibly, luckily, till you’re happy with the harvest.

Bud Smith, author of Teenager, interviewed by The Creative Independent

[sarahspy]

It may be that you, like many, think that writing fiction does not require study. And not only that: that it is not improved by study. That talent is preeminent, the only thing required to become a writer. I was told I was talented. I don't know that it did much except make me lazy when I should have worked harder. I know many talented people who never became writers, perhaps because they got lazy when they were told they were talented. Telling writers this may even be a way to take them out of the game. I know untalented people who did become writers, and who write exceptionally well. You can have talent, but if you cannot endure, if you cannot learn to work, and learn to work against your own worst tendencies and prejudices, if you cannot take the criticism of strangers, or the uncertainty, then you will not become a writer. PhD, MFA, self-taught -- the only things you must have to become a writer are the stamina to continue and a wily, cagey heart in the face of extremity, failure, and success.

Alexander Chee, in "My Parade," an essay within How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

[sarahspy]

The story of your life, described, will not describe how you came to think about your life or yourself, nor describe any of what you learned. This is what fiction can do -- I think it is even what fiction is for. But learning this was still ahead of me. I knew what I thought was normal for a first novel, but every first novel is the answer to the question of what is normal for a first novel. Mine came to me in pieces at first, as if it were once whole and someone had broken it and scattered it inside me, hiding until it was safe for it to be put back together. In the time before I understood that I was writing this novel, each time a piece of it emerged, I felt as if I'd received a strange valentine from a part of me that had a very different relationship to language than the me that walked around, had coffee with friends, and hoped for the best out of every day. The words felt both old and new, and the things they described were more real to me when I reread them than the things my previous sentences had tried to collect inside them. And so while I wrote this novel, it didn't feel like I could say that I chose to write this novel. The writing felt both like an automatic process, as compulsory as breathing or the beat of the heart, and at the same time as if an invisible creature had moved into a corner of my mind and begun building itself, making visible parts out of things dismantled from my memory, summoned from my imagination. I was spelling out a message that would allow me to talk to myself and to others. This novel that emerged was about things I could not speak of in life, in some cases literally. I would lie, or I would feel a weight on my chest as if someone was sitting there. But when the novel was done, I could read from it. A prosthetic voice.

Alexander Chee, in "The Autobiography of My Novel," an essay within How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

[sarahspy]

I was with him in a way that I had been with no one else, and from what I understand, this was also true for him. It isn't just that you fall in love with someone -- you each allow yourself new identities with each other, new skins, almost like a cocoon to who you'll be next. Strange to ourselves and to each other; only the feeling of the room, the silence of it, was familiar.

Alexander Chee, in "After Peter," an essay within How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

[sarahspy]

If you are reading this, and you're a writer, and you, like me, are gripped with despair, when you think you might stop: Speak to your dead. Write for your dead. Tell them a story. What are you doing with this life? Let them hold you accountable. Let them make you bolder or more modest or louder or more loving, whatever it is, but ask them in, listen, and then write. And when war comes -- and make no mistake, it is already here -- be sure you write for the living, too. The ones you love, and the ones who are coming for your life. What will you give them when they get there? I tell myself I can't imagine a story that can set them free, these people who hate me, but I am writing precisely because one did that for me. So I always remember that, and I know to write even for them.

Alexander Chee, in "On Becoming an American Writer," an essay within How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

[sarahspy]

I have a theory of the first novel now, that it is something that makes the writer, even as the writer makes the novel. That it must be something you care about enough to see through to the end. I tell my students all the time: writing fiction is an exercise in giving a shit -- an exercise in finding out what you really care about. Many student writers become obsessed with aesthetics, but I find that is usually a way to avoid whatever it is that they have to say. My first novel was not the first one I started. It was the first one I finished. Looking at my records, I count three previous unfinished novels; pieces of one of them went into this first one. But the one I finished, I finished because I asked myself a question. What will you let yourself know? What will you allow yourself to know?

Alexander Chee, in "The Autobiography of My Novel," an essay within How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

[sarahspy]

Women are not going to start claiming too much. Women are just getting closer to claiming something closer to their share. What looks like overreach is simply reach. Any time that a woman acts in her own interest or in the interest of her gender, she is accused of selfishness. Look, even, at the language of “having it all,” which is my most loathed phrase for a million reasons, namely that it’s a cliché. But it’s a perfect example of what we’re talking about here. “Having it all” has been the default state of male life. But when women make any kind of move towards having a full life that has many dimensions in many different directions, it gets framed as an issue of greedy acquisition. Every move toward equality for women has always been framed as narcissism, self-interest, vanity, self-regard, piggishness.

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