An Interview with Sarah Lutterodt

Sarah Lutterodt was born and educated in England, gaining a BA degree in physics from the University of Oxford, an M.Phil. in nuclear physics from the University of London, and a Ph.D. in Education from the University of Birmingham. She has spent most of her adult life outside England, working for two years at the University of Lovanium in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and subsequently for ten years at the University of Cape Coast in Ghana. Since 1980, she has lived in the United States, where she worked as a technical training consultant for General Physics Corporation before starting her own business, Quality Training Systems, in 1997.

Sarah has celebrated fifty-two years of marriage to her husband, Clement, with whom she has three children, who pursue their careers in Seattle, Los Angeles, and London respectively. Now in retirement, she and Clement divide their time between their homes in Columbia, MD, and Accra, Ghana.

Tell us the story of your book’s title. Was it easy to find, or did it take forever?

The first part of my title—Worlds Apart—came fairly easily. But my memoir is not just a travelogue, and I felt that standing alone those two words would be misleading. I needed a subtitle that hinted at the ways in which I had experienced and negotiated the different worlds in which I have lived. Finding the right subtitle wasn’t easy. My writing coach and I went back and forth until I found words I was comfortable with and he felt would spark the interest of readers ready to look beneath the surface of life’s happenings.

How did it feel when you first saw your book cover? Or when you first held your book in your hands?

I am very pleased with the way the book looks and feels. My daughter’s friend—himself an immigrant from Peru—did an amazing job with the cover design, capturing the cross-cultural experience that has defined my life using striking images of cloth as a non-cliched metaphor.

Who/what made you want to write? Was there a particular person, or particular writers/works/art forms that influenced you?

In embarking on my memoir project, my goal was to look for a common thread that would serve to integrate and make sense of my diverse life experiences. As the project continued, I found myself leaning increasingly on the structure that the Franciscan friar, Richard Rohr, offers for understanding what he calls the “two halves of life” and using his inclusive, non-dual language for framing my response to navigating boundaries between people and cultures. “Both-And” is one of his favorite expressions. It was only as I neared the end of writing the memoir that my target audience and external purpose came clearly into focus.

What is one thing you hope readers take away from reading your book? How do you envision your perfect reader?

My ‘perfect reader’ is someone who is open to looking beyond the bubble that defines their particular life situation. I would like readers to use the stories I tell as a starting point for self-reflection: what are the boundaries that define their own life experiences, what would it take to build bridges to those whose experiences are very different from their own, and to what extent does their childhood conditioning continue to influence their thoughts and behaviors as adults?

What new writing projects are you currently working on? Or, other projects that are not writing?

I am hoping to use stories that I cut from the memoir to achieve a manageable length and stories that emerge as I live into my ongoing experiences to form a collection of what I like to think of as “Present Moments”—that is, events or happenings in which I felt particularly alive or present in a situation and encountered others in a non-transactional way.

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