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An Interview with Sarah Orman

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Sarah Orman used to be an attorney for public schools in Texas and California. Now she writes personal essays and poetry. Her work has been published in Narrative, Witness, oranges journal, and elsewhere. Sarah is also the author of A Reader’s Compendium on Substack. She lives with her family in Austin, where she is working on a memoir about her wayward youth. Although she spent her twenties on the East and West Coasts, she enjoys reminding her fellow Texans that she was born and raised here. Find out more about Sarah at sarahormanwrites.com.


What inspired you to start writing this book?

This is a tough question for me. Maybe it’s easier to point to a moment of inspiration if you write fiction, or if you were already a writer and then an interesting thing happened in your life that you thought would make a good nonfiction book. In my case, I was not a creative writer—that is, I was a person who wrote professionally while actively suppressing the urge to write in my own voice—and then I reached a certain age when the urge became too pressing to ignore. I didn’t so much “start writing” as I stopped trying not to write. The question of “this book” is also complicated. In the beginning, I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to write about. Fortunately, I had a wonderful teacher in my first memoir class, Donna Johnson, who told me that it was okay to write my way into a story. So that’s what I did. I wrote for about a year before I landed on the story I’m telling in GRAY STREAK, which is about reckoning with a strange friendship I had in the 90s, when I was a rebellious teenager with a shaved head in Austin, Texas.

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

My book is about realizing in my forties that a thing that happened to me when I was seventeen was what other women called rape. I was an attorney specializing in Title IX sexual harassment, so I was used to thinking of rape, sexual harassment, and sexual assault in black-and-white, legalistic terms. After Donald Trump was elected and the #metoo movement resurfaced on social media (I always like to remember that Tarana Burke first used the phrase “Me Too” in this context on MySpace in 2006), it became impossible to ignore that there was this whole range of nonconsensual behaviors that I, and many other women of my generation, had put up with because we simply weren’t taught to exert authority over our own bodies. At one point I found comfort in the phrase, “gray-area rape” (Amy Schumer calls it “grape”). But I don’t think of GRAY STREAK as referring only to the act of betrayal that is at the center of my book. I like how it emphasizes the liminal nature of the two times in my life depicted in this book—my rebellious teenage years and my early forties. It took a couple of years for me to realize that all these themes were coalescing around the concept of grayness, and of course by then I had aged; I now have long dark hair with a gray streak in the front. A hip young barista recently asked me if I dyed it that way. Ha! It was one of the coolest things that has ever happened to me.

If your book had a soundtrack, what are some songs that would be on it?

Ooh, great question. The music in my book is mostly what my friends and I listened to in the early 90s: The Cocteau Twins, Jane’s Addiction, Indigo Girls, Pavement, My Bloody Valentine, The Smiths, Babes in Toyland. Most of my memoir takes place in Austin, so obviously there’s some Stevie Ray Vaughn and Willie Nelson. A small part in the middle takes place in Olympia, Washington, in the mid-nineties, when K Records was all the rage, so the soundtrack would also have to include Beat Happening, Bikini Kill, Sleater Kinney, Babes in Toyland, Modest Mouse.

What books are you reading (for research or comfort) as you continue the writing process?

I haven’t started it yet, but I’m excited to read Kimberly King Parson’s novel, We Were the Universe. I heard her interviewed on Brad Listi’s otherppl podcast recently and she said the novel was about “Texas motherhood and psychedelics.” I was like YES! My book includes strong doses of both things.

What other professions have you worked in? What’s something about you that your readers wouldn’t know?

The best job I ever had was working at a used bookstore in Austin, on the street by the University of Texas that locals call “the Drag.” This was between college and grad school. I was a student of literature, but at the used bookstore I learned about the business of books: what books would reliably sell (new fiction, new and timely nonfiction, hard-to-find classics); what books were most likely to be stolen (anything by the Beats); how to value the personal libraries that people brought in to sell (hint: your hardback Michael Crichton novel is not worth as much as you think). We were right across from Wheatsville Coop, Austin’s oldest natural grocery store, and we used to give the coop employees discounts on books in exchange for vegan frito pie, wasabi peas, and chocolate-covered almonds that we would spread out on the buy table for everyone to share.

This chapter of my life might not be surprising to readers of my Substack newsletter who know about my obsessive reading habits, but here’s the twist: after I’d been at the bookstore for about six months, I was offered a chance to work as a grant writer for an international corporation that was working on federal contracts. I had never heard of Lockheed Martin, but I felt like I had to take the job because it paid more money and I would be writing. I lasted about a week at Lockheed before I went back the bookstore and begged for my old job. I was surprised that they re-hired me. As penance for my disloyalty, I lost fiction S–Z and was assigned to health/beauty/sex, an unpopular section because browsers tended to bolt at the first sight of another person, clumsily shoving whatever book they’d been perusing onto the shelf, often backward. I didn’t care. I was so happy to be back with the books.

Do you have any writing rituals?

Every morning I write three pages by hand, a practice inspired by Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. I’ve kept a journal since I was a young teenager, but I was never this regular about it until I read The Artist’s Way about six or seven years ago. My morning pages practice is not the pure, fall-out-of-bed-and-write-from-the-subconscious practice that Cameron recommends. For example, I insist on making my coffee first. These days, with two kids in school, there are mornings when I make two lunches, feed our cat and dog, and unload the dishwasher while my coffee brews, which means I’ve accomplished several worldly tasks before coming to the page. Writing continuously for three pages is also a challenge. During the school year, I’d have to wake up at 5:00 a.m. to avoid interruptions when someone can’t find their water bottle or needs motivation getting dressed. I do my best and trust that Julia Cameron wouldn’t want me to feel exhausted. The great part about morning pages is that even on days when my life is full of non-writing tasks, I have exercised the writing muscle.


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