The protagonist of Sara Zarr’s recent novel Once Was Lost, Samara Taylor, is the teenage daughter of a pastor who leads a small congregation in the desert of eastern Oregon. In the midst of a series of traumatic events “Sam” develops a fascination for xeriscaping, the art of creating a garden that needs only a…

  We are pleased to present an Image Intensive workshop with Sara Zarr! The Art of Revision Narrative Prose with Sara Zarr   A six-week craft workshop on narrative prose April 6-May 11 Saturdays, 11:30 AM-1 PM Eastern REGISTER We are pleased to announce another Image Intensive, an opportunity to dive deeper into your craft,…

Though Airbnb is born of modern times and technology, it almost seems a throwback to the art of innkeeping in much earlier eras when for a reasonable fee people opened up extra space in their homes, however humble, to strangers. And to me it’s somewhat remarkable in our suspicious age that people would do this. Hosts are making themselves and their things vulnerable by leaving their homes and appliances and personal belongings in the hands of unsupervised strangers. Guests are trusting that the space will be as advertised, and relying on the hosts for good information and functional plumbing.

As of October 18, my fourth novel, How to Save a Life, is officially out in the world. The plot involves a death, a pregnancy, and an adoption. Recently, a fellow writer said he thought it interesting that I, the same person who wrote about not being a mother here at Good Letters, had written a…

My one-year Bible has me in Acts. It also has me in Kings, but I’ve temporarily abandoned the rulers of Aram, Elisha and his floating axe heads, and the mysterious woman of Shunem. I’m hoping to regain some sense of the world depicted on the pages as at least distantly related to present reality as…

In my Father’s house are many mansions. Also, there’s a pretty neat treehouse out in the yard. I built it myself. I don’t have a lot of DIY skills and it shows. It’s made mostly of pieces I’ve scavenged here and there: driftwood, planks “borrowed” from nearby yards, and, frankly, a few remnants better left…

As of August 18th, my husband and I will have been married twenty-one years, and have known each other for a total of twenty-four. It’s easy to believe after all of that time that I know everything there is to know about him. There’s something wonderful about that, the comfort and ease and shorthand that…

As I write this, Mother’s Day is nearly upon us. It can be a painful day for some women who are my age or older, and, like me, childless. For me, the day doesn’t arouse any emotion other than regret that once again I’ve failed to get a card for my mom. My husband and…

As soon as I settled into my theater seat to watch 127 Hours, I felt uneasy. Why had I decided to spend the next ninety minutes of my afternoon watching what I knew would be a story of one person, virtually alone, in a desperate struggle for life? It’s not like I didn’t know how…

When my husband and I moved from San Francisco to Salt Lake City, we told ourselves and our appalled friends that we’d give it two years. Two years to ascertain whether we could survive summer heat, winter snow, being inland, minimal sources of good Chinese food, and a total absence of Mission-style burritos. And what…