Sarah Sentilles, STRANGER CARE: A Memoir of Loving What Isn't Ours

[1:51]Zibby Owens: Hi. This is Libby Owens, and you're listening to the award winning podcast, moms don't have time to read books. I'm also the host of moms don't have time to lose weight, and I'm the editor of the anthology, which you should run out and buy, called Moms Don't Have Time to: A Quarantine Anthology. All proceeds of that book go to COVID nineteen Vaccine Research. And I'm the editor in chief of Moms Don't Have Time to Write, a new publication on Medium, and we're accepting submissions, so please send your personal essays there. And if all that isn't enough, you can follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens, and my website is zibbyowens.com. Okay. Now back to this amazing podcast. Sarah Santilles is the author of Stranger Care, a memoir of loving what isn't ours. You might find that to be a recognizable name because I have been doing a giveaway for her book in conjunction with Katie Couric Media and Random House for the past month or so, which is now over. Sorry. Anyway, Sarah is the author of Draw Your Weapons, which won the 2018 PEN America Award for Creative Nonfiction, Breaking Up with God, A Church of Her Own, and Taught by America. A graduate of Yale University and Harvard Divinity School, she currently lives in Idaho's Wood River Valley. Welcome, Sarah. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Thank you for having me, Sabia. I'm so looking forward to talking with you. I loved Stranger Care, a memoir of mothering what isn't ours. And I feel like now I know you so well, which I know that in memoir, you know, you only have a slice of yourself that you share. But just going through all of this with you from, you know, the ship whatever, the Chevy dealer, whatever it was where you're upstairs taking the classes and I mean, like, all these little bits and pieces. I don't know why I picked that one random moment out of all the many, but just seeing your whole journey through this thing. Anyway, why don't you I'm rambling because I'm, like, so excited, but tell listeners what Stranger Care is about and this whole journey which became the book. Yeah, sure. So I wrote Stranger Care as a love letter to our foster daughter who

[3:49]Sarah Sentilles: we picked up from the hospital when she was three days old. I call her Coco in the book. And I wanted to write a book that would mother her when I was no longer allowed to. And it started I actually started writing it before Coco ever came into our lives. I'm a feminist, but when it came to becoming a mother, I wasn't admitting to myself or to my partner that I really wanted to be a mother, that it was my deepest longing. And by the time I did admit that to him, I discovered that I was married to an environmentalist who didn't wanna make another human being. He thought that why would we make a new child when there are so many children in the world who need homes? I mean, he was open to fostering or adopting. And he wants to live in a world where we tend the earth. And I really want to live in a world where we tend each other. So foster care became kind of our common ground. We thought, Okay, there's 500,000 children in foster care. Over 100,000 need permanent homes, and we can be a safe place for one of those children. So we started the process of becoming certified as foster parents. And the book opens with my own indecision and kind of our struggles in our marriage to figure out how we're going to remake our partnership in order to grow our family and what that's going to look like. And then it kind of takes a turn when we get the call for Coco and we bring her home. Wow.

[5:12]Zibby Owens: But it's not just that, because you intersperse basically every short chapter with some sort of story from the environment or the Bible even or all these different sources that sort of make your own experience much more global and sort of rooted in the history of motherhood in general. There was one of those passages that I, like, have not stopped thinking about about the tree, how the mother tree tends to the tree beside it based on its seedlings versus the other trees in its orbit. But that when those trees that aren't its seedlings are out of its orbit, it'll just take care of whatever tree is close by, which I thought was like, I've never thought of a tree that way ever. I had no idea. Did you know? I mean, that blew my mind, I have to say.

[6:01]Sarah Sentilles: I had no idea. I read an article by Suzanne Simard, who has a new book out called Finding the Mother Tree, about this idea. So in in the beginning of the book, I'm really looking to nature to find examples of expanded sense of kinship. Like, how does nature take care of the stranger? What does family look like in nature? I was trying to think differently about it. I knew that it was gonna be a very intimate story, the most personal book I've ever written. But I also wanted it to open to the wider world. And so I interspersed it with examples from nature of care or family, which I think become kind of a breath or a relief for the reader in some way, but also a reminder that my heartbreak is not the only heartbreak, that our world is big and wide and there's beauty in it and terrible things at once. But that Mother Tree book, had first read The Hidden Life of Trees or The Secret Language of Trees. I always get the title mixed up with that bee, the one about I

[6:55]Zibby Owens: think it's The Secret Life of Bees.

[6:58]Sarah Sentilles: Isn't it the secret? But it was the one about trees. Was it the don't know. Language of trees? I

[7:03]Zibby Owens: don't know the tree one. I only know the bee one.

[7:05]Sarah Sentilles: It's about trees. It's by Peter Bollhaven is the author. And he talks about how trees can communicate and remember and how trees grieve and they have friendships with other trees. And I finished the book and I was just blown away, kind of like what you're talking about, oh, the world is different than I thought. Everything is different than I thought. And I live in Idaho in a small mountain town in Idaho, and I had signed up to do trail maintenance on one of these trails that are used for hikers and mountain bikes. And I arrived to do the trail maintenance and they gave me clippers to clip off tree branches along the trail. And I was just weeping, being like, these trees are, you know, they're feeling it, they're feeling pain, they're talking to each other. So it was a transformative moment for me to read that book and then to read these essays by

[7:52]Zibby Owens: Suzanne and Samard about this idea that trees recognize their own kin and through these root systems. And and then they also take care of of strangers, which I thought was really profound and beautiful. I mean, you know, we just think we're the center of the universe as people, and it's so not true. Yeah. I feel like I've been reading a lot about trees lately. I just read, like, the the Oak Papers by James Canton. I don't know if you've read that. Oh, I haven't. No. I would like to read that. It's like a tree meditation, if you will. He's a PhD, lives outside of London. Anyway, that was really interesting. And my husband keeps being like, what's with all the trees? Why are you I'm like, I don't know. I don't know. It's just because also, all the stories, they're not really about trees. It's about life. It's about humanity and and all how we all interact and sort of the beauty of seeing things outside of ourselves. So I don't know. It's been like a theme of the summer reading, I would say.

[8:47]Sarah Sentilles: It's beautiful. And I think it's it points to this ways of what you're talking about about how humans think of ourselves as the center, but we have all these stories that we tell ourselves about how the world works. And there's these moments where you're like, oh, it's it's different than what I thought, and it's more beautiful and more profound and more connected. And I think there's there it's like a balm or medicine in some kind of way to to remember that communication's happening all around you. Family's happening all around you. Yep. So true. And speaking of family,

[9:14]Zibby Owens: so, yes, I would say like and I listened to it, so I didn't read it. So I don't know if it was exactly half of the book or it seemed like the first half, you had not even had you had not met Coco yet. You had it was the lead up to that. And as you said, there was a lot of this debate. And what I found really interesting was how you described sort of muffling your own you knew deep down what you wanted, but you couldn't assert yourself. You you it would have, like, rocked the boat too much, and it would have maybe I didn't say that in the right way, but, like, your husband wanted something totally different. So what do you do in a relationship? And you were like, I've been so amenable up until that point. How could then all of a sudden, I'd be like, absolutely not. When, like, you'd been like, sure. We'll do this. Sure. We'll do that. And then I'll so it's like the the precedence you set in the relationship,

[10:04]Sarah Sentilles: and then this big decision comes along. I don't know. Why don't you tell more about it? I I just keep summarizing. Well, that was the hardest part to write. I felt like a lot of shame about looking back at the ways that I'd been in my own marriage and the ways I'd subverted my own desires, whether it was for small things like what I wanted to eat for dinner or things to do. You know, I'm a people pleaser or I want to say I'm a former people pleaser, but I'm still a people pleaser, like a good girl who likes to do what other people want her to do. And it kind of runs counter to my understanding of myself as a strong, decisive person. And I'm married to someone who wants to be married to a strong woman. So it was also a shock to him that I hadn't been saying my own desires. And so it's kind of an interesting question of how when you've been pretending to be one way, but then you're admitting to yourself that something else is going on, how do you remake your partnership to be more equal? And it was I I didn't write that part at first, actually. I I was I didn't wanna write about my marriage, and I definitely didn't wanna write about the fact that I hadn't been saying naming my own desires. It was more comfortable to blame other people for the situation that I found myself in than to look at the ways that my own behaviors have led to the this, like, moment that we found ourselves in. So that was the hardest part for me to write. Other people think other parts are harder, and there's emotional parts. But that part, admitting admitting that I had been swallowing my desires was the hardest part. But interestingly, it's the one that so many women readers have responded to. I think it's a pretty common thing that people a lot of women are trained not to say what they want. And then you find yourself in a situation that you really don't want to be in and end up having to either explode your partnership or remake it or give ultimatums or do something. This one about being a mother, I had my own resistance because there's cultural resistance around this thing. I think I write that motherhood is framed as both holy work and trap. So I had absorbed that. I was afraid of what it would do to my writing and my life and my time. And I had a partner who didn't who didn't need to be a parent. He said, I'm fine with it just being the two of us. And then he became more adamant in his desire not to create a new human as I realized that my deepest longing was to become a mother. And so we had to then straddle this pretty big chasm.

[12:23]Zibby Owens: The thing is you write about it as if you wanted to, you know, become an astronaut and go to the moon or something. You know, like, I'm like, it's okay to wanna be a mother. I'm like, you're you know, I'm like, my heart is like going out to you as I'm listening. I'm like, it's okay to admit this. It's not like some shameful desire to wanna be a mother who's like, you know, but there was just so much built up. And of course, if the person in your life feels the opposite, it doesn't really matter how common or not common it is. It's like that's your sort of ecosystem in which you have to sort it out. But yeah. Yeah. You're right. It's like I'm like, I really wanna drink poison. Exactly. Wanna do. You know? I know. I'm like, she wants to be a mom. It's okay. Be a mom. I hate Yeah.

[13:04]Sarah Sentilles: Yeah. It is okay. But it didn't feel okay. I know. I completely.

[13:08]Zibby Owens: And you wrote, you explained it so well. I just, you know, my heart was kind of going out to you as you wrestled with it. Although I'm sure that would have been the case had you been wrestling with anything. And then of course, it all goes on, I felt sort of similarly at every step of the way. Even by the way, just read your LitHub article about going to Coco's first birthday. Mhmm. Oh my gosh. Well, I hate to like fast forward, but can we talk about that or would you prefer No. Please. Which sounded just I mean, the fact that you went and visited after you had to give Coco back to her biological mother and then literally, like, felt like you were going to die in your whole body that you said you had migraines and bruises and swelling and you just literally

[13:49]Sarah Sentilles: couldn't stand it. Tell me just tell me maybe tell about the trajectory, what ends up like sort of happening, which isn't a spoiler, I don't think, because that's No. It's not. At this point, no. I don't think so. So we we wanted to adopt through the foster care system. And so what happens when you are certified as a foster parent is you get these phone calls that there are children, sometimes siblings that are available that need a safe place to go, sometimes single children. And so we would get call after call after call, and you're supposed to keep a list of questions by the phone to determine whether you're the right fit for that particular child. And since we wanted to adopt, there were some questions that we had. We wanted to make sure that there was another family available or we wanted to know what the biological mother's situation was. And so when we got the call for Coco, we were told that her biological mother was what they called a poor prognosis. This was her fourth child and she had a long history of not being able to have a safe life for children. And so it was pretty possible that we were going to adopt her. So that was what we went in with. So we picked up this three day old baby girl with less than five pounds from the hospital. And our attachment to her was immediate, fierce. When I had been wrestling, do I want I had been asking myself, do I want to have a baby? Do I want to have a baby? Do I want to have a baby? And then it kind of switched, do I want to be a parent? And so I knew that I didn't need to give birth, but I still wasn't sure I could love another person's child immediately. But it was immediate and fierce and beautiful and profound for both me and Eric. So we brought this little girl home. And with the baby, you know, you're it's not babysitting. You're up every two hours feeding them. You know, you you kind of fall madly in love with this little child, and I really wanted to keep her. And so part of the book is me wrestling with this longing, this full bodied desire to have Coco be our child and to give her a forever home. And also seeing that there was this other mother, her mother, who also wanted her and who wanted to get her life together so she could get her daughter back. And that was hard to learn how to love her mother as well. I remember the first time I met her, which kind of points to the violence and bureaucracy here. We had brought home this little girl from the hospital, and we didn't meet her mother, who I call Evelyn in the book, for two weeks. And we met her at a courtroom after going through metal detectors. And here's this woman who's given birth two weeks before, and her body is still holding all the signs of pregnancy. Mean, think her breasts are still making milk and we're in this courthouse and she asks if she can hold her daughter. And I hand her this tiny baby in this random courtroom hallway and she just holds her and whispers I love you, I love you, I love you, I you, I love I love you, like for hours. And I thought okay, this is it's almost like reading about trees, like this doesn't work the way I thought it worked. There's another woman who loves this child. What we going to do? And so I had to learn how to love Evelyn as much as I loved Coco. So as Evelyn, I think my therapist said to me, this child might save her life and you don't need your life saved. You need to stop rooting against her and start rooting for her. And so I tried that. It became this practice, kind of love practice. And Evelyn and I really grew to love each other as she got her life back together. And eventually, the foster care system determined that it was safe for Coco to return to her. So I had underestimated my what my attachment to Coco would be, and I'd also underestimated what it would feel like to hand a baby, a vulnerable baby, back to someone who I didn't think was safe for the baby. I mean, when we did that, she was 10 old. She can't talk. She's not going to school. She can easily disappear. And the foster care system gives biological parents a lot of support while their children are in foster care. They have access to counseling and job training and drug counseling and financial support and social workers and free childcare and all these different things. But the moment that reunification happens, all of those supports disappear. So that meant that Evelyn was on her own, which meant that Coco was on her own. In the beginning, we stayed in touch. And the article that you talked about, this is a long way around to get to that essay. She invited me to Coco's first birthday party. She invited Eric and me, but Eric, it was too hard for him to go. So he drove me there. And we had this huge role reversal where I felt like nobody understood my grief over losing my foster daughter, but then I realized that Evelyn did. She lost her daughter to me, and then I lost my daughter to her. And so I showed up at this birthday party, and Coco had these cute pink tennis shoes on and her hair and pigtails. And I don't think she recognized me. It had been a couple months, but Evelyn let me hold her the whole time. And I didn't know then that that was the last time that I would see Coco in person. Today's episode is sponsored by Quince.

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[21:23]Sarah Sentilles: And you still haven't? Well, now so she Evelyn was doing really well until she wasn't doing very well. And I can't talk a lot about what happened, but she ended up relapsing and going to a different state. And Coco was taken into foster care in a different state. And as soon as Eric and I heard that, we went to go get her. But that state won't place her with us. They've placed her with a different foster family. And so we've been fighting to get her placed back with us, but we are losing. But what we have been allowed to do is Zoom with her every Thursday morning. So actually right after we talk, we Zoom, and it's really the most beautiful thirty minutes. We giggle and play games, and then the screen goes dark, it's like losing her all over again. Oh my gosh. Sarah, how do you go through this? How do you do I mean, how do you go how do you manage the the pain of this? It's brutal. You know, I I think it's one of those things where I'm sure you've experienced where life asks you to do something that you don't think you can do and you only have one choice, which is to do it. I feel like the only choice we have is to love her and to continue to try to champion her in whatever way we'll be allowed to. I do a lot of therapy. I do EMDR, like trauma therapy. I do something called Havening, which is really beautiful. I have a lot of supportive family and friends. And what I try to remember is that none of this is about me, it's about her. And it's about these 500 children that are in this system, the foster care system. Like, it was difficult for me to navigate as a overeducated white woman with money. And then I think, what is it like to be poor? What is it like to be an addict? What is it like to be a person of color navigating that system? So I try to de center my own grief, but it's been the most beautiful experience of my life and the most terrible.

[23:18]Zibby Owens: Wow. And of course you wrote about it. So did that help?

[23:22]Sarah Sentilles: It did help. I don't know for you as a writer also, you know, I felt people like, how did you write about this? It seems so hard to write about. I wrote about it when it was happening. And there was, I found an agency on the page that I didn't have in the foster care system. I felt so much helplessness and despair. And just being able to arrange words on the page felt like a kind of agency, like I could exercise some control, even when those words were, She is gone. Gave me a sense of control that I didn't have in any other aspect of that experience.

[23:54]Zibby Owens: Wow. How is this project different? I mean, I know with all the layers of emotion on top of it and writing through the situation, but this is like your fifth book or something or something. I say so glibly. No. It's good. Don't how many. Losing track. No. I mean and you've there's always a personal element to it, and yet they're also different. Right? Like breaking up with God and, you know, like the analysis of female religious leaders around the country and all the work that you continue to do is so interesting. And there's all this reported stuff and then all this emotional stuff, if you will. So how how do you synthesize all that information and make it into sort of a cohesive narrative? And like, which part of it or is it the combination of both? Like, you feel like you need the two sides, the sort of the analytical meeting with the emotional.

[24:50]Sarah Sentilles: That's a really interesting question. I write I don't know how how you write. I'd love to hear what your writing process is like, but I write in fragments. I write like little bits and the book is in fragments of it. It has short I wanted there to be a lot of white space on the page for space for the reader to breathe and space for the reader to animate the text on her own. And I also like to point to the limits of my own writing that, you know, what I write about Evelyn or what I write about Coco, there's always more to them than what I can capture on the page. And I like to point to that by by having these short sections. But I needed the analytical part. It was like medicine to me. I needed kind of to fall in love with the world in my grief. I had gone in the beginning, like I said, to look for examples of kinship and family. My friend read my book and she said, I love how in the beginning you're looking to the natural world for examples of kinship and family, and by the end, it's the natural world that's taking care of you. It's like, it's your family. And I was like, oh, I realize I did that. But, you know, that's how that is how it worked. You know, I got to be held by the mountains and by the river and by the vultures and hawks and the robins in my yard. And so I needed that sense of expansiveness and that sense of long, eternal time or the sense of the stars and the moon. I wanted that also to be medicine for Coco. You know, it's my hope that someday she'll read this and she'll know how loved she is. And she'll know how many people want wanted her. And that and I had this sense that if we all come from stardust, if we're all made from the same material, then wherever she finds herself, she she's home. You know? I I used to, like, literally go out and hold her into the moonlight and say, wherever you are, there'll be moonlight. You know? Wherever you are, there'll be trees. And so I wanted the book to do that for the reader to do that, to kind of, like, reenchant the the world in some way even though the material was so difficult.

[26:57]Zibby Owens: Wow. That's beautiful. It's so beautiful. And I'm just like, alright. Making my own selfish wish on the stars with my kids. Oh, good. Take it. Yeah. Am like, you know, can I have x y or z star? Can you work with so much? For me, please. You know? You do so much to support writers and authors and books and community. You're you're a powerhouse. Oh, thank you. That's sweet. So I know you got your start with your first book about Teach For America after graduating from Yale, which, by the way, I went to also. So Oh. Yeah. Yeah. Yay. When did you graduate? I am much older than you. I mean, I'm sure I am, but I graduated in '98.

[27:36]Sarah Sentilles: No.

[27:37]Zibby Owens: I'm older than you. I graduated in '95. No way. Wow. Well, you look much better.

[27:43]Sarah Sentilles: See, I had to plug in my ring light. Told you.

[27:47]Zibby Owens: Oh my gosh. I thought you were like ten years younger though. Oh, that's so funny. I was in Davenport. I was in Pearson. I was first in Trumbull and then in Pearson.

[27:56]Sarah Sentilles: So I was right next to you. I ate a lot of meals in Davenport. Had a big gang of friends that was in Davenport. Oh, awesome. Well, we were there at the same time then. Right? You were there? Very cool. Yeah. Wow.

[28:07]Zibby Owens: Well, so so you so just give me like the two minute version of your life story then. So you went to Yale. Then you went to Teach for America. Like, did you end up here? I know what happened. Yeah.

[28:19]Sarah Sentilles: I'm a weirdo. I'm a real weirdo. So I I yeah. I don't know of how career services was when you were at Yale. But when I was there, you had two options, which was investment banking or the Peace Corps. Those were the two things. Was way I mean, we had computers, but you would go in and there was all these binders. This is where you could do this. Yeah, binders. And I ended up applying for Teach for America, which is, I'm not a fan of that program at all. I think it's not a good idea to send inexperienced undergrads basically to the schools that need the best teachers. But I ended up doing Teach for America and I was sent to Compton, California. And I taught bilingual elementary school, first grade and then second grade. And that experience was like a conversion experience for me. Similarly to reading about trees, I was like, oh, the world works differently than I thought. Here I am, it's embarrassing, but here I am as this white woman where all the structures are designed to support me, to feel smart and successful. And I'm in a school that's predominantly for black and brown children, and we didn't have any books. The windows didn't open. There were mice crawling through my classroom. They were being set up to fail and then blamed for that failure. So it was this really deep encounter with structural and systemic racism. I also started going to church at that time. I had been raised Catholic, but kind of left the church when I went to college and then started going to this really beautiful Episcopal church that was like a social justice church in Pasadena called All Saints Pasadena. So I thought that becoming a minister would be the way to combat oppression of all kinds, specifically racism. And so I ended up going to Harvard Divinity School to become a minister, but I stopped going to church when I went to divinity school and ended up getting a doctorate in theology and realizing that I couldn't make my mind do what the church was asking it to do. And so I became instead a theologian where I studied the words people use to talk about God and the effects of those words, whether they make the world more life giving or whether they cause harm. And so I went to divinity school. I fell in love with Eric in graduate school. We kind of moved all around following academic jobs. We've lived in California. We've lived in Portland, Oregon. And then I eventually ended up teaching at an art school in Portland. I taught critical theory and ethics and aesthetics. And I had written my dissertation at Harvard on the torture photographs taken at Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq. I became really interested in what we're supposed to do when we encounter images of other human beings in pain. So that's what I wanted to write my dissertation about. So I wrote about that. So that led me to studying art and working with visual artists. But eventually I realized my biggest dream was to be a writer. And so I ended up leaving my academic job to focus full time on my creative writing. And Eric and I ended up living in this small mountain town in Idaho. So that's kind of how I ended up here. That story. And yet you're interviewed by Cheryl Strayed for your launch and Anthony Doerr and all these amazing,

[31:23]Zibby Owens: amazing authors and have had such success yourself. It doesn't matter where you are, especially now, I feel like. Yeah. Yeah. Zoom is a helpful tool. How

[31:33]Sarah Sentilles: did you connect with them, by the way? I met Cheryl Strayed right before she became super famous for a while. She's good friends with my friend, Emily Rathblack, who's another author and writer who I love. And I remember she introduced me to Cheryl right when I moved to Portland. And I got this really sweet message back from Cheryl, I'm about, my life is about to change. I think she knew she was an Oprah Book Club select and I don't have time to make friends, but we kind of kept in touch for about ten years. And then she ended up Hemingway lived in the town where I live. He lived in Ketchum, Idaho, which is just north of me. And he actually died here. And the house where he lives has the community library in Ketchum turned it into a writing retreat. And so Cheryl came out as the Hemingway distinguished lecturer, and we we got to know each other. Awesome.

[32:23]Zibby Owens: She was on this podcast also about a year ago. Awesome. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Yeah. She's so generous. I remember taking I used to take all these writing classes in New York by Sue Shapiro and she always had all this recommended reading and she would always have us read essays by Cheryl Strayton. Anyway, then the book came out and I was like, oh my gosh, that's that essay writer for that. Yeah. Yeah. She's wonderful. So, okay, two questions. Like, what is coming next for you on the writing front? What is coming next with the child fostering front? And then advice for aspiring authors.

[32:56]Sarah Sentilles: Oh, I love those questions. So I'll answer them in the second one first. Okay. So Eric and I realized through our experience with Coco that we wanted to be forever parents. And so we worked with a nonprofit adoption agency. And actually two weeks before my book came out, we adopted a baby boy who was born on April 19, whose name is Griffin. And we're over the moon. He's just over two months old now. And it's an open adoption. So we know his birth mother and her mother and the birth mother's daughter. It's just more family, more family, more family, more family. It's just the most beautiful, profound, gorgeous experience. Open adoption is such a beautiful thing. So we have that, which means that I haven't been writing for the last two months, but I might be writing a novel. I've never written a novel, and so I'm experimenting. I'm also doing some writing about creativity, and I work a lot. I do one on one coaching with writers, and I do virtual retreats and writing workshops that I love to do. And I know that you mentor writers. And if you ever need support for that, I'd be happy to. Thank you. Yeah. Work with you. And so that's next for me. And my advice for aspiring writers or for writers, write first thing in the morning, if you can. That would be my advice. I find if I write first thing, if I put that first, then I don't resent the rest of my day or write in whatever way works for you. Like, Emily Wrap Black, she was taking one of my writing workshops and she went to her daughter's, like, some five year old birthday party for her daughter and brought her computer and turned her back to the birthday party and did her writing then. So I thought, well, maybe you can do writing anywhere. Maybe it doesn't have to be the perfect setup. You can do it wherever you need. But if you have a I feel like our stories choose us and we can become the writers that our stories need us to be, and that they come to us from the stars or from deep within, and it's our job to kind of honor that and not worry about if it's a good enough idea because they've visited us. You know? They're they're these holy things, and it's our job to tend them. Wow. Well, that's beautiful. I love that. Wow.

[35:02]Zibby Owens: I feel like we only scratched the surface. There was so much more in the book to discuss, and I'm just I feel so privileged to have gone through this journey with you. And now I'm so I'm so happy to hear about Griffin and so happy for you. And, like, it's such a happy, sad, happy, sad, so with Coco, and I'll be rooting for you for that. And yes, that's such a good idea with the fellows. I should really loop you into the program. Maybe you could give them some advice or something like that. I would be happy to, whatever would be useful to you and them, I would be happy to do that. I'm so grateful for everything that you do to support writers. It's really amazing. You're such a generous, generous person and it's a privilege to get to talk with you. Oh, thank you. You too. I do it. I have so much fun. So it's actually totally selfish.

[35:47]Zibby Owens: a great day. Sarah, thank you so much and for

[35:50]Sarah Sentilles: thanks for your beautiful book, Stranger Care. Thank you. Thank you so much for talking with me. Take care.

[36:16]Zibby Owens: and thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.