We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Sarah Sunfire. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Sarah below.

Sarah, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

I’ve always been passionate about Greek mythology, and in 2018, I wrote a novella-length retelling of the Hades/Persephone/Demeter myth called “A Softer Darkness.” In my retelling, Demeter is the suffocating, abusive mother that Persephone can’t break away from without help, and the maligned Hades helps her to understand her own strength so she can be free.

I paid a lot of attention to poetic language, took time building the love story, and did some research so that Persephone’s bedroom in Hades’ underworld palace was furnished in an accurately Greek-of-long-ago style. But it was an extraordinarily personal story for me to write, even within the mythological framework, and it stayed in my Documents folder for several years, unacknowledged.

Sometime last year, I was describing the story to someone who was very important to me and was surprised by how excited he was to read it. He loved the idea of Hades as a hero and asked me to send it to him right away. After he read it, he said, “This is really good. You should do something with it. Submit it somewhere.”

But novella length is so difficult to place (longer than a short story, shorter than a novel), and I wasn’t sure what my ideal trajectory was for the whole project. Still, that encouragement inspired me to submit an excerpt of the work to Lit Angels, a Los Angeles-based online literary magazine edited by Francesca Lia Block, who, incidentally, has been one of my favorite authors and abiding literary influences for most of my life.

When Issue 4, with the theme of Mothers, went live, I was stunned to see my piece brought to life by the dazzling artistic talents of Jade Lynn Goh. I spent my 20’s focused on Playwriting, and few highs are equal to that of a gifted actor making your characters real. But Jade’s illustrations gave me that experience on the page.

Not only did I have new faith in this work — a work that may never have seen the light of day if I hadn’t found the right reader at the right time — but I was newly invigorated and even enamored with writing in general. The past several years have been a time of painful growth for me, and in the worst of those stretches, I went back and forth between fear that I was talentless and fear that the written word had no real power in the challenges we face today.

Jade’s illustrations blasted apart any lingering doubts I’d had. I will always be honored that my work inspired these images, and I take that sense of possibility with me now in everything I create.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m a queer disability activist, but primarily I’m a writer, and that means a lot of things. Two of my ten-minute plays, Freckle Music and Shears, were published by Heuer Publishing and have been produced throughout the US and Canada. For my MA thesis in Children’s Literature, I adapted Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” as a musical that retold the story through a disability-focused lens. (Realistically, two brand new legs would need crutches to walk.)

While I remain open to theater projects, I’m focused on Fiction and essays these days. I keep a regular Substack called Hot and Disabled where I talk about all sorts of things related to the body, disability, working out, and sexuality. (I was born with cerebral palsy and walk with crutches.)

I’m currently seeking representation for Sugar Moon, my novel about lesbian werewolves. I’m interested in stories of transformation and am drawn to the ways that horror allows us to explore our bodies and psyches. But I’m also a sucker for a great romance, and I’m working on a memoir with romance and sexuality at the center of it.

Starting this month, I’ll be pursuing my MFA at Georgia College and State University with full funding and a stipend, courtesy of the Flannery O’Connor fellowship. Living in a small and friendly Southern town where cardinals congregate outside my office window by day and fireflies gather by night has already had an enormously positive impact on my writing. I’ve lived in every region of the US, but nowhere near the South since moving from my hometown of New Orleans when I was a teenager. I’m glad to be here, drinking iced tea by the liter as summer swelters on.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

One of the most abiding lessons I had to unlearn is that the purpose of creating meaningful art is not to be liked. My father, who passed away in 2006 at age 50, was a gifted musician and adored by everyone, but when I reflect on his remarkable life now, I think about how averse he was to making anyone uncomfortable for any reason. He was a marvelously generous soul who loved without condition, and that’s a beautiful, sacred way to be. But I have reason to believe there was a lot he was escaping, and that his determination to make sure he was “acceptable” at all times to all people affected his health negatively. He gave the impression that he could simply absorb difficulties, laugh them away. And oftentimes he could.

But I know that his laughter, and his gift for lighting up a room, also took the form of intense pressure to make everyone feel better, with little to no outlet for his own emotional hardships. He couldn’t abide the possibility of anyone disliking him, and that ultimately held him back in terms of his ambitions as a musician. As an artist, you *have* to be comfortable with not being everyone’s thing. I’d go as far as to say you have to learn to revel in it. I’m not saying artists don’t get hurt, or that bullying is in any way okay. But sometimes, a negative reaction to our work is an unexpected indication that a piece is challenging in the ways it needs to be, that readers are really thinking about it and allowing it to affect them. It’s confirmation that the work *is* affecting them, whether they want it to or not.

Oscar Wilde said that the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. This statement might need a few caveats in the age of social media, but I fundamentally believe it holds true. I wouldn’t do the work I do in the ways I do it if I didn’t want an audience. And part of the thrill of an audience is that they’ll bring their own experiences and associations into the art they consume. They might miss your points entirely, and that’s a risk we have to take. But they can also open up avenues to new points that you, the artist, wouldn’t have thought of without their perspective, and that’s a moment worth taking risks for.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

Broadly, I want people to feel comfortable expressing parts of themselves that they currently deem “unacceptable” or un-pleasing, anything they make sure to hide for fear of losing followers, or even fear of being abandoned by people they love. Having come through periods of unfathomable loneliness as I’ve navigated my own trauma and healing, I can finally say that anyone who compels you to hide who you are is not worth your emotional investment and energy. If you freak them out, if your art freaks them out, then they, whoever they are, are not for you. Personal writing is my way of showing others that it’s not inherently scary to reveal yourself. It will start out feeling scary, feeling lonely, and feeling vulnerable, but the people you connect with on the other side will be people you can trust and thrive with. And after the scary-feeling period? It starts to feel freeing and defiant, even fun. I’m currently revising a memoir called Why Am I Telling You All This? in which the narrator, me, makes quite a few questionable and even hurtful decisions in pursuit of validation, sexual fulfillment, and escape from the impact of trauma. The erotic elements don’t hold back. No part of it does.

I’m not writing this book because I’m proud of my choices, but I couldn’t write it if I were ashamed of them. I’ve never seen shame do anything positive for anyone, and if I’m going to advise anyone to let go of shame, I have to lead by example. Most of the people I’ve known who are consumed by self-loathing are, ironically, some of the kindest and most creative people out there. It’s the outright assholes who never question their right to be seen. Saying, “I am flawed and I am worthy, do not look away,” is, to my mind, where revolution begins.

Contact Info:

• Bluesky: @sarahsunfire.bsky.social
• Other: You can find my essays at www.sarahsunfire.substack.com. Feel free to subscribe! I also write uncategorizable pieces I care about but am not sure what to do with on my medium page: https://medium.com/@SarahSunfire And I’m JustBrethe at fanfiction dot net, for the curious. (The misspelling is a tribute to my original AOL screenname, back when such handles only allowed 10 letters.)

Image Credits
Illustrations by Jade Lynn Goh for “A Softer Darkness,” excerpt published in Lit Angels, issue 4.