Sarah Cummings is a senior at Emerson College, working toward her BFA in Writing, Literature and Publishing. Sarah, a 21-year-old New York native with a concentration in Fiction, is publishing her first book through Wilde Press. An imprint of Undergraduate Students for Publishing, or “Pub Club,” Wilde Press publishes two student submitted books each semester. Sarah’s book is called These Thoughts That Hold Us, and it’s a collection of five interrelated short stories. “It deals a lot with mental illness, messy relationships and family dynamics,” says Sarah. “Most of them were actually stories I did for fiction workshops, so I wrote the first one my sophomore year. Then over the summer I started thinking about trying to make them a collection, because I generally write about the same themes and subjects. I tried to incorporate the characters into different stories.”
When asked where she got the inspiration for the stories, Sarah explained that she’s always written darker things. “That’s my natural style,” she says. “I write a lot about mental illness, because that’s something I’ve dealt with. And I think its representation is getting better, but still lacking in a lot of ways.” Many of the stories also have LGBT characters. “I wanted to try to write those relationships where it’s not the main point of the story, because I think that also happens a lot—where the idea of a character being gay is the main thing,” says Sarah. “Those are two things I kept in mind while writing.”
Sarah lists Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer and The History of Love by Nicole Krauss as two of her favorite books. As for her own work, her favorite story to write was the first one in the collection, called “Lucy.” “That was a story where I went in with a very vague idea of what I wanted to do,” says Sarah. “I decided I wanted to write about a friendship, because I usually focus on relationships, and I realized most things I wrote only had two characters—the person and their significant other. I felt like the characters completely wrote themselves. The story went in a direction I wasn’t expecting it to go in, which doesn’t happen to me that often. So that was really cool and fun.”
Like all writers, Sarah experiences writer’s block. For aspiring authors struggling with writer’s block, she suggests trying to set your own deadlines and finding places to submit your writing, in order to get inspired. “Don’t worry too much about what you’re going to write about, just write for you,” she says. “I find that free writing helps a lot. Just see where that takes you.”
As far as goals for the future, Sarah says that she has a handful of dream career options. “Right now I’m very interested in book publishing editorial,” she says. “I’m interning with Beacon right now, which does social justice. I love them. I really love what they do.”
You can purchase These Thoughts That Hold Us at the Spring 2016 Book Launch on April 19th at 7 pm in the Bill Bordy Theater. Sarah and David Carliner will both read from their respective books, answer questions and sign copies. The books are $8 each, and all of the money for Sarah’s book will go to Active Minds, an organization on campuses to end mental health stigma. The money for David’s book will go to an LGBT youth organization.