Literary Birthday – 23 April – Sarah Bernstein

Happy Birthday, Sarah Bernstein, born on 23 April 1987.

Sarah Bernstein Quotes

1. I start with a phrase, a few words, and follow the logic of sound suggested by that phrase—its rhythms, its cadences. In this way a voice emerges, a character takes shape, and the story unspools from there. The initial phrase also suggests an atmosphere, a few ideas about setting, that I have in mind while I work, but I don’t usually have a set plan for the series of events that make up the plot. (Girls On The Page Club)
2. I do a lot of reading before beginning to write, which includes fiction, but slightly less during the writing process itself. (Girls On The Page Club)
3. I work in the brightest room in my house, which is the front porch. It is usually a little bit too cold in the winter and a little bit too warm in the summer, but the windows look out onto the bay, so I can watch what’s happening with the weather and the sea life. (The Booker Prize)
4. The book tries to imagine what it might be like to be the kind of character who reads significance into what are in fact ordinary occurrences because it’s the only way she knows of making sense of what is to her an unknowable landscape.(The Booker Prize)
5. I think a lot about sound in fiction as well as in poetry. But I guess I think of them differently in terms of duration—how time operates in the novel, say, as opposed to in a poem. In poems I tend to think of moments, and in fiction I think more about sequence. (Room Magazine)
6. Once I know how a first line sounds, subsequent lines will start radiating out, following the logic of the sound of the voice. (Room Magazine)
7. I guess the way I think about plot is that it is the order in which things happen. Those things can be external events, which I think is what people usually mean when they talk about plot, but I think that action is constituted differently depending on the kind of work you’re writing, and things can ‘happen’ within the delineation of thoughts and feelings, too. (Room Magazine)
8. I think I tend to be as, if not more, interested in the way a character tells a particular story as I am in the content of that story—what the speaker sounds like, what they reveal, conceal, what they’re trying to persuade the listener of. I tend to write about the process of characters making sense of their experience of the world, rather than about a series of objective, external events. (Room Magazine)
9. I like books that attend to the specifics of language in this way, taking pleasure in the way the lines sound, whether that sound is lovely or harsh, whether the sentences create a sense of flow or friction. (Room Magazine)
10. There’s no one way to approach writing fiction, and so I hope that writers will try to follow the stories and the forms that suit them. (Room Magazine)
11. I started writing my own stories, I think, as soon as I could write. Some were invented, some tried to imitate books I was reading. From an early age it was how I encountered the world and articulated my thoughts about it. (Girls On The Page Club)
12. I have to remind myself that reading, watching, observing—all that is part of the work, just as any fallow periods in between, where it seems like nothing is happening, but so much is happening—all the subtle connections and so on—is part of the work. (Girls On The Page Club)

Sarah Bernstein is a Canadian literary fiction writer and scholar. She was born in Montreal and now lives in the Scottish Highlands, where she teaches literature and creative writing. Her collection of prose poems Now Comes the Lightning appeared in 2015. Her first novel, The Coming Bad Days, was published in 2021. Her next novel, Study for Obedience, was shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize and won the 2023 Giller Prize. In 2023 she was named as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have been featured in publications like Contemporary Women’s Writing, MAP magazine, Granta, and ROOM Magazine.

Source for image: The Booker Prize Credit: Alice Meikles

by Amanda Patterson

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