Writing through Faith and Doubt An Interview with Sara Zarr By Stephanie H. Kim I picked up my first Sara Zarr novel during the summer of 2008, when I was looking for a quick, fun read and heard some buzz about the National Book Award Finalist Story of a Girl. Young adult (YA) fiction is kind of my go-to for guilty pleasure reading, so I was eager to figure out what all the hype was about as I dove into the first few pages. And yes, okay, that Third Eye Blind song immediately started ringing in my ears as I cracked open the paperback spine. You know—“This is the story of a girl / Who cried a river and drowned the whole world.” Accordingly, I was half-expecting some melodramatic fluff with a lot of angst and a lot of tears. To my pleasant surprise, this particular story of a girl hit every note completely right. I read it one sitting, turning the pages in the dim light of my bedroom late into the night, and by the time I reached the final sentence, I was an official Sara Zarr fan. I read Sweethearts shortly after that, and I pre-ordered Once Was Lost in anticipation of its release in the fall of 2009. This last tale takes up the story of Samara Taylor, a small-town pastor’s kid whose wavering faith is pushed to the edge when a local girl is abducted and Sam’s life seems to fall crumbling around her. Her journey of faith and doubt struck an authentic chord with me, both as a pastor’s kid myself and as a person of faith. Something I find compelling in all three of Zarr’s novels is that none of the stories end in perfect resolution; instead, they’re left open-ended. Conceptually, this resonates not only with the genre of YA literature (because adolescence is nothing if not a journey), but also with the aspirations of faith as well. Once Was Lost, to me, seemed like the perfect intersection of both journeys. I had the privilege of interviewing Sara about her thoughts on this intersection as well as the relationship between faith
and art, and her answers can be found below. ______________________ While you don’t tackle religious faith as explicitly in your first two books as you do in OWL, related themes do show up. You deal with forgiveness and redemption in Story of a Girl and love and sacrifice in Sweethearts, but did you intentionally approach these themes from the perspective of faith? I didn’t, but my faith is so ingrained---it really is the filter through which I experience the world, and it can’t help but also be the filter through which I write. All writers have a worldview, whether that’s framed in religious faith or politics or a certain belief about human nature. I think that always comes through.
“I never wanted to wind up in a position where I was being asked to softpedal the adolescent experience, or feel like I had to clumsily bolt on some Christian message or moment of conversion if it wasn’t organic to the story.” Spring 2010
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