Sarah Smith--Telling Stories in a Plague Year

DEBORAH CROMBIE: How quickly things have changed! Our perspective is so different than it was a month or six weeks ago. But we are valuing friends, and stories, more than ever. Wonderful writer and Jungle Red friend Sarah Smith tells us just what both mean to her, with a new book and an altered world.

TELLING STORIES IN A PLAGUE YEAR

Sarah Smith

When JRW asked me to do something for them, about a month ago…thousands of years ago, in plague years…I talked about the experience of publishing a book independently, after having published previous books traditionally. I felt sad because I didn’t have my previous group of publisher friends; I felt happy because I was connecting with new friends.

How much more true that is now. 

Independent publishing means connecting with people in new ways. Your editor, your cover designer, your interior designer. Your publicist. Most of all, your readers. 

And publishing in the time of coronavirus is a time of special connection. 

In the last couple of weeks, we’ve been physically distancing—but emotionally close. Zoom meetings help us share everything from the location of toilet paper and Tiger King watch parties, to the state of friends’ health and the publishing industry.

And those of us who write have been sharing stories. 

All the writers in the world, all the artists and singers and musicians, are being moved by a single impulse: We want to share our art.

Of course we do. Art is a gift. It’s a gift to be able to do it; it’s a gift to be able to give it. This wonderful thing we can do, to tell a story. We do it for ourselves as much as for our audiences. Like an opera singer singing from his balcony, we sing, we tell stories, we celebrate ourselves and each other and the wonderful fact of our being together, in the face of worldwide sickness and death.

Someday we’d like to be paid for this again. Those of us who live through this will get paid again. But whoever we are, whatever we write or sing or do, we’ll remember what it was like to hand our art to another human being and say “Here. This is the best thing I have to give you.”

While we do that, we’re alive together. 

In my new book, the heroine is a survivor of Titanic. She feels terribly guilty. She survived; children died. She wonders, what if she hadn’t left the ship? What if she could have shared those last moment before the ship sank? For her those last moments are a kind of moral touchstone:  with all the lifeboats gone, what love and care people must have had for each other. 

Her art is music. She decides to take music on as a responsibility, as a way of expressing her love and care, the best she has to give away. It changes her life and the lives of those around her. She connects; she learns how to survive.

We are connecting. We are telling stories. And through that we will survive. 

Sarah Smith’s Titanic mystery, Crimes and Survivors, comes out April 15. Visit her and celebrate at her online publication party:  .

DEBS: This gave me chills! I'm going to be pondering Sarah's words as I write. And the idea for Sarah's book seems eerily prescient now. I'm going to be wondering what it would have been like to have survived a catastrophe like the Titanic. What would I have done?

What would you have done? How will we view what we are experiencing now?

Stop by and chat with Sarah, celebrate her book, and celebrate our daily sharing of stories!