“We have these narrow stories about what it means to be a human being,” author Sarah Sentilles says. But we have the power to expand them, just as we have the power to remake the world.

Sarah Sentilles is the author of Draw Your Weapons, Breaking Up with God, A Church of Her Own and Taught by America. A graduate of Yale University and Harvard Divinity School, she lives in Idaho’s Wood River Valley. Her latest book is Stranger Care: A Memoir of Loving What Isn’t Ours. 

Stranger Care is a memoir of Sarah and her husband’s experience with the foster system in Idaho and the ten months they parented an infant named Coco, only to return her to her loving but vulnerable mother. She describes the book as “a keening, a song of grief, a love letter”.  

In episode 50, Sarah joins us to discuss coping with unexpected loss, who counts as family, and how at heart, all of us are baby monkeys.

She also shares how each of us can use our creativity to remake the world around us. She believes being an artist is urgent and reparative work. When we turn towards our creative work, Sarah teaches, we turns toward the world.

Books and authors discussed in this episode
– Draw Your Weapons by Sarah Sentilles
– This Accident of Being Lost by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
– The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World by Elaine Scarry
– The Rabbits by Sophie Overett
– Bewilderment by Richard Powers
– ‘The abortion I didn’t have‘ by Merrit Tierce
– A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet

Listen to episode 50 of James and Ashley Stay at Home here, or on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or your favourite podcast app, and find out about past episodes here.