Sara Pritchard is the author of Crackpots and Lately.
Q: What is your preferred environment for writing?
A: Typing on my laptop at a card table, sitting in my Herman Miller Aeron chair. In my study. Ergonomically, this is perfect. While I like the idea of writing outside, I find it impossible to get comfortable outside. Plus, I don't really like it out there.
Q: What punctuation mark are you fondest of?
A: That's an easy question! The em dash. It's like the perfect running stitch. The lock stitch with perfect tension, the perfect stitch like the old Singer sewing machines make. There's a fabulous Singer sewing machinge, model 221-1 Featherweight Centennial, up on eBay right now. Search auction number 200204165640, and good luck bidding!
Q: What punctuation, spelling, grammar, style, or usage error annoys you the most?
A: I hate really ragged right margins. Like when words or phrases joined by a slash are not separated, and the whole enchilada is taken to the next line, leaving a big bite in the right-hand margin. Likewise, I hate justified margins with hyphenation turned off, which creates big, horrible, white gullies between words. I also can't stand it when em dashes are set as two hyphens or as hyphens with spaces around them. Other then those typesetting cold sores, I sort of like to see a little boo-boo now and then, especially in a book published by somebody like Knopf. Just a little something I can put a little checkmark by ever so lightly with my mechanical pencil.
Q: If you weren't in your current line of work, what would you be doing instead?
A: I don't know. In my next life, though, I will be a musician.
Q: What drove you to become a writer?
A: Drove is a very funny word, isn't it? I see a stagecoach, a team of horses. A taxi. Thelma and Louise. James Dean. Isadora Duncan. NASCAR. Morgan Freeman in Driving Miss Daisy.
I had lunch the other day with Devon McNamara, a poet who teaches at West Virginia Wesleyan, and we were talking about Irene McKinney, West Virginia's poet laureate and a good friend of Devon's. Devon said that Irene told her that she came to literature, to poetry, by growing up surrounded by her father's books, and that at some point in her life she just knew that she was part of that "tribe," a member of that group of people who would make their life in words, or that words (language and books and literature) were the real sustenance. I feel something like that, too. Without words, without books, I'd be lost.
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