About Sally
A novelist with a deft touch, Sally earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University, where she studied with poets W. D. Snodgrass and Philip Booth. What followed was a 30-year career teaching people worldwide to write clearly and persuasively in corporate, not-for-profit, and government organizations. So, she combines a poet's sensibility with a workmanlike skill with language.
Sally lives in rural Central New York with her husband, a botanist. When she's not writing, she tends gardens, kayaks, and plays piano. Once upon a time, she was a member of the Cranberry Lake Jug Band.
About language
The plain truth is that I love to write.
I marvel at the levers and switches of what we offhandedly call grammar: a kind of architecture for thought.
The only other thing that comes close? Being in the garden, which has its own grammar.
Places, please
Oh, how I admire a writer skilled enough, sensitive enough, to create what we call "a sense of place."
Much of what happens in Ruth in Shadow and in Light happens within a Brooklyn brownstone such as this, to the people who pass through that crooked door.
For the love of type
My dad and one of his brothers founded a print shop.
My dad could set type by hand, and I fell in love with typefaces because of him. He had a story about how he once "pied" a case of 6-point Goudy and spent the entire evening loading that type back into its case.
If a book contains a colophon, that's where I turn first. I want to know who cut the typeface and when. Goudy Old Style was cut by Frederic W. Goudy for American Type Founders in 1915.
This poster is set in Goudy. It used to hang in the print shop; now, it's in my office. It speaks to the power of words.
