A Conversation with Featured Author Sarah Oechsle

After our team fell in love with "The Front Range," I knew I had to get Sarah Oechsle on the horn (er, online Word document) to discuss it and her many interests. Please enjoy our conversation ranging from geography (external and internal) to the Middle Ages with some writer advice and landscape photos slathered throughout.

Dina Dwyer: Howdy, Sarah. Thanks for taking the time to chat with me today. Your story we published this quarter “The Front Range” is, at its core, a vampire story. One of our editors, Fawn, just wrote a blog post about how difficult it is to tackle such a trope-y kind of thing. Can you talk a little about your relationship to the vampire genre and how you came up with your unique angle?

Sarah Oechsle: Of course! And I’m so glad that you and your team enjoyed the story. I’m not sure I have much of a “relationship” to the vampire genre. It’s not something I’ve written before. The truth is, this story started as a joke within a group of my writer friends, where one of them posited that vampires were never portrayed as “traditionally masculine.” I was surprised by how folks in my circle responded to it not as a trope-y vampire fic, but as a more tender story about two people on the fringes of society.

Behind the Super 8 West of Memphis

DD: Writers inevitably pull from not just their social lives but their work experiences, be they direct exchanges with clients and coworkers to the often unlikely fields they may find themselves pulled into. I noticed you have experience with geographic information systems (GIS). What about that realm is interesting to you? Do you have a favorite map? I have dozens, but often find myself returning to this one: https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home

SO: Wow, that’s a great one! Yes, I studied GIS in college, and my mother worked in it her whole career. I worked as a geographic analyst after graduating, and although I left that line of work, my love for maps certainly remains. Geography felt right for me because I personally believe that “place” is at the heart of most human experiences. It shapes what we build, what we can grow, what our societies and civilizations become, and therefore who we are as individuals and as a species. The all-encompassing nature of that way of thinking is really appealing to me, as someone who was never really able to settle on one interest. I found I loved geography because it felt like a way of looking at everything all at once. As for my favorite map, honestly, I’m a big fan of fantasy maps. As you might imagine, I was a bit of an odd kid, and one of my favorite pastimes was drawing my own maps. If I wanted to invent a world, I would usually start with a map and go from there. Maybe it’s because my first favorite book was an atlas, so I guess I’ve always thought of the world as one big map with infinite layers.

DD: I love this: maps “shape what we build, what we can grow …” One of my earliest favorite books was also an atlas. Many memories of pouring over the detailed state-by-state spreads that marked where natural resources were what the major crops were produced. When my parents and I went on a long road trip from Iowa to North Carolina and back again in a big loop, I made a big “guide” to each state we’d be going to and what we might find. Imagine my delight when we pulled over on the shoulder of the highway to collect tobacco leaves blown off a semi in N.C. It felt so real connecting the abstract 2-D map to something in my hands. I know you went to school in N.C., but did you grow up there?

SO: I did! And I live there now. I grew up in a small town called Hillsborough, which is in the middle of the state. Tobacco country. The nearest city was Durham, where the famous Lucky Strike factory was/is, and where the Durham Bulls play. I love where I grew up, and am fortunate to still have friends there who give me a reason to go back from time to time. Currently, I live in the mountains of western N.C. Both are beautiful in different ways, but I think growing up where I did played a huge part in shaping who I am.

DD: What’s your top three favorite positive things about where you grew up? They can be things that a visitor might enjoy or something deeply unique to your time and place.

Winter Woods in North Carolina

SO: There’s something I love so much about the piney woods of central North Carolina in the wintertime. It’s gray and green and perfectly silent. It was also really nice to grow up three hours from the beach and three hours from the mountains. Getting to travel easily and often to places that looked different from my home had a huge impact on my imagination. Like I mentioned, I always find myself thinking in terms of landscapes and places. I’m very grateful to my family for giving me the chance to see and experience so many landscapes when I was so young. Thirdly, I’d have to say the food. Oh my god, the food. There’s no food as good as southern food anywhere in this world, and I mean that.

DD: I see that you’re very tied to your roots in that part of world, so much that you’ve started a literary magazine, French Broads Lit, that centers around works from that area. Can you tell me a bit about the motivation to start up such an endeavor?

SO: I have to give credit to my friend and business partner, James, who had the original idea for the magazine—although it’s something I’d thought about doing as well. The aftermath of Hurricane Helene was a really terrible time for Western North Carolina, where I live now. We spent weeks without water and power here, and countless folks lost their homes, farms, animals, and even their lives in the catastrophic flooding. The idea is to honor that time and our community with a literary magazine dedicated to publishing authors from our region, with the first issue’s proceeds (assuming there are any) going to an organization that helps community members affected by Helene. That’s why the first issue’s theme is “Waterline,” a nod to the flood and, more importantly, to the incredible resilience of Western N.C. and its people. That time changed so much for so many, and as a lifelong cynic, it had a huge impact on the way I view the world. It gave me so much faith in people and in compassion, and I guess that’s sort of what French Broads Lit is about at its core.

DD: Powerful stuff. I wish you and James all the best and luck with it. Say, correct me if I’m wrong, but this time last year you hadn’t had anything published (that you’ve written), yes?

SO: Yes, you’re right. My first piece was accepted to Heavy Feather Review roughly a year ago. I’ve been writing forever, but it was only in the last year and a half or so that I’ve been writing short fiction with the intention of getting published. It’s been incredibly rewarding, even when it isn’t.

DD: You’ve had a lot of success in this short period of time. What’s the secret? You mentioned a writing group, which I can attest to being key in my own life, but what else beyond that? Are you writing every day, manically, without cessation or sleep?

High Waves in Key West

SO: I wish I could say I was. I tend to write pretty obsessively when the mood strikes, and then can go longer periods without writing at all. It’s funny you ask about a secret to success, because I haven’t really considered myself “successful” at this by any means. So that’s quite nice to hear. I think it’s in our nature as people, or maybe as writers, to be self-critical. You have to be able to be self-critical to get better, but I think you also have to be a bit delusional. You have to believe that for whatever reason—luck, skill, a pact with the devil—you will be the one to make it. On some level, maybe I feel that way, but certainly not every day. Mostly, I just hope, and I try to get better every time I write something. I think the biggest secret to getting better is to be humble. I’ve been a victim of my own arrogance many times, and it wasn’t until I was able to look at myself and my work and acknowledge my many weaknesses that I was able to start getting better. I’m a far better writer now than I was a year ago.

DD: From what I’ve read of your works online I can see some common themes in your writing. For instance, your stories often have very frank expressions of sexual encounters. This isn’t an easy thing to do. Entire books and dissertations have been written about hard it is to write a “good” sex scene without it being classified as erotica or worse, so cringey you can’t continue reading. Everything in a good short story should contribute to either plot or character development (ideally both). The often strange or supernaturally flavored sex in your stories feels central to plot and narrator development, in some cases causing a literal transformative experience. Can you talk a little about those decisions?

SO: You’re right that a lot of my existing work deals with sexual themes, though most of those moments are not “sexy.” I like to write about things frankly. There’s a lot going on during sex—even perfectly good sex—that isn’t sexy. Sex is unique because it’s extremely vulnerable. It doesn’t just strip away our walls when it comes to another person, it also strips away the walls we build in our own minds. Our sense of ourselves. Seeing the way a character has sex, and what they’re thinking about, or what details beyond the pleasurable they’re encountering or fixating on, gives you deep insight into who they are. That’s also why, in “The Front Range,” portraying sex as less personal than, for example, sharing a joint with a woman in the front seat of your truck, just tells you all the more about how that person thinks.

Castle Ruin in Provence

DD: Another thing you do quite well is dialogue. As an editor I often see what amounts to what could be a screenplay—pages of dialogue with few tags—or just clunky unnatural garbage. Do you have some tips on how to write dialogue for our readers?

SO: Dialogue is so hard. I guess my best tip would be that less is more. When people talk normally to one another, they usually aren’t going on and on. A lot is implied by context. Granted, I’m saying that as someone who definitely goes on and on when they talk, so what do I know? I tend to read conversations aloud at least once, to ensure that they sound real. Maybe the best way to improve is to talk to people and get a feel for how people talk in different situations.

DD: Yes, I think it can be as simple as “less is more” and to actually actively listen to those around you. Most people do not. Just like a lot of writers who don’t … read? It’s amazing. 

SO: It’s a cliché, but reading is an unmatched way to improve as a writer. But it can be a little exhausting to do on top of writing. Lately, I’ve found myself reading more non-fiction, because fiction feels a little too close to work sometimes. Non-fiction just scratches a different itch.

DD: I agree that non-fiction can be good to offset some of the more real-feeling drama/emotion that fiction can do. You list reading about the Middle Ages as something you find yourself doing. One of my favorite things to find is accounts of what life was like for the average Joe in ancient times, the older the better. Even fictional ones like the Strugatskys' Hard to Be a God paint a comically grim and disgusting picture of what life must have been/smelled like. I think what all of this does is make me appreciate my surroundings more. What’s the root of your interest? Any specific period or area?

SO: Don’t even get me started! I’ve been very fixated on the Middle Ages lately, and I’m not totally sure why. I was a knights and fairytales kid, so it feels very natural to continue that interest. Like studying the Middle Ages is the adult version. History has always been my favorite subject because, to me, it’s full of stories. Everything is a setting to be explored. Right now, I’m really interested in knights and their relationship to ordinary people and society at large. And castles. I love architectural history, but I am especially fond of castles and other structures often built over the course of centuries. Each addition tells you so much, and castles had such a unique and interesting function in medieval society. The early Middle Ages (400s - 1000s-ish) is another current fixation. A lot of what we think of as “medieval” actually peaked in the late Middle Ages and into the Renaissance. The people of the early Middle Ages in Europe were basically living within the ruins of a greater, lost civilization. Maybe it’s because I often feel like we’re living in the twilight years of the Western Empire, but there’s something so haunting and wonderful about that world.

Fairy Forest

DD: Absolutely. As we wind this down, I’m going to ask my hardest question yet. It’s one I like to ask my friends: If you had to make a map of your mind, what would it look like? What would be the points of interest? No guidelines. No extra parameters. Just a map of your mind, please.

SO: I don’t know about a map of my mind, but I do have a map of my dreams. My closest friends know that all of my dreams exist in the same world, in places that all spatially relate to each other. They all take place on what my best friend jokingly calls my “Dream Coast,” because there’s always an ocean to the east, whether I can see it or not. It’s full of whales and incredibly high waves. You know, dream stuff. So, that’s probably the closest thing I have to a literal map of my mind. Frequent points of interest would be the high school/mall where I seem to be permanently enrolled (although I did recently brave the admissions labyrinth and withdraw), the giant hotel that sails up and down the coast where I can never find my hotel room, and the construction site in the woods that hosts live music after 11. 

DD: I’m insanely jealous you have such solid subconscious continuity. Most people just get a recurring nightmare or two. We should all be so lucky to have a reliable if not kind of stressful second world inside. I hope you write about it sometime, or at least the floating hotel bit. That’s super interesting. Thank you so much for your time today and for giving Weird Lit a shot at publishing “The Front Range.” I wish you all the best with your future writing and publishing endeavors.

SO: Thank you so much for putting my work out there. I loved this story, and it’s great to find other people who saw the good in it, too. It was a pleasure chatting with you! 

Sarah Oechsle

Sarah Oechsle is a writer living in Asheville, NC. Her recent work has appeared in After Happy Hour and Black Cat Weekly. When not working, she maintains a fragile peace between her three dogs, reads about the middle ages, watches hawks, and dances. All photos on this page are her own.