Sara Woster Interview Transcript

Hannah Medina: Hi, my name is Hannah Medina and I'm here with Sara Woster to talk about her book Painting Can Save Your Life. You are both a writer and a painter. How do you feel that those two work together in your creative process?

Sara Woster: Well, thanks for talking to me today. I guess they've always been two halves of the same interest in creative thinking and being creative. It kind of just depends on which path I decide to express myself in. Sometimes I just want to write; sometimes I just want to paint and they overlap. Like in the case of the book it's all about connecting with the world and expressing myself. Sometimes it goes one path, and sometimes it goes the other.

Medina: What was your writing process like throughout creating Painting Can Save Your Life?

Woster: It was hard. I've never really written a memoir or written about myself in that way before. So that part, there was two kinds of difficult. It was difficult to write about myself in such a personal, honest way. On the other side, it was very difficult to condense what I teach in real time into short segments of text. It was two different kinds of challenges, but it was really great and I'm so glad I did it.

Medina: How long did it take you to finish your book?

Woster: That is such a good question. I had about a year from the publisher from when I signed the contract to when the book had to be handed in. Officially, it took about a year, but I had done such a thorough proposal when I pitched the book, I had done about probably half of the work so— probably two or three years total.

Medina: Have you ever published books previously?

Woster: I've illustrated children's books but that's it. I've published a lot of essays, short stories, and that kind of thing in different magazines and publications.

Medina: How do you feel that process differed from the book that you published, Painting Can Save Your Life?

Woster: It was very different because for children's books, when you're illustrating, you're kind of restricted by the goal of the writer. That was very much less free, and also less difficult. When I was doing my own book, it was really all me. It was just a different level of responsibility and work.

Medina: When did you realize that you wanted to pursue writing as a career?

Woster: That's a good question. I was definitely always doing painting first. I come from a family of writers and journalists, and my mom was a librarian, my sister worked at a publishing house. I come from a family of writers and readers. I always wrote; I always read. I guess I was in my early 30s when I joined workshops. That's kind of how I started; I started doing workshops for fiction. That led to me going back to school at the New School in New York to study writing.

Medina: You also have the Painting School. How did you decide that was something that you wanted to create?

Woster: I began to feel an obligation that I wanted to give back. Right? You know, painting has done so much to me that I've wanted to create a scenario where people could learn to paint quickly and have their own creative practice. My grandma was a painter and she learned in a very similar way from a woman in her community. She lived in a small town in the middle of South Dakota, and she learned from a woman who was a painter. Then I had another great-grandma on the other side of my family who learned how to paint as part of the WPA project and then Great Depression. I had a history of people in my family learning. I just felt like I wanted to spread the art. I feel like people are very intimidated by painting in a way that they're not about photography and ceramics, and so I just wanted to try and make it something more people felt like they could do.

Medina: That's cool. How did you go about like starting that?

Woster: Looking back, it's very scary. It was kind of weird. I established the structure of an eight week class that I determined would get everyone in a place where they could paint on their own, which was which was kind of my goal. I honestly sent an email out; I posted on like a listserve at my kids school. I got 12 people that signed up and it just started like that. It's just kind of grown into where I've done kids’ classes, I've worked with firefighters, I've worked in senior centers, and I've just kind of been able to find different venues and different formats of teaching.

Medina: Is there a particular age range that you'd like to work with?

Woster: I'm open to everyone. I think my favorite experience was painting with seniors. I did a four month residency with the Brooklyn Arts Council and then also the New York City department of seniors. They have this wonderful program where they send artists, theater people, writing teachers, and dance instructors into the senior centers in New York to work with this senior population. That was really fun, because they were just really open to it. There was a lot of language barriers. It was interesting to work around both language barriers and restrictions that come with age, like maybe eyesight or hand control. It was really fun. I worked with the senior population. Seniors was the most fun to work with because they were just so enthusiastic and so excited to be doing learning. We painted different flowers. We did work together for four months. That was really great.

Medina: Do you have any artists or authors that inspire you for your work?

Woster: Oh, wow, I have so many of both. I guess I'll just say artists. There was a painter who recently passed away named Etel Adnan whom I'm a huge fan of and I was inspired by her simplicity. Salman Torre is a young contemporary painter. I love any Monet. I love so many writers. I don't even know where to start, so I won’t.

Medina: How would you describe your art process?

Woster: I do slightly representational work but it's very emotional and very expressive. It's not like abstract expressions, but it's very much making a ton of paintings and then liking three of them. That's my process. I work all the time. I work with a lot of paint. Every once awhile, I love painting,

Medina: You currently have an art exhibit at Cedar Crest. What was the inspiration for that particular collection of work?

Woster: I must say, I love that show. That is about climate change; the works in there are almost exclusively still lifes and I call them, in my head, dystopian still lives. I imagined that they're lit up by the last call at a party, the last call at a club, party lights, and lights in the club. It's a bunch of fruit that we stand to lose and wine that we stand to lose if climate change continues. We could lose a lot of crops, which means we could lose a lot of the things we love and a lot of the iconic, still life tropes. I wanted them to be beautiful and bright and oddly cheerful, given the content. They're very wild still lifes, I would say.

Medina: I work at the gallery, so I always get to see them when I'm there. They just look so cool.

Woster: Hannah, that’s so nice of you to say.

Medina: Do you have any advice for either artists or authors who are looking to put themselves out there?

Woster: Think about community building. I think it's really hard to succeed in the art world if you have not built an online community. I know people are doing really well by building a fan base on Instagram or Tiktok, but also in real life, the art world. You go out and meet other artists, and you go just to do visits, and you meet curators and that's kind of how that works. It's pretty similar in writing. I would say with writing it's more important to build a community of writers that you can workshop and share your work with because it's hard to ask people to read your work. As you probably know, it's a big ask to ask people to read what you're working on. It's very hard for your work to improve if you're not getting feedback. For writers, I think it's important to find a workshop group, or writers’ community or online writers’ community where you can share your work.

Medina: I had one more question for you. Do you have any like future plans for upcoming novels or painting?

Woster: Yeah, I am working on finishing a novel right now, which is really hard. It’s a whole different level of hard. I’m working on a proposal for a second painting book. I'm working on one proposal and one book right now. I'm always painting; I really don’t have an idea of what this next body will be. I'm still working on the early stages, but generally at some point, it coalesces into what the central theme is, but I don't know yet. That's kind of fun about painting. It's a little bit more exploratory, I think, than my writing.

Medina: What will your next two novels be about?

Woster: Well, one, the novel is about a young girl in the ‘80s, kind of in the height of AIDs hysteria that is connected to a rumor about her sexual life, that really creates a total disruption and so she has to rely on her family members, especially the women in her family, to get through this period. It doesn't sound funny, but it's actually funny. It doesn’t sound funny at all, but it's like it's a funny family saga.

Medina: Cool. Do you feel like it's harder for you to write nonfiction or fiction?

Woster: That's such a good question. I think it's much more difficult to wrap up a novel. I think it's a lot more of a process making sure everything is tied up. All the characters have their arc. The story has great momentum and all of that. I do feel like nonfiction is more difficult because you're putting your own story out there. That's a little bit more vulnerable. I think finishing a novel for me is a lot more difficult than finishing a nonfiction book because you got to wrap up all the loose sentences.