ALUMNX STORY: Sarah Seltzer, 2012 MFA in Writing
Bestselling Author Sarah Seltzer Shares her Story
By Karis Rogerson (WCYA ’24)
Sarah Seltzer (W ’12) is a multi-talented writer: she is a journalist of over a decade and the author of the USA Today bestselling novel The Singer Sisters (Flatiron Books, 2024). Since graduating from VCFA’s MFA in Writing program in 2012, Seltzer has appreciated the breadth of the artistic community the school provided.
“I came out of VCFA with a great group of friends,” she said. “I’ve stayed in touch with the faculty. It’s a giant writing community, and a supportive, very loving one.”
Before beginning her MFA, Seltzer was a working journalist with a wide range of interests. She covered pop culture, did investigative reporting, and wrote op-eds for outlets ranging from local newspapers to TIME and Jezebel.com. She said that the two disciplines of journalism and creative writing share commonalities like a need for engaging writing and working under tight deadlines.
A career in journalism helped prepare Seltzer for creative writing by teaching her that “different pieces require different rhythms and details,” she said. “Each form and each piece has its own requirements. There’s a lot that trained me for novel writing, but there are a lot of big differences.”
The main difference, of course, is that novels are fiction and journalism is not.
Seltzer, a native New Yorker, discovered the MFA in Writing program at VCFA after stumbling upon the concept of low-residency MFAs, and was entranced by the prospect. “Everyone I had interacted with at VCFA was really nice, so I kind of just took a leap,” she said. “The craft lessons I learned…I had amazing faculty advisors, they taught me all the basics.”
Seltzer’s advisors during her time in the program included Domenic Stansbery, Ellen Lesser, Jess Row, and Abby Frucht, and she completed a postgraduate semester with Connie May Fowler.
“It was a brilliant group of advisors who collectively and individually helped me find my voice and motivated me to stay writing once I was done. I can still see Ellen’s color-coded comments on my work, and Abby’s ‘riffs’ that asked me, what would happen if…?”
After graduating from VCFA in 2012 and spending some time polishing the work she produced during the program, Seltzer had her first child, and wound up working on her novel The Singer Sisters as something new and fresh to entice herself to write. She’d had an idea of a folk-singing family for several years.
“I attended a few group folk concerts where I saw the McGarrigle-Wainwright family perform together along with friends of theirs,” Seltzer explained. “The memorial concert for Kate McGarrigle was particularly poignant and planted the seeds of the novel that emerged years later.”
The Singer Sisters follows two protagonists; Judie, who with her sister Sylvia was a folk-singing duo in the ’60s, and Judie’s daughter, Emma, who is making a name for herself as a rock singer in the ’90s.
The novel sees Emma’s career ascend, and as it does, she begins to “uncover the truth about her mother’s career and her mother’s life as a musician,” Seltzer said. “It helps her understand both her musical legacy and the legacy of her family.”
“There’s family secrets and drama and betrayal and rivalries and all the good stuff you’d get from an episode of VH1 Behind the Music,” Seltzer explained. “It’s the story of one family moving toward reconciliation.”
Once she had a revised and polished draft, the process of going from querying writer to writer with a book deal was quick and “relatively angst-free,” she said, though the journey in its entirety has taken years of effort. These days, she’s working on new fiction and nonfiction and seeing where the process takes her.
Seltzer doesn’t give much credence to the oft-preached advice that one should sit down and pen words every day.
“[It’s] ludicrous for most of us,” she says of daily writing. “There’s a lot of writing that goes on while you’re not writing, while you’re on a bike ride or a walk.” The act of living, in other words, is a great way to get story ideas.
“Make it a practice,” she added. “Don’t impose goals for your writing that are unachievable, in terms of how much you do. That’s the best way to keep going is to feel like you can reach your own goals and keep them small and manageable.”
No matter how or when you write, Seltzer emphasizes that it should be a priority.
“VCFA teaches you how to be a working writer,” she added. “You have to integrate your writing with the rest of your life. That is an invaluable lesson. That’s why so many people keep writing.
“I’ve been a part of a lot of different academic and writing communities but there’s something really special about VCFA.”
The Singer Sisters is out in paperback August 5. Follow Seltzer’s work at sarahseltzer.wordpress.com.