By Sarah Tomlinson | May 19, 2015 | Portland Book Review Some aspiring writers work in bookstores. Some find a job in publishing. Others hone their craft as journalists. Me, I waitressed. Having entered the early college, Simon’s Rock, at fifteen and graduated with a BA at nineteen, the last thing I wanted was a […]
By Sarah Tomlinson | May 10, 2015 | Salon.com I got my first manicure when I was 11. This was at the local beauty school in Portland, Maine. There was nothing posh about the room’s fluorescent lights and chipped Formica, or the redneck beauty student’s aquamarine eyeliner and feathered hair. But when she took my […]
By Sarah Tomlinson | May 7, 2015 | Poets & Writers, Writers Recommend “I’m a big believer in snacking for inspiration. When I’m really struggling with a piece of writing, I get up and make myself a snack. I don’t mean something healthy or practical. I mean a treat that is pleasurable. Like a tablespoon […]
By Sarah Tomlinson | April 22, 2015 | xoxoafterdark.com | If it’s true for athletes: you are what you eat. Then it’s true for writers: you are what you read. When I sat down to write my memoir, Good Girl, about my troubled relationship with my compulsive gambling, wannabe mystic dad, my literary agent had one […]
By Sarah Tomlinson | April 17, 2014 | The Los Angeles Review of Books MY DAD DISAPPEARED when I was two years old. He and my mom were never married. But before he was removed from my life, we lived together as a family, first in the farmhouse in Freedom, Maine, where I was born; […]
By Sarah Tomlinson | April 24, 2015 | Medium.com Year’s later the echo of a school shooting lives on. For me, December 14th will always be the day my college classmate, Wayne Lo, purchased an SKS semi-automatic assault rifle and rampaged across the campus of Simon’s Rock, the early college we attended. By the time […]
By Sarah Tomlinson | April 24, 2015 | Medium.com | When I was a college sophomore, I thought everything I needed to know could be learned from a book. My best friend, Claire*, and I decided to create an independent study on the topic that most fascinated and confounded us at that age: love. We […]
By Sarah Tomlinson | April 20, 2015 | Tips on Life and Love from Simon & Schuster I learned to gamble from my father, as he once tried to learn from his mother. In his thirties, my father had lost a lot of money at the track and was in a bad way. Normally he […]
By Sarah Tomlinson | April 19, 2015 | Salon.com | Photo credit: Warren Goldswain via Shutterstock. Before the starter’s pistol, I knew I was unprepared to run my first marathon in August 2013. It didn’t hit me that I was potentially worse off than I’d thought until about the seven-mile mark. I found myself panting […]
By Sarah Tomlinson | Friday, April 17, 2015| Off the Shelf Kids are not known for their self-control. When I was little, if given the chance, I would gorge myself on Swedish Fish—or, more often, Wha Guru Chews, the health food–sanctioned candies my mom actually allowed me to eat. And whenever I sat down and […]