Valerie Sayers—Reading 0 comments

No one writes about the misfortunes of the body quite as wryly as Valerie Sayers, who describes herself as a “cheerful hypochondriac.” In Sayers's stories and essays, pain intensifies everything about us: our generosity and wisdom, maybe, but also, frankly, our vanity, our folly, and our white-knuckled grip on life. There's nothing transcendent about the way Sayers's characters experience illness, but somehow, redemption creeps in at its own dawdling pace. And precisely because Sayers doesn't clamor for it, it arrives at last. And when it gets there, it's the kind you can lean into.

Sayers was born and raised in Beaufort, South Carolina, and educated at Fordham and Columbia Universities. After taking her M.F.A. in fiction, she lived in New York for almost twenty years, writing novels, raising her two sons, and teaching writing. In 1992 she was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction and in 1993, accepted a position as Director of Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame, where she is currently a professor of English. Sayers is the author of five novels, two of which were named "Notable Books of the Year" by the The New York Times. A film, Due East, was based on her novels Due East and How I Got Him Back. She has received a Pushcart Prize for fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship and has served on two NEA literature panels. Her stories, essays, and reviews appear widely in such journals as Zoetrope, Ploughshares, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Commonweal, and have been cited in Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays.

This piece was featured in Image Issue # 53  in spring 2007 and was recorded at the 2008 Glen Workshop.

Bibliography

• Due East (Doubleday 1987), fiction
• How I Got Him Back (Doubleday 1988), fiction
  
• The Distance Between Us (Doubleday 1994), fiction
  
• Who Do You Love (Doubleday 1995), fiction
  
• Brain Fever (Doubleday 1996), fiction

Visit Valerie Sayers as Image Artist of the Month for May 2005.