“Layden’s soaring themes encompass the full range of what it means to be human.”
-Elizabeth Smith for Necessary Fiction
Sarah Layden is the author of Imagine Your Life Like This (University of Wisconsin Press, 2023), The Story I Tell Myself About Myself, winner of the 2017 Sonder Press Chapbook Competition, and Trip Through Your Wires (Engine Books, 2015), a novel. She is co-author with Bryan Furuness of The Invisible Art of Literary Editing (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023.) Her short fiction can be found in Boston Review, Stone Canoe, Blackbird, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, the anthologies Best Microfiction 2020, Welcome to the Neighborhood, and Sudden Flash Youth, and elsewhere. Her recent nonfiction work has appeared in The Washington Post, Newsweek, Poets & Writers, Salon, River Teeth, The Millions, and Identity Theory. She teaches English at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (soon to be Indiana University Indianapolis.)
salayden (at) gmail (dot) com
website under construction (as are we all)
SELECTED WRITING
Fiction
“Legacy Contact,” failbetter.com
“Where Light Can’t Reach,” upstreet Magazine
“Gone for Good,” Sycamore Review
“The World in its Entirety an Open Door,” Necessary Fiction
“Nothing and Nobody,” Blackbird
“Bad Enough With Genghis Khan,” Boston Review
“Decoy,” failbetter.com
“Resuscitation,” Blackbird
“13 Things Your Mail Carrier Won’t Tell You,” Booth
“The Woman Who Was a House,” PANK
Essays & Journalism
“Reading in the Bardo,” Poets & Writers Magazine
“Side B,” River Teeth
“On Writing,” Women Writer’s, Women’s Books
“A Lifting of Burdens: A Conversation with Mirza Waheed,” Identity Theory
“How Do You Know When to Stop Revising?” by Bryan Furuness and Sarah Layden, Poets & Writers
“Revising with Lenses” by Bryan Furuness and Sarah Layden, Brevity
“Q&A with The Islands Author Dionne Irving,” Indianapolis Monthly
“Found in Translation: Mapping Budi Darma’s People from Bloomington,” The Millions
“Adrian Matejka Is No Square Poet,” Indianapolis Monthly
“I Hope My Grandchildren Will Know Me By This Book,” An Interview with Patricia Henley for The Millions
“Cut the Sentimentality,” An Interview with Polly Rosenwaike for The Millions
“Then Again, Maybe I Will: The Reads I Kept Hidden in My Youth,” The Millions
“My Less-than-Glossy Life,” The Indianapolis Star
“Why I Banned ‘The Handmaid’s Tale,’ and Why We Need it More than Ever,” Salon
Satire & Short Humor
“It is Time to Put Steve Zahn in Everything,” The Belladonna Comedy
“I’ve Been to Ireland Once. The Banshees of Inisherin Should Win Best Picture.” The Belladonna Comedy
“Regretsy: ‘Exceedingly remorseful’ you took part in that insurrection? There’s an app for that,” Salon
“In the Aftermath of the Mass Shooting in (Name of City),” Newsweek
“Hope you’re enjoying March Madness here in Indianapolis.
Could you move that mask up?” The Washington Post
“Unsolved Mysteries: Who’s that Lady?” Weekly Humorist
“Live and Let Live, Laugh, Love,” Slackjaw
“I Know, Right?” Translated, Points in Case
“I Am The Mom in the Mop Commercial, and I Am Ready to Be
the Mom in the Vacation Commercial,” Points in Case
“Seven Women on His Mind:
The ‘Take it Easy’ Ladies Tell All,” McSweeney’s
Poetry
“Missing Trees,” Doubleback Review
“Why This Pregnant Woman Walked Out of a Subway Restaurant in Tears,” and “The Return of Sad Beck, Thank God,” Hobart
“Astronauts Answer YouTube Questions from Space,” Sweet
“The Mystery of the World,” Juked
“In the Trunk,” “Something in the Way,” “The Tax Clown,” Blood Orange Review
Interviews, etc.
Playlist for Imagine Your Life Like This, Largehearted Boy
TBR: To Be Read (Leslie Pietrzyk)
Q&A with Old Iron Press
Interviewed by James Figy for Fail Better series, FEAR NO LIT
John Ketzenberger’s Business Insider column, The Indianapolis Star
Interviewed by Michael Noll (with craft exercise), Read to Write Stories