Sarah York Books

More about Sarah

If you have read Remembering Well or Pilgrim Heart, you already know a lot about me. I was raised in California and Florida by brilliant loving parents who, though they were atheists, modeled integrity and compassion in a home where humor and creativity were daily fare. My father, a cartoonist, worked for Walt Disney for 25 years, before developing his true genius writing and drawing the Gasoline Alley comic strip. My mother, an accomplished pianist and wood sculptor, struggled with depression and alcoholism, but she was also my spiritual guide and intellectual companion. Self-educated, she read a book a day and hobnobbed with college professors who could not keep up with her. Unaware of her emotional issues until adolescence, I was the beneficiary of that rare thing people call a happy childhood.

I started writing when I was twelve, a series of mystery novels a la Nancy Drew, and articles for the Capistrano Beach Road local newspaper. I thought I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. But mostly I was a reader–like my mother, only slower. So I ended up being an English major in college.

Backing up a bit… Where does religion fit in? or church? I think I got my spiritual bent from my atheist parents, which must have pissed off my mother, who was horrified when I started attending church youth groups in high school. Then after I went to a Young Life camp and became a Christian, it was another blow. But I didn’t stop there. I went onto the Young Life staff after graduating from Wake Forest College. I loved the work with young people, discussing the big questions, but I became less convinced of the answers in evangelical Christianity. Also, as a woman I was always an assistant to a male leader. So I abandoned it all and, like Emily Dickinson, I chose to practice my religion at home, “with a bobolink for a chorister, and an orchard for a dome.”

After earning a masters degree in teaching at Duke University, I was ready to launch my career as a high school English teacher. I had been dating a med student at Duke, and his internship was in California, so off I went across the country hoping this was “the one.” It wasn’t. But two doors down in my apartment building was a very handsome young man who played tennis and brought me a Marie Callendar pie when I came down with mono before our first date. Chuck Campbell was, and still is, “the one.”

Chuck and I moved to North Carolina, where I taught English for eight years. We built our dream home, but did not enjoy it for long before we discovered the Unitarian Universalist church. There I made peace with religion and, without ever having met a woman minister, decided to apply to Harvard Divinity School.

After serving several congregations as a parish minister and interim minister, I retired to the family farm near Asheville, NC, where Chuck and I grew organic produce and raised French Alpine dairy goats for ten years.

Asheville is home, and while my health holds out, I will be here writing and offering spiritual direction, walking the dogs, feeding the birds, performing kitchen alchemy, marching for democracy, and savoring time with good friends.

For information about Sarah’s ministry and spiritual direction practice, visit http://www.sarahyork.com