Upcoming Events
AWP Baltimore, March 2026 (date TBD). Haints, Haunts, & Other Shape Shifters, panel with Beth Alvarado, Lillian Howan, Judy Juanita, and Mary Slechta. Description: What calls us to tell tales of spirits made restless by loneliness, passion, and personal or historical grievances and injustices? How, in today’s endangered world, do we find new ways to write speculative fiction about ghosts, the uncanny, haints and haunts, shapeshifters, and the dead who refuse to stay dead? Five fiction writers from varied backgrounds and storytelling traditions share work, literary models, and craft strategies for the fierce and sometimes playful art of writing the uncanny.
LABA EAST BAY Live “Drunk”
Selected Recorded Events
The Booksmith/The Bindery, San Francisco, CA, virtual, November 16, 2020. Launch for Ron Nyren’s The Book of Lost Light, conversation hosted by Evan Karp, with Ann Packer, Angela Pneuman, Ann Cummins, Lisa Michaels, Cornelia Nixon, Rafael Yglesias, and Vendela Vida.
Image Journal’s Summer Stage, Covington, WA, virtual, July 14, 2020. (Now available in archives, by subscription.) Reading and discussion with Melissa Pritchard: the intersection of art, politics, and theater.
Jewish Learning Works, StoryForward, "Exile at Home" series, co-presented by JCC of the East Bay, Jewish Community Library, and jewishLIVE Connect, San Francisco, CA, April 12, 2020. A conversation on creativity and humor with Dan Schifrin, Marika Brussel, and Caroline Kessler.
Selected Past Events
Off Campus Writers’ Workshop, Chicago, IL, virtual, Thursday, Feb 6, 2025. Class on unreliability in fiction.
AWP 2023, Seattle, WA, Saturday March 11, 2023. “The Other World in This: An Image Journal Reading (Scott Cairns, Joyelle McSweeney, Sarah Stone, Fady Joudah, Shane A. McCrae)” Poets, novelists, and essayists from Image journal upending our assumptions about religion.
Odd Mondays Reading Series, San Francisco, CA, virtual, Monday, January 11, 2021. In conversation with Ron Nyren: readings from The Book of Lost Light and Hungry Ghost Theater, with audience Q&A.
JCC East Bay and LABA, Berkeley, CA, virtual, Thursday, July 30, 2020. “Inappropriate Laughter” with Bruce Bierman and slide show by Sarah Wolfman-Robichaud.
JCC East Bay, Berkeley, CA, November 23, 2019. LABA East Bay Launch Party, “Drunk,” readings, performances, and multi-media work by Rachel Berger, Bruce Bierman, Marika Brussel, Sara Felder, Caroline Kessler, Kiki Lipsett, Jake Marmer, and Dan Schifrin.
Litcrawl, San Francisco, CA, October 19, 2019. “WTAW Press and Friends,” with Amber Butts, Olga Zilberbourg, Anita Felicelli, Meghan Flaherty, Ted Gioia, Louise Marburg, Ron Nyren, and Peg Alford Pursell.
The Story is the Thing, Kepler's Books, Menlo Park, CA, June 20, 2019. With Kate Folk, Julie Lythcott-Haims, Jaya Padmanabhan, Ari Rosenschein, and Michael Shewmaker.
Octopus Literary Salon, Inside StoryTime, Oakland, CA, May 16, 2019. “Quiddities,” James Warner, host, with Cheryl Ossola, Lynn Breedlove, Vincent Chu, and Linda Fiddler.
Bay Area Book Festival, Berkeley, CA, The Brower Center, May 4, 2019. “Quest: Journeys Through Generations,” panel: Joan Frank, moderator, with Michael Levitin, Katja Petrowskaja, stories of Jewish generations past and present.
AWP Portland, WTAW Press Offsite reading, Portland, OR, March 30, 2019. With Anita Felicelli, Jimin Han, Louise Marburg, Angela Mitchell, Barbara Roether, Naomi J. Williams, and Olga Zilberbourg.
AWP Portland, Oregon Convention Center, Portland, OR, March 28, 2019. “Writing the Transcendent,” panel with Courtney Sender, moderator, Goldie Goldbloom, Rahul Kanakia, and Yehoshua November on writing the numinous or otherworldly and the relationship between the divine, the inspirational, the science fictional, and the fantastical.
Stories on Stage Sacramento, Sacramento, CA, March 22, 2019. Sue Staats, host, staged reading from Hungry Ghost Theater.
Word Week 2019, Umpqua Bank Noe Valley, San Francisco, CA, March 13, 2019. Rick May, organizer, Cara Black, host. Reading with Jon Longhi and James Cagney. Bookfair publishers: J.K. Fowler, Nomadic Press; Jennifer Joseph, Manic D Press; Emily Wolahan, Two Lines Press; Peg Alford Pursell, Why There Are Words Press.
Babylon Salon, San Francisco, CA, March 2, 2019. Laurie Ann Doyle, Ryan Sloan, and Maury Zeff, hosts, reading with Joe Loya, Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, Maw Shein Win, and Irving Ruan.
The Racket Reading Series, Adobe Books, San Francisco, CA, February 28, 2019. “Shape,” Noah Sanders, host, reading with Brittany Ackerman, Hadas Goshen, James Cagney, Matt Carney, Kar Johnson, Laur A. Freymiller, and Michelle Schlachta.
WTAW LA, Los Angeles, CA, February 3, 2019., “This is Definitely Not the Superbowl,” Patrick O’Neil and Ashley Perez, hosts, reading with Dennis Cruz, Alex Espinoza, Anita Gill, Natalie Graham, and Lauren Marks.
Mrs. Dalloway’s, Berkeley, CA, January 27, 2019. Reading and signing.
Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, Blue Ridge Center, Asheville, NC, January 5, 2019. “Eruption/Incandescence,” craft lecture.
Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, Blue Ridge Center, Asheville, NC, January 3, 2019. Reading with Jane Hamilton, Reginald Gibbons, T. Geronimo Johnson, and Pablo Medina
Green Apple Books, Clement St., San Francisco, CA, November 29, 2018. Reading and signing.
Book Passage, Corte Madera, CA, November 7, 2018. Reading and signing
Litquake, Center for the Book, San Francisco, CA, October 19, 2018. “The Novel and the World,” panel (moderator) with Judy Juanita, Michael David Lukas, Nayomi Munaweera, and Ethel Rohan, discussing how novelists can work with political, social, and historical context in ways that feel true to the characters and story and also allow for iconoclastic reinventions of fiction.
WTAW Sausalito, Sausalito, CA, Oct 11, 2018. Book launch for Hungry Ghost Theater and Angela Mitchell’s Unnatural Habitats & Other Stories. Reading with Lisa Locascio, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Louise Marburg, Angela Mitchell, Natalie Singer, and Terese Svoboda.
angela mitchell, UNNATURAL HABITATS & OTHER STORIES and hungry ghost theater launch cakes
News & Media
Hungry Ghost Theater was one of the five nominees for fiction for the 38th Annual Northern California Book Awards, presented and sponsored by Northern California Book Reviewers, Poetry Flash, PEN West, Mechanics' Institute Library, Women's National Book Association-SF Chapter, San Francisco Public Library, Friends of the San Francisco Public Library, and Readers Bookstore at the Main. The other fiction nominees were The Incendiaries, R.O. Kwon, Riverhead Books; The Winter Soldier, Daniel Mason, Little, Brown and Company (winner); There There, Tommy Orange, Alfred A. Knopf; Winter Kept Us Warm, Anne Raeff, Counterpoint. More information about the awards at Poetry Flash.
October Preview: The Millions Most Anticipated (This Month)
“Hungry Ghost Theater by Sarah Stone: Siblings Robert and Julia Zamarin want to reveal the dangers of the world with their small political theater company while their neuroscientist sister Eva attempts to find the biological roots of empathy. While contending with fraught family dynamics, the novel touches on themes like art, free will, addiction, desire, and loss. Joan Silber writes she ‘found this an unforgettable book, astute, vivid, and stubbornly ambitious in its scope.’” (Carolyn)
21 Books You Should Read This October (Lit Hub)
“Sarah Stone’s Hungry Ghost Theater is an astonishing mosaic of fiction, theater, lyrical text and performance, tracing one family through many generations and permutations. It’s a rare look at the inner workings of a theater company devoted to political material, involving siblings Robert and Julia, as well as an exploration of the roots of empathy, undertaken by their sister Eva, a neuroscientist. Reading it leaves the aftertaste of a powerful performance: ‘Though we’d worked all summer for one ephemeral moment, I was content.’” (Jane Ciabattari, Lit Hub columnist)
After two years as a Jewish Studio Project Fellow, in a cohort of artists, teachers, rabbis, healers, and activists, I’m now certified as a Jewish Studio Project Facilitator (more about the Jewish Studio Project mission and programs here.)
In 2020, I was fortunate to become a LABA East Bay Fellow. LABA is a Jewish house of study and culture laboratory that uses classic Jewish texts to inspire the creation of art, dialogue, and study. The theme for our year was humor, which we explored through writings from the Torah, Talmud, Mishnah, and Zohar alongside contemporary texts.
Interviews/Book Notes
From Research Notes for Hungry Ghost Theater (Necessary Fiction)
My new novel, Hungry Ghost Theater, began when I was avoiding a novel I kept writing and rewriting. That other novel changed dramatically — a pair of sisters turned into friends and then lovers, Quakers morphed into drag performers, and drinking problems migrated from character to character — but it didn’t really seem to get much better, though my friends and early readers tried valiantly to encourage me.
From time to time, I put it down and wrote stories and short plays about a half-Jewish family of performers, scientists, and activists, idealists who couldn’t live up to their own visions. Robert and Julia, a brother and sister who run an experimental performance company; their middle sister, Eva, an affective neuroscientist; Eva’s wild nearly grown children. And then their parents, people whose lives they touch, other performers, patients in a locked psychiatric facility. I began to feel as if these people existed somewhere: it was my job to find them and bring them over an invisible, semi-permeable barrier to introduce them to the world. More >
First Draft/Aspen Public Radio, Mitzi Rapkin, host
A behind-the-scenes look at Hungry Ghost Theater: a conversation about the writing process, the book’s structure and nature, mental illness, addiction, dark humor, family, and learning to deal with rejection. Listen to the show here.
After working as an aide in a psychiatric facility, and because of my family history, I’m interested in the question of how much is biological and when and how we make certain decisions that affect who we become. The book is divided into nine pieces, like Dante’s nine circles of hell. But hell can also be our beloved families and what we put each other through. My students and I have been talking about the secrets we keep from other people and the secrets we keep from ourselves. I sometimes think that writing fiction is part of how we both face and avoid external conflict, and even how we face and also avoid internal conflict. More >
from An interview with Sarah Stone by Ron Nyren, WTAW Press: 2018 Interviews
Everything my mother made turned into a collage, assemblage, or installation, and I’ve inherited that sensibility from her. Hungry Ghost Theater is a mix of invented personal reality, real political context, and various mythologies, told in different voices and modes. The book does have a throughline moving underneath all the stories in the book, making an arc from beginning to end, but my experience of life is that it’s quite surreal: connected in improbable ways and disconnected in others. Some of the most fantastic moments are based at least a little on the tangible details of life. I’m very interested in the reality/fantasy border: did that really happen, or is it the character’s imagining or delusion? More >
from Interview with Sarah Stone and Nancy Au, Entropy
For a long time, I didn’t understand that I was writing Hungry Ghost Theater, or that it was a book, and that made it possible to creep in through the back door. I was working on that other novel—I wrote something like twenty-eight drafts before I stopped counting. I gave up on it multiple times, but always with the feeling that I was letting down the characters and had to go back to it. (It’s now the third book of what’s turned into a trilogy, and I’m working on it again right now. Feeling as if it’s going better now, though that may be one of those necessary delusions that keep writers going.) So I would sneak away from the novel I regarded as “work” to write stories or study playwriting, always with a mixture of reckless freedom and guilt. The Zamarin family took over the plays too. When I knew Hungry Ghost Theater was a book, the plays were clearly part of it. Not simply plays written by the characters but the characters’ lives seen as plays in two of the sections: their lives literally become theater. More >
From Transforming the Agenda (The Writer’s Spotlight)
Occasionally a novel will begin for a writer as a mysterious image or a line of dialogue: my first novel started with a fragment of a dream about a mother lying to her daughters. By the time I finished, it had turned into an attempt to understand the qualities in us that make genocide possible. My new novel, Hungry Ghost Theater, started as a short story about a couple who take a trip to Seoul (where I’d once lived for a year and a half) to rescue a sister having a breakdown. Over time, that sister became a daughter with a drug problem. I drew on family history, changing it substantially as I imagined these characters. The core issues, though, remain the same — denial, deception, self-deception, and self-awareness. Helping each other, hurting each other, fighting, and making up. More >
from How We Spend Our Days, from Cynthia Newberry Martin's Catching Days series
"As soon as we stop trying to write a final draft and just allow ourselves to make discoveries about the characters, story, and world, writing becomes delicious. It’s fatal to try to write beautifully, but helpful to try to write what feels like the truth. And we definitely shouldn’t say ugly things to ourselves that we would never want anyone else to say to us. Writer’s block is almost always some form of self-hatred or an attempt to write something we’re not ready to write. It can help to write in a notebook about what might happen in a scene or storyline, or to try a writing exercise, to write what interests us and leave brackets for the parts that bore or puzzle us. We may not need those parts at all, or we may understand how to do them later on. And if all we do is to make some notes, edit previous pages, or write a paragraph, that’s a writing day. We can have another one tomorrow. It’s remarkable how they add up after a while.” More >
from Interview with Kenneth Caldwell
“The theater gives us a chance to sit together in the dark, to collectively help the actors imagine a new reality. Often a totally improbable one! Some of the playwrights I love most (Mary Zimmerman, Wole Soyinka, Shakespeare), allow themselves great freedoms in time and space and in emotional logic. Hungry Ghost Theater has a couple of plays, which take place, respectively, in an assisted living community and in six different hells. The characters’ stories, at that moment, turn into dialogue, action, and stage directions: there’s a plausible deniability to material being presented as a play. So when a story gets ludicrous or fantastical, it fits into a theatrical tradition. Then, too, so many of the characters are actors. And just about all of the characters in the novel, actors or not, are constantly performing.” More >