Interview: Sarah Cypher, The Skin and Its Girl

On revision and finding courage

Sarah Cypher’s debut novel, The Skin and Its Girl, releases today from Ballantine.

Sarah and I met at the Pinewood Table, a writing workshop taught by Stevan Allred and Joanna Rose. Over the years since she moved away from Portland, Oregon, we’ve kept in touch, visited each other, and continued to talk about the craft of writing.

Sarah is a queer, Arab American author and a well-known, sought-after developmental editor. She runs the Threepenny Editor and has worked with many successful author-clients to help them hone their drafts into publishable material.

Years ago, when Sarah was working on an early iteration of The Skin and Its Girl, I fell in love with the story and I’ve been cheering Sarah on ever since.

It’s interesting to think about all the characters and plots those of us in writing classes experience while sitting around the table with writers. Some of them existed only in that communal space. I brought two novels to the Pinewood Table, neither of which will find their way into print, because I’ve let them go.

But having that time with my writer-colleagues, participating in discussions about my language and plot decisions, gave those characters life. They really existed. Not in a printed form on the bookstore shelf, but in the room where my writer-friends made space for them. Listened. Suggested. Offered notes in the margins.

Sarah was one of those friends.

I’m sure The Skin and Its Girl is a radically different novel than the one I remember, but I love that I had the opportunity to engage with a long-ago version. Those early pages deeply impacted me as a reader and a writer. Sarah’s courage and curiosity and use of language made me braver in my own work. I’ve carried that appreciation forward, hoping someday to read this story in bound and printed form, and here we are.

I’m thrilled to share this short interview I did with Sarah to honor her debut novel’s publication.

When did you write the first draft?

I started exploring the characters in 2005, but I finished a draft I was proud of in 2009, in time for my first writers' conference. I received a few revise-and-resubmit responses from agents I met there, but when those hit a dead end, I moved on to a different project. I returned to it off and on until I started from scratch in 2018, working from the narrative strategy outward, and finished a draft on March 8, 2020, just as the world was shutting down in response to the pandemic.

How many drafts did you do? Or is there a better way of measuring the journey from where you started to earning this book deal?

I typically say the project lived in me for about 15 years. But if we’re talking about THE SKIN AND ITS GIRL—the novel it became—I worked my way forward through a single draft in two years. I write slowly, revising as I go, so I did no further structural revisions. I nudged the narrative strategy a final time at the end of 2020 in response to some rejections, so it was the second draft that got an agent offer ten days after I sent the manuscript.

Were you working on other manuscripts between drafts of this one?

After I wrote a different novel, an agent was interested in representing it—just the project, not my career overall. It had its chance, didn’t sell, so we went our separate ways. I needed time to retrench in my craft, and after a couple of years of noodling around with short stories, I decided to go back for my MFA. I wrote several short stories and some critical work in the program before picking up the first novel again.

I needed to find the courage and confidence in my own identity before I could approach the work of telling a queer, unconventional story with the creative courage and confidence it deserved. Ever since the notion of an Palestinian American baby born with cobalt-blue skin came to me in the middle of writing a scene about something else, I knew I needed to find a way to write about that kind of magic, but do it in a way that gave that character full agency.

Thank you so much, Sarah!

You can subscribe to her Substack, The Bird’s Eye, where she offers insights about editing and the publishing journey.  

And you can buy The Skin and Its Girl wherever books are sold; ask for it at your local bookstore or here’s the Bookshop link. You can also catch her hybrid launch event tonight (April 25) at East City Bookshop.

I started this newsletter to create an intimate but accessible conversation space about creativity, publishing, and the societal reset that the pandemic has offered creatives like us. I’d love to hear your thoughts. You can reply to this email to have a conversation just with me, or you can comment on the post to connect with other readers too. 

YOUR INVITATION: What characters or stories of yours have existed in the presence of writer friends or event attendees but never in printed form? Think about who has held space for your words over the years—especially the words that didn’t manifest as finished work. Do you remember any special compliments or conversations about those pieces? Reach out and thank someone who has been a witness to your hard work over the years. Tell them what their insights and attention have meant to you as a writer.