Writer & Editor

As an editor, my approach is to offer you a new way of seeing your writing. Rather than something to be “fixed,” I view your text as one that is full of potential. My aim is to help you uncover what has not yet reached the page, and to help your manuscript arrive more fully into itself and to align more clearly with your vision (even if that vision is not yet clear to you).

For the past twenty years, I’ve facilitated creative writing workshops and taught literature courses at both the undergraduate and graduate level at multiple universities, and have worked with numerous writers to bring forth their most resonant work.

I am the author of two novels, The Ladies (winner of the 2016 Noemi Press Book Award for Fiction) and The Mayflies (Dzanc 2014), and hold an MFA in creative writing (poetry) from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and a PhD in literature and creative writing (fiction) from the University of Denver.

Testimonials

  • Finding Sara to work with on my book was such a relief. I trusted her wholeheartedly to accompany me alongside the vulnerable messiness of writing a book, guiding me through tangled narrative arcs, rough drafts, numerous form shifts, and meticulous line edits. Sara’s creative intuition was invaluable to my writing process. She helped me better understand where the pulse of my book was, and how to guide my writing towards it. She has an impeccable sense of what needs tending to in a piece of writing, what areas could be nourished, trimmed, or pushed further along. My book would not have come into the world without her guidance, and I am a much better writer having worked alongside her.

    —Marie Conlan, author of Say Mother Say Hand and Neurotic Love Baby

  • Sara's guidance and mentorship skills are incomparable. These past three years, she's been my storytelling ally and manuscript doula. When I first started working with Sara on my autofictional manuscript, it struck me how much she understood my decentralized/minoritarian narrative. As a non-American, I often struggle with having my voice perceived as "too foreign". With Sara, however, I felt seen, heard, and understood. Her approach is always that of curiosity and heart-centered guidance. I always feel like my writing is in safe hands when I work with Sara. I've trusted her with extremely vulnerable and personal pieces of writing and gained so much valuable advice, insights, and editing suggestions. Sara knows how to breathe life into one's work and her perspectives always catch me by surprise (in a good way). Sara's expertise comes with the bonus of her being extremely well-read and truly knowledgeable about world literature. I wouldn't be the writer that I am today without her.

    —Kate Shyló

  • Sara Veglahn is a generous editor who emphasizes what’s working well. The questions and comments she writes in the margins are uniquely driven by her own curiosity with the text. Sara never tries to mold my writing into a particular method or imposed style. There are no assumptions. She’s kind, present and has great insights. This is not to say I don’t feel challenged. She’ll find a way to tell me if I’m being too general, heady, or unconsciously using cliches. (I always laugh when she catches these tendencies). When my perspective becomes narrow Sara has led me to step back or around or to write more. She’s a wizard at finding patterns in the work. She rearranged the order of essays of a work in progress and the whole book came together. In one instance she helped me discover that a series of poems actually could become one long poem. When this happened, the entire manuscript woke up. She found a depth in my work I didn’t know existed. Working with her has changed the way I think about editing. I highly recommend choosing Sara Veglahn for your editing needs.

    —Katharine Kaufman