Media & Radio
TAMRON HALL SHOW: “This Beautiful Adoption Story Is Proof Anyone Can Become Family”
KATE BOWLER’S EVERYTHING HAPPENS: Sarah in conversation with Kate about loving a stranger
JAMES & ASHLEY STAY AT HOME: How to remake the world — Sarah in conversation with James and Ashley
BYRON WRITERS FESTIVAL: Sarah in conversation with Ashley Hay
SUN VALLEY MUSEUM OF ART: Artist Marie Watt in conversation with Sarah Sentilles
BOOK PASSAGE: Anthony Doerr & Sarah Sentilles discuss STRANGER CARE
ELLIOTT BAY BOOK COMPANY: Suzanne Simard & Sarah Sentilles discuss FINDING THE MOTHER TREE
GREENLIGHT BOOKSTORE: Leslie Jamison & Sarah Sentilles in conversation about STRANGER CARE
ELLIOTT BAY BOOK COMPANY: Cheryl Strayed & Sarah Sentilles discuss STRANGER CARE
COMMUNITY LIBRARY: Jenny Emery Davidson & Sarah Sentilles talk about STRANGER CARE
FAMILY ACTION NETWORK: Sally Field & Sarah Sentilles Discuss STRANGER CARE
ABC CONVERSATIONS: “Loving and Letting Go — Sarah, Eric & Coco,”
Sarah Kanowski interviews Sarah Sentilles
How Can You Write While the Earth Is Burning? Sarah Sentilles on Why Making Art Matters
The Writer’s Room Podcast with Charlotte Wood (December 2019)
Every artist eventually comes up against some big, scary questions, like: What’s the point? How can I justify making art in the face of the world’s catastrophes – a burning planet, endless cruelty, broken politics? And yet we know that seeing and reading and watching other people’s art is something that saves us, over and again. It clarifies our thinking, challenges our ideas, and illuminates our darkest moments. In this episode we cut through the despair that often attends the writer’s life, and talk about how to keep showing up to the desk - to make something meaningful, ethical, and beautiful.
Do Images of Dead Bodies Make It Harder for You to Care?
KUOW, The Record (July 2019)
Sarah Sentilles talks with VOX’s Visuals Editor Kainaz Amaria and KUOW’s The Record producer Adwoa Gyimah-Brempong about photographs of suffering: “How desperate do you need see a group of people or a community in order to start caring?”
When the Media Shows Us Images of Dead Bodies, What Do We See?
KUOW, The Record (May 2019)
There are many bodies that have been front page news in the last few years: Alan Kurdi. Michael Brown. Philando Castile. But there are only some bodies we see in death: mostly black and brown and foreign, or somehow “other.” Sarah Sentilles is the author of Draw Your Weapons. She says we’re not great viewers of photos – that our job is to take action, not to look away.
Sarah Sentilles in Conversation with Margaret Throsby, Byron Writers Festival (August 2018)
Sarah Sentilles is a writer, teacher, critical theorist, scholar of religion, and author of many books, including 'Breaking Up with God: A Love Story', and most recently, 'Draw Your Weapons'. In this podcast, Sarah Sentilles speaks with Margaret Throsby about God and war, her decision to leave the church, and about how violence is waged, witnessed and resisted.
Art Imagines a Better World, ABC Radio National (11-22-18)
For American author Sarah Sentilles it was the image of the hooded prisoner tortured at Abu Ghraib. It changed the direction of her life to study photography and art as a way to change the world. Here she discusses seven ways art is an antidote to Trump. Recorded 8 August 2018 Cranlana Programme Alumni Speaker Series. Broadcast in November.
ABC Radio National with David Rutledge (3-30-18)
Interview about BREAKING UP WITH GOD on Good Friday:
"We're calling 'good' the day that a human being is tortured and put to death for no crime by the state."
Conversations with Sarah Kanowski (3-1-18)
"God, War, and Weapons of Peace"
In the midst of training to become a priest, Sarah Sentilles gave up God.
The Wheeler Centre, Melbourne (3-7-18)
Sarah Sentilles digs into our world’s most brutal and profound instincts with critic and writer Maria Tumarkin.
Across four books, and the striking Drone Alerts project, Sentilles has plumbed questions of spirituality and absolution, life and death. In Draw Your Weapons, Sentilles turns her eye to art and war; metaphor and survival. How do we create, accept, understand and recover from violence? How do we live with it?
In a deft and genre-crossing exposition, Draw Your Weapons deploys ideas from memoir, criticism, journalism, literature, visual culture and theology. It centers on two people – one a former prison guard at Abu Ghraib, the other a conscientious objector to World War II – and the work of understanding suffering, and rediscovering dignity, through art. In breathless reviews, critics have likened it to Maggie Nelson or Susan Sontag, and labelled it transformative, fierce and brilliant.
Nine to Noon, Radio New Zealand (7-20-17)
Sarah Sentilles: Draw Your Weapons
How to live in the face of so much suffering? It's the question American writer, critical theorist, scholar of religion and author of many books, Sarah Sentilles, aims to answer in her new book, Draw Your Weapons... A unique perspective on the role of art against the violence of war. It's a book that took Sarah a painstaking 10 years to write and piece together, with an overarching aspiration that art might offer us the tools to re-make the world.
Afternoons with Sonya Feldhoff, ABC Adelaide (3-5-18)
If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by what is happening in the world or the efforts to try to make sense of it, you’re not alone. Sarah Sentilles book “Draw Your Weapons” simultaneously captures the complexity, the darkness and the hope. Beautiful and unsettling at the same time, this is a book to be read again and again.
She spoke to Sonya Feldhoff at Adelaide Writers' Week about her attempts to understand the world we live in and how these thoughts provided the backbone to her book.