Delia Sherman ’69 is an award-winning author and editor. After 12 years at Chapin, she earned her B.A. from Vassar College, M.A. from Brown University and Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies from Brown University. Delia began her career teaching Freshman Composition and Fantasy as Literature at Boston University and has since worked as a reviewer, writer and teacher. She is a current faculty member of the Graduate Program in Children’s Literature at Hollins University and leads workshops all over the world. She lives with her wife, Ellen, in New York City.
*Published in the 2025 Alumnae Bulletin
You’re currently working on a historical novel set in Paris. Can you tell me a bit about it?
The Absinthe Drinker is set during the Année Terrible of 1870-1871, during which Paris lived through Franco-Prussian War, a seven-month siege, and the Commune. My elevator-pitch is Dickens meets Zola, but with more women. Historical characters appear, but not as major ones. I am a lot less interested in the people who make history than the people that history happens to.
What is your writing process like?
My writing process is messy and probably as dated as my subject matter. I write mostly by hand, then type it up, print it out and edit that — I’m not a complete Luddite. I don’t make an outline until I’m part-way through the first draft and need to figure out what comes next, but I like having a skeleton story to build my narrative around. I usually use a fairy tale or a historical moment to riff off of, like a jazz musician. I rewrite a lot. Each chapter goes through 6-7 drafts, and the whole book gets several more. I have a critique group and — for this book, especially — a handful of beta readers to help check my French, my military history and my cultural assumptions.
When I think I don’t have time to write (because life), I make a point of sitting down each day with paper and pen, setting a timer for 40 minutes, and writing until it goes off. I can edit, I can draft, I can write about how I don’t know what’s going on in the scene and try to describe what I need it to do, and try a couple of ways of rewriting it. I can write anything I want as long as my hand is moving and words are appearing on the page. If I get on a roll — and have extra time — I can keep going, but I don’t have to. It’s been an incredibly useful discipline for me.
Would you say Fantasy is your favorite genre? What drew you to that particular genre?
The books I loved best when I was growing up were fantasies: The Borrowers, Alice in Wonderland, Wind in the Willows, Stuart Little, and, when I got older, The Five Children and It, by E. Nesbit. But I liked historical novels just as much: Heidi, Hans Brinker, Little Women, The Swiss Family Robinson. I also loved mythology and fairy tales — not just the ones that Disney made movies of, but the older, more diverse ones to be found in the fairy books of many colors, edited by Andrew Lang. Thinking about it now, I would say that what I loved was stories about places and people who lived lives very different from mine, stories that opened my eyes to the beauty, wonder and danger of the world outside of my family and my home. And I still do.
What do you find most rewarding about being a writer? Most challenging?
My joy in writing lies not so much in telling a story as it is in falling in love with a place and making up characters to have adventures in it. I’ve set stories and novels in all the places that I have found a real connection to: rural England, Paris and northern France, Maine, Louisiana, rural Texas, and, of course, New York. I love discovering the characters who live there and making them and their stories feel as real to a reader as they are to me.
Writing is hard work and one of the hardest things about it is keeping at it when the sentences don’t sound right, the dialogue is stilted, the characters are wooden, the exposition sounds like a bad history book, and I can’t figure out where any of it is going or just what I want to say. It’s hard to sit down and figure out what’s wrong with it and how to fix it. But if I don’t, it won’t get written, and I want it to be written, so I write. In short, persistence counts.
Prior to becoming a writer, you worked as a lecturer, reviewer and consulting editor. How and when did you decide to write full-time?
I don’t really write full-time. I have friends who make their living writing, who write 5-8 hours a day, sometimes seven days a week, and can turn out a book or more a year. Some of them also run workshops, lecture, do school and bookstore events and raise families. At one point, I lived that life (except for the book a year thing — I’ve always been a slow writer), and it was fun, if hectic. But I slowed down when it got to be too much. I still go to conventions and teach workshops and write my 40 minutes a day.
You currently teach in the Children’s Literature Graduate Program at Hollins University and at other workshops. Can you tell me about your experience teaching writing?
I taught Freshman Composition at Boston University in the 70s and 80s, where I learned how to talk about the craft of writing an essay and how to look at a text as something being built rather than as a finished artifact. Volunteering to conduct writing workshops at Science Fiction conventions taught me how to talk about fiction, tropes, characterization and dialogue, which I liked a lot more than talking about essays. Later, I was hired to teach at speculative fiction summer writing programs like Clarion (at UCSan Diego) and Odyssey (in New Hampshire).
The Hollins faculty position was something I lucked into. The program is low-residency, leading to an M.A. or MFA. I had met the program director at the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts, and she had mentioned that she’d love to have someone to teach Fantasy at Hollins. I expressed interest, and, in 2005, she said that there was a place for a Fantasy course, to be run every other year. I jumped at it, of course, and now have taught it six times. What I love most about it — apart from my students, who are smart, motivated, hard-working, and generally astonishing — is that talking about craft, examining works in progress, brainstorming possible plots and discussing things like how to make a training montage interesting and how to kill off a character, is as useful for me as it is for the students.
Your books have won the Andre Norton Award and Mythopeic Award. What other career accomplishments make you most proud?
Reading books by writers who have been my students and seeing them win awards for books they may have started in my class.
For how long were you at Chapin? What memories or experiences at Chapin stand out to you?
I was at Chapin for 12 years. What I remember is Prayers and revising my weekly essays by addressing each of the questions Miss Whiteside or Miss Phelps wrote in the margins. I also remember helping catalogue the library and putting books where they belonged for Miss Linmer, who taught me the Dewey Decimal system.
In what ways do you feel Chapin prepared you for the adult world?
I learned how to read carefully and to write clear sentences. I learned that the easy way is not always the best way. I learned that I couldn’t be good at everything, even if I tried, and that that didn’t mean I was stupid or that I should just give up. The best thing that I learned — and this was in 1969, remember — was that my being a girl had nothing to do with how intelligent, sharp or strong I was. Chapin made me a feminist before I had ever heard the word.
What other aspects of your life played a role in who you are today and what you’ve achieved?
Reading and traveling have been the strongest influences. As a severely asthmatic child, I spent an inordinate amount of time in the hospital or home in bed, reading everything I could get my hands on, age-appropriate or not, including a lot of history and biography that were my mother’s favorites. Since my father worked for Pan American airlines, we could fly for free, so from the time I was 10, I spent most of my summers abroad. I still travel a lot, both in the U.S. and beyond. In 2017, my wife, the writer Ellen Kushner, and I spent 18 months bouncing from Singapore, to Australia, to Finland, ending up in Paris, where we spent a year while I did research for my novel.
What advice would you give to current Chapin students or young alums who hope to pursue writing?
Write what you love. If you’re just chasing a trend, it’s likely that the trend will be over by the time you’ve finished writing it. Right now, you need to know that even publishers don’t know how publishing works. It’s hard to get an agent. It’s hard to sell a book. And once it’s published, it’s hard to get it read. Write it anyway. Thanks to the internet, there is now more than one way to build an audience.
Writing can also be lonely. Even if you’re not a joiner, try to find a community of writers for support, encouragement and reality checking. Writing “dates,” when you get together with friends and work over coffee/tea/soda/pastry, are wonderfully energizing.
Above all, don’t give up. If you don’t write a terrible first draft, you can’t fix it. If an agent says no, complain to your friends and keep looking. While you’re waiting for your book to sell, start the next one. And if it doesn’t, look into self-publishing. There are popular authors out there who have never been traditionally published.
How do you like to relax and decompress?
I knit and listen to audio books. I bake bread. I take long walks in Riverside Park and think about plots. I cook dinner for good friends. I read.