"...Read... Not Something We Discuss Often, and see how the path to navigate our broken, beautiful lives becomes brighter."

Jill Christman, author of If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays

In Not Something We Discuss Often, Sarah Cedeño offers up “a more complicated vision” of a life—her life—one in which pain and joy co-exist. In prose that is both beautiful and brave, Cedeño confronts the daily indignities of living with a chronic and disabling illness and envisions a future of total dependence. Cedeño refuses to look away from the hard and inevitable truth and in doing so, she offers up instruction on how to live.

   -Sarah Freligh, author of We

When I first read Sarah Cedeño’s “Future Care Instructions for Your Wife with Multiple Sclerosis” in Brevity, I was stunned by the vulnerability, clarity, love, pain—and humor: “Ask me to shovel the walkway,” her future self tells her future husband, “and pretend I’ve done it.” In essays you’ll return to again and again, Cedeño makes space for everything, all together. Read her debut collection, Not Something We Discuss Often, and see how the path to navigate our broken, beautiful lives becomes brighter.

 -Jill Christman, author of If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays

In her book of essays, Not Something We Discuss Often, Sarah Cedeño writes, “Maybe I worried what kind of mess I’d become.”  Her worry drives these essays with strategic tentativeness and gentle self-effacement.  Bless the world for making her life a chaos of delicate family issues, chronic illness, and flawed, enduring love. She’s determined to get to the bottom of these things, and, of course, no one ever does. Her writing makes you thankful for that fact. We don’t want to stop reading these essays. 

-Steve Fellner, author of Eating Lightbulbs and All Screwed Up

Sarah Cedeño’s chapbook of essays, Not Something We Discuss Often, was published by Harbor Editions in November 2022. Her essay "The Visible Woman" was selected by Vivian Gornick as a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2022. Her debut story collection, The Grand Scheme of Things, is forthcoming from Harbor Editions in 2025. Her work has appeared in Brevity, Salamander, The Journal, The Pinch, The Baltimore Review, Hippocampus Magazine, Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. Sarah holds an MFA from Goddard College. She lives in Brockport, NY with her husband, two sons, some old ghosts, and two German shepherds. She teaches writing at her alma mater, SUNY Brockport.

cover art by Jen Stein Hauptmann