Humans of AFS: Sunshine O’Donnell

Sunshine O’Donnell has been a teacher and writer for over 30 years, releasing novels, poetry, and children’s books during that time. What most people don’t know about her is that she started off her career as a freelance journalist in college.

What was your favorite part about being a journalist?

I loved being able to experience other people’s lives. I felt like I was in a very privileged position to bear witness to other people’s suffering. I feel like the most joyful part of my job was that no matter how difficult the subject might be, there was something really amazing about being able to connect with other human beings in that way.

What was the most personally impactful interview that you did? 

This is going to sound crazy. The most personally impactful interview that I did was with a woman who was dying from tongue cancer and was trying to set up some kind of… almost a “beef and beer” event to raise money to help pay for her kids’ lives after she passed away, and it taught me such gratitude for the paradise that is my everyday existence. I’m grateful for wellness every second of the day because of that.

What was your most fun or enjoyable interview?

No question that my most enjoyable interview was with James Earl Jones, who played Darth Vader in the Star Wars series. He had come to Philadelphia to do a special reading at the public library.  I was interviewing him about that and about the nonprofit that he was supporting. We wound up having a much longer conversation that led somehow to Abraham Lincoln.

We were off the record and just talking, and he said, “Well, everybody knows that Lincoln was a shit.”
And then he proceeded to explain all of the ways in which Lincoln had, indeed, behaved in shitty ways when it came to enslaved people in the United States.

How did your time as a journalist affect your professional writing and teaching career?

I never intended to be a journalist. It was not the kind of writing I was interested in at all, but while I was in college, one of the ways that I was able to make extra money was to write for anyone who was willing to pay me. I wrote reviews of CDs that were coming out for indie magazines, and I wrote features for larger magazines. This job really was, at the Northeast Times, it was a paycheck. It wasn’t until I realized that there was an opportunity to amplify things that people otherwise would not pay attention to or even have awareness of and that changed my relationship to the job. When it was time for me to really focus on my own creative writing, I had to stop writing for other people for money. There’s a big difference between writing for work – writing for money – and writing for art, but it taught me how to create creative nonfiction, and I learned so much.