Alumni Spotlight: Dr. Cassandra O’Sullivan Sachar ‘99 Shares Her Spooky Origins in Horror Writing
An educator for over 25 years, Dr. Cassandra O’Sullivan Sachar ‘99 released her second collection of short stories just in time for the Halloween season.
Dr. Cassandra O’Sullivan Sachar ‘99 has been dabbling in spooky writing that has evolved into gripping horror short stories and novels. Her love of English has led her to create riveting stories and teach students at various levels.
Now a Regal Summit Book Award-winning writer, Bram Stoker Award-nominated editor, and English professor at Bloomsburg University, Sachar has just released her second short story collection, Prepare the Coffin: Tales of the Macabre, and has continued to impact her students as they discover their own creative writing paths, just as she did.
Beginnings at York College
Sachar came to York College of Pennsylvania after being offered a scholarship based on her high school GPA. Having grown up in Kutztown, she wanted distance from her home without going too far away and found she loved the campus.
“York has come a long way since I first arrived, but I always liked the small campus,” Sachar said. “I liked that it was easy to get from one place to the other.”
Originally, Sachar came to York College as a Political Science major after having several positive experiences with the topic in high school, including the opportunity to meet former President Bill Clinton. However, she always loved English and writing, which culminated in a new desire to become a teacher when she grew older.
Among the many experiences Sachar had while at York College, the most life-changing of them was having her daughter the summer after her junior year of college. She was still able to return for her senior year, and her professors were especially helpful in getting her the support she needed to graduate.
When she was experiencing childcare issues, one of her professors held an independent study on his own time to help her finish the class needed to fulfill her Theatre minor requirements. Sachar’s English professor also worked with her and the Education Department to help her complete the courses she needed in a much shorter time frame than general so she could become certified to teach.
“They modeled behaviors that I try to model with my students,” Sachar said. “When my students come to me and tell me there’s something going on, I want to be accepting and listen so I can help them find resources. There were professors at York College who have influenced the way I do my job.”
Continuing Education Through Teaching and Learning
Sachar graduated with an English degree with a Writing Concentration and minors in Business and Theatre. She began taking education classes in her senior year and stayed at York College for an additional year to complete her courses and fulfill her student teaching requirements.
Sachar moved to Delaware and took a teaching position as a seventh-grade English teacher, where she stayed for a year. She then spent 14 years teaching ninth- and tenth-grade English at Newark High School, a public school, where she found fulfillment in working with underserved populations, especially by helping reluctant writers build stronger backgrounds in writing.
During this time, Sachar also attended the University of Delaware and earned her Master’s of Instruction and Doctorate of Education with a Literacy Specialization. Eventually, she accepted a teaching position at Bloomsburg University. For several years, she worked as a writing researcher, publishing a plethora of articles and research studies about writing instruction and presenting her scholarship at national and international conferences.
However, during the downtime of the pandemic, she found herself drawn back to her creative roots. Though she had always thought of herself as a writer, she hadn’t had much success when it came to fiction. With a renewed interest in creative writing, Sachar realized that she should try to improve her craft. She decided to pursue a graduate degree at Wilkes University, earning her Master’s in Fiction and MFA in Creative Writing.
“I’m a career-long educator, first teaching middle school, then high school, and now college,” Sachar said. “I knew that what I needed to grow as a creative writer was more education.”
After graduating with her MFA, Sachar began teaching creative writing classes at Bloomsburg University, which sometimes includes a horror fiction course for students interested in following in her footsteps genre-wise.
“And so now, I get to teach creative writing along with my first-year composition classes and my composition theory class, where I work primarily with future English teachers,” she said. “I have a few different specialties now, and they’re all rolled together to combine my interests and help students in these same areas.”
Origins of Horror Fiction
Sachar grew up fascinated with horror stories, reading authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King, loving Halloween, and constantly watching horror movies. Even though she had little experience writing for the genre, that interest never faded as she got older.
It wasn’t until she pursued her MFA and experimented with different styles that she attempted to focus on writing horror and found herself coming back again and again to the genre.
Sachar shares that she is also a very anxious person, something that she feels many horror lovers have in common. She tends to imagine the worst scenarios happening to her, such as falling down the stairs and injuring herself, and finds horror fiction as a way to, ironically, help ease that anxiety by providing her a safe and productive outlet to release her intrusive thoughts.
“The same can be said of watching horror movies,” Sachar said. “There are a lot of psychological studies on it. When people watch horror movies, if they have these fears, they still feel safe watching a movie since it’s happening to somebody else. They’re just observing it.”
Story Collections and Anthologies
When asked which of the two she likes best, Sachar prefers reading novels but has much more fun writing short stories, both for her own collections and anthologies in which her work has been featured.
As a college professor, Sachar’s schedule can get incredibly busy, and she admits that it’s easier to step away and then put herself back into the worlds of her short stories compared to her novels.
“I feel a lot more freedom with short stories, generally, even though I still do a lot of research for my writing,” she said. “I have some elements of historical fiction in my work, but the deep amount of research that goes into a novel is far more time-consuming than in a short story. And again, with my job, it’s just more conducive to me.”
One commonality that many of Sachar’s short stories and novels share is their setting, Blackthorn, Pennsylvania, a fictional town she created based partially on her experiences living in the state. She has stated that she loves creating connections between her stories through this town.
Her latest release, Prepare the Coffin: Tales of the Macabre, is her second short horror story collection, featuring 17 tales that once again take place in Blackthorn. Although focusing on different characters, the collection delves into the attempt to understand why so many bad things keep happening in the town.
A big fan of brevity and the narrative principle of Chekov’s Gun (where every element in a story should serve a purpose), Sachar ensures that all of her stories contain details that will leave an impact later on. Some of her main characters deserve the empathy of their readers, while others are, in her own words, “simply rotten.” Regardless of their qualities, they will often meet similar fates by the end of her stories.
“Certain characters get what’s coming to them, while other endings are more tragic,” Sachar said, “so there’s definitely some karma involved. I’m really excited about the collection. I think it’s a lot of fun, and a lot of the stories pack a punch and hopefully will be memorable.”
Sachar also recently released Dark and Dreary: A Basement Horror Anthology, which she edited and published through her own self-started small press, Screaming Scorpion Press.
She did much of the work herself and hired others to assist. Her husband, Simon Sachar ‘96, another York College alum, helped with the formatting of the print, and her daughter, a Bloomsburg graduate, even submitted a story for it.
Writing Challenges, Successes, and Finding More
Writing does come with its fair share of challenges, and Sachar is no exception to the struggles that come with it.
“I would say one of the biggest challenges of a creative writer is a mental one, which is that fear of not being good enough, and the fear of rejection,” Sachar said.
She always encourages her students to submit their work, regardless of whether they think it’s perfect or not. Normalizing rejection is important, and she always felt that sharing her past with rejection and showing her students her moments of vulnerability was a positive experience.
“I get rejected, and that’s normal,” she said. “Sometimes, my work isn’t a good fit for a publication. It doesn’t mean I’m a bad writer.”
Most of all, Sachar ensures her students have the necessary resources to submit their work. She helps them understand the querying process and that it’s okay to get rejected and have feelings hurt by that. But also, she tells them not to take it personally.
“I’m so fully ensconced now in the writer’s life, and it’s because I pushed past that fear of rejection,” Sachar said. “It’s okay to be rejected; that’s normal. All my writer friends have work rejected. What I always say to my students is, if you don’t try to submit your work at all, you know you won’t get published. If you submit your work, you still might not get published, but at least you have something out there.”
On the flip side, Sachar shared that her favorite part about writing is when she gets to work on character creation. While she loves her characters, Sachar acknowledges that the story will dictate that it can’t always have a happy ending. She doesn’t like manipulating her readers and prefers to give endings that are deserved.
“When I feel something powerful for characters, that makes me feel that I’ve really created something special,” she said.
Sachar also loves talking to readers as an author–not just about her writing, but also themselves, too–what they’re working on, providing any helpful tips, etc. She also encourages them to join writers' groups for feedback exchange.
“I really like to pay it forward,” she said. “I really like to encourage other writers to write and to submit, and to just have fun with their writing.”
When it comes to themes and messages within her writing, Sachar says it depends on the book and/or story. While karma is a prevalent theme in many of her short stories, for both good and bad characters, some of her longer stories have more personalized meanings hidden within them.
A strong example comes from her novel, Darkness There but Something More, which follows a woman who is a college professor and Edgar Allan Poe scholar. The title is a play on Poe’s quote from “The Raven,” “Darkness there and nothing more.”
For the character, there is something more for her after having experienced a lot of darkness in her life. Sachar felt it was a powerful message that we all go through difficult times in our lives, and one that resonates strongly with her.
“The idea is that the darkness is not all there is,” Sachar said. “And I think it’s so important for everybody. College students are going through a lot of things, but this, too, shall pass. There’s something beyond the here and now.”
Seeing Students and Success
Seeing how much her success has grown since she started writing has been an amazing experience for Sachar. From attending horror conventions and book events to interacting with avid readers and budding writers, it has been a fun journey for her.
“There’s pleasure in knowing that people are reading my work, that they’re enjoying my work, and my whole hope is that if somebody reads my work and enjoys it, they might check out something else that I’ve written or recommend it to a friend,” she said. “It’s a lot of fun having people discover worlds that I’ve created. So I love that - I love being a part of a writing community.”
Her biggest supporters have always been her family. Her husband, whom she met at York College and has been married to for 26 years, has always supported her work, and she is grateful for him always being there for her at important milestones and for attending her events. Several of her books are even dedicated to him.
When it comes to advice, Sachar shared that staying true to her identity has always been a priority, and for her, being an educator and a writer are such important parts of who she is.
As an educator, understanding the value of being authentic with her students and seeing them as people is incredibly important. Her students are more than test scores and behaviors, and instead, in her own words, “people in our classrooms.”
In terms of her writing career, Sachar said, “If you care about writing, stick with it.”
Over the years, Sachar has learned to acknowledge that her stories aren’t for everyone. There are those who love horror, and those who do not. And because of that, there is no need to push an interest onto someone with different tastes.
At the same time, her advice for writers is not to worry about every little detail being perfect in the first draft. In the beginning, Sachar struggled with that as well, but found helpful advice from another author, Victoria Christopher Murray: “Give birth to your ugly baby.”
In other words, get the story out and written, even if it’s a mess; revision can always come later.
“Don’t try to make it perfect,” Sachar said. “Perfectionism can really be a problem. I have been a perfectionist at different points in my life, and it’s stifled me.”
Once a person breaks past the hard part of writing, they can enjoy the fruits of their labor, such as reading and enjoying their work. So even if a writer finds themselves hesitating and worrying about how their story will turn out, they should start by having a beginning, middle, and ending written. From there, a story can be brought to life.
To learn more about her other published works and upcoming events she will be attending, visit Cassandra O’Sullivan Sachar’s website.
