Meet Sarah Berke | Author & Creative Facilitator

We had the good fortune of connecting with Sarah Berke and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Sarah, what do you want your legacy to be?
This is a tough question, and it’s hard to separate my answer between my business owner hat, my creative hat, and my human hat. First and foremost, I want people to remember me as kind. Someone who is thoughtful, considerate, and who makes them feel seen and heard. That seems to be the through line of all of my work.

Although I’ve written a beautiful, fancy mission for my business, Esperance Creative, what it really comes down to is that I want to help people feel empowered in the business of their creative work, whether that’s helping them write their own mission statements, consider their brand, create their website (one of my very favorite kinds of projects!), help with executive functioning and time management, serve in a coaching or consulting capacity, and beyond. At the end of the day, my goal is to help professional and aspiring professional creatives and the related practitioners who support them.

In addition to my business, I’m also an author, specifically of both book club fiction and essays I publish on my website and through my free newsletter, Eliciting Esperance. These essays are published every other month and cover everything from book recommendations to motherhood to reactions to current events and personal experiences—basically life and the human condition. I strive to be thoughtful, vulnerable, raw, and authentic, and I hope they’re a little beacon of positivity in a crowded, and often negative, content world. My hope is that when someone reads my work—whether my fiction (fingers crossed, as it’s yet unpublished!) or my essays that they come away connected to something within themselves, that they feel seen, and that it leaves readers thinking about how they can understand and care for themselves and others a bit more.

What should our readers know about your business?
What sets me apart is that I take a very client-centered approach, whether it’s creating a website, coaching on a mission statement, or beta-reading a project. My knowledge, expertise, and best practices don’t really matter if it isn’t the right for that person, their story, and their creative vision. I’ve heard so many horror stories of projects being hijacked by the professional because they put their opinion over the needs of the client. And while you hire a professional for a reason, everything in the creative space—including the business aspects—are deeply personal to the creative. It’s crucial before beginning a project to understand who the creator is, what their story is, and what their goals are, and then do to the work in the way that best supports them. That’s the only way to build a relationship based on trust and respect, which is the only way to make sure the project is the absolute best it can be.

I also don’t focus exclusively on one mode of creation. Right now all of my clients are/have been writers, because my business is new and that’s where most of my contacts lie, but I’d love to expand to include other creators—potters, florists, sculptors, graphic designers, jewelers, whatever! If you identify as a professional or aspiring professional creative or have a business that intersects with them in some way—please reach out. I’d love to help support your goals.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
Well, I’m a homebody suburban mom whose love language is food, so it would be a very food-centered day of kid activities! Special adventure favorites on the kid-front are the Chattahoochee Nature Center, Fernbank, Children’s Museum, Atlanta Botanical Garden, and the zoo! We also absolutely love escaping to Blue Ridge, but my friend and fellow author, Jennifer Jabaley, has already written about Blue Ridge so beautifully on your web site [https://shoutoutatlanta.com/meet-jennifer-jabaley-author/].

Food-wise, I would take friends to The Pie Bar in Woodstock—best pie ever!—and Butter & Cream Ice Cream in downtown Roswell! Both are locally owned, both incredible food. I’m a huge fan of locally-owned, so we’re also likely to eat at Montana’s, Mediterranean Express, Fuego Tortilla, Canton Cooks, Nancy’s Pizza, Asahi, or Ipps—all in Marietta, or close to it!

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
My daughters, who are eight and five. Without them, I would have given up long ago, if I’d even started at all.

My writing came long before my business. I started writing a novel in 2015, but it was awful, and I lacked the discipline to even finish a book, let alone make it worthy of being read (a process that takes a long time and a lot of work). Five years, two kids, and a pandemic later, several things happened at once in late summer 2020—including postpartum depression—that led me to start writing again.

I wrote the first third of my first novel on my phone, usually while nursing, often in the middle of the night. It was only after I hit 30,000 words that I gained the confidence to take myself seriously and actually sit down with a laptop. Over the next four months I stole time wherever I could to write (still, often, in the middle of the night). The result is a book that I’m immensely proud of, but the road hasn’t been easy and will never be easy. It took a long time to get an agent, and then when my first book didn’t sell and we parted ways, I was not in a great place. It was then that I decided to launch this business and start fulfilling something I’d been interested in doing for awhile, something related to my creative self but also grounded in my interest in and experience with business. Through it all, my girls have been so loving, so encouraging, so vocal in their belief that I can do it. I’m proud to be setting an example for my daughters and showing them what it means to work hard and believe in themselves, but their absolute confidence in me—their love and encouragement—is what has been the driving force that’s kept me learning, evolving, growing, and most importantly, not giving up. It’s so important to me that they go for their dreams, and that means I have to show them what that looks like by going for mine.

I also want to give a shout out to my dear friend and critique partner, Grace Helena Walz [https://bookshop.org/beta-search?keywords=grace+helena+walz], whose first book, Southern by Design came out in February and whose second book, Good Hair Days comes out this fall (both amazing, both available for order). She’s a steady and calming presence in my life, helping me stay focused on what truly matters, while also giving me the very best, most impactful feedback on my writing. I’d be truly lost without her.

Website: https://www.sarahberke.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sarahjberke/

Twitter: https://bsky.app/profile/sarahjberke.bsky.social

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SarahJBerke

Other: https://www.esperancecreative.com/

Image Credits
Kaila Bruner
Katy Lockhart