Announcing: My Next Book

A break from format to share some exciting news: I have signed a contract for my next book!

They say you can't go home again, but I'm thrilled to be partnering for a second time with the wonderful Beacon Press. I love that they're a small independent press located in Boston, the city of my heart. I love their commitment to social justice and making the world a better place. I love sharing a list with Octavia Butler, Mary Oliver, Victor Frankl, and James Baldwin. But most of all I love that I'll be teaming up again with Rachael Marks, my luminous editor for Mind Over Monsters.

It was such a joy working with Rachael, and I am greatly looking forward to meeting our minds again. I'd also like to express deep gratitude to my literary agent Jessica Papin for steering the project through to this happy conclusion, and for her faith in my writing though I'm not (yet?) exactly lighting up any bestseller lists.

Slightly longer description of the book: In many ways, human life is better than it ever has been. Modern medicine has expanded our lifespans and reshaped the quality of them, technology provides previously unfathomable conveniences and ways of connecting, and social norms have shifted in ways that allow people to pursue their individual happiness more than ever before. And yet if anything, modern humans are unhappier than all our ancestors before us – disconnected, disaffected, and plagued by crises of both loneliness and mental health struggles. Are there any happy people at all? In Where Are All the Happy People? I set off on a quest across disciplines, settings, and locales to answer just that question. I find happy people on nude beaches and in nunneries, in Lithuania and Trinidad, at native plant nurseries and pagan revivals, in Black choirs and hospice centers. While their settings varied significantly, the architecture of their joy remained remarkably consistent, seeming to offer us a universal blueprint for a life well-lived.

You might be thinking that this is a step aside from writing about teaching and higher education, and you wouldn't be wrong – this will be a popular science book on the latest science of well-being. That said, one of the happy places we will visit in the book will be the college classroom, and another will be "on retreat" and so I'm dearly hoping my higher education / faculty development readers will still find food for thought in reading the book. I'm also excited to lean a little heavier on the creative side of creative nonfiction in this book, launching each chapter with a vignette that steps you into the lived experience of the person highlighted in that chapter. I told my writer's group my primary writing goal is to make the reader fall a little bit in love with all my happy people.*

One thing I'm excited about is that since turning my attention so much to teaching and learning over the last number of years, I have fallen a bit out of step with my community of affective scientists. To get the latest and greatest happening in the world of emotion and motivation, I'll be attending the Society for Affective Science conference for the first time in many a year this March. Shout if you'll be there and want to connect!

Finally, I have conducted a number of the interviews for the book but am still looking for the below sorts of folks:

• Nudists
• People who sing in choirs (ideally, the sort of choirs that get more joyous)
• People running retreats, or people who have been profoundly changed by them
• People who follow pagan traditions
• Researchers on well-being, positive psychology, chronobiology, predictive processing, co-regulation of emotion, interoception, pagan studies, or attentional restoration

If you are thinking, I know just the people Sarah should talk with! (if that someone is you or someone else), here is a quick Google form to share the idea. Grateful to you for considering it.

I'm off to write.... happy February. Hopefully that furry little groundhog was quite mistaken.

*One of my writer's group gentlemen responded: "That might just be the most Sarah Cavanagh thing you've ever said."