Gayle Saks on Writing About Recovery as a Counselor

Gayle Saks-Rodriguez has been a writer since filling her fourth grade diary with such perfectly crafted sentences as: “Ricky is getting confirmed tomorrow. Since I’m Jewish, I’m not really sure what it does. I should congradulate [sic] him though.”

She has graduated to being published in places like The Fix, The Huffington Post, Thought Catalog and Salon and has appeared on HuffPost Live. Now she's working on her memoir, You Ain't No Soccer Mom, about her work with female inmates and at an all male sober living. She was also a contributor to Light Hustler's first anthology, Darkness Before Light: 12 Writers on Addiction, Sobriety and Recovery.

In this interview (which originally took place over Facebook Live), we talk about being the only contributor to the anthology who's not in recovery, shelving one book proposal to work on another and her experiences in my coaching program for writers, among many other topics. We also—spoiler alert—had a lot of fun. Listen here.