→ Learn about Porchlight's services for authors, publicists, publishers, and readers: https://bit.ly/pbcweb

→ Subscribe to Porchlight's weekly newsletter to stay up to date with our giveaways, recommendations, reviews, and more: porchlightbooks.com/subscribe

BUY THE BOOK
→ Purchase single copies of A RECIPE FOR MORE from our event partner, Boswell Books: https://www.boswellbooks.com/book/978...

→ If you need copies of A RECIPE FOR MORE for your book club, students, or organization, Porchlight offers competitive discounts on all bulk book purchases: https://www.porchlightbooks.com/produ...

•••

Boswell and Porchlight Book Company present a conversation with Sara Elise, author of A Recipe for More: Ingredients for a Life of Abundance and Ease. Previously live-streamed on May 4, 2023.

ABOUT THE BOOK
"Each new day is a singular moment, a singular opportunity. No day is like the last and no day is like what’s to come. We have arrived, and we are simultaneously arriving.”

In this expansive debut, A Recipe for More: Choosing a Life of Pleasure and Abundance, creative, host, and "pleasure doula" Sara Elise offers a profound and challenging inquiry into the forces that keep us in a state of survival and limitation and asks us to consider a new way to live. Sara Elise leaves us with what it means to be present to what’s unfolding around us and open to the change that is possible in that empty space.

A Recipe for More is a quest to examine the ingredients of our lives, those essential components that make up our days. Have we chosen rest, breath, movement, agency, visibility, play, and pleasure? Or are we trapped in the numbing and violent pattern of self-inflicted suffering? Do we celebrate the unique and precious wiring of our brains? Are our relationships a garden of ever-growing and evolving roots? Do we nourish our bodies with what it requires to sense and receive? Are we liberated, awakened, and alive? In the tradition of Adrienne Maree Brown and Sonya Renee Taylor, A Recipe for More is a radical argument for dismantling the systems that oppress us. But it begins with the individual, and the simple recipe of our every day.

Groundbreaking, persuasive, inclusive, and warm, A Recipe for More brings the ingredients of an abundant life to all readers so that we might honor ourselves, deepen our communities, and finally be present in each miraculous and life-giving singular moment.

•••

SARA ELISE is a Black & Indigenous, queer, autistic femme creative splitting her time between Brooklyn and Upstate, NY. She is a pleasure doula; the co-founder and designer of Apogeo Collective, a hospitality experience centering QTPOC; the founder of Harvest & Revel, an event catering + design company; and is currently working on her forthcoming book with Harper Collins (Amistad Books) entitled A Recipe For More. Sara Elise has been featured in Dazed, Playboy, Afropunk, Healthy-ish, Well + Good, Nylon, StyleLikeU, and them, among others. With all of her work, she aims to challenge our collective reality by first re-imagining and then creating alternative systems and spaces (both external and internal) for BIPOC and LGBTQIA2S+ folks to thrive. She spends much of her thoughtspace contemplating pleasure, pain, healing, destruction, and growth— and how inextricably those concepts are linked. To that end, Sara Elise has deep interests in BDSM, ritualization, relationship dynamics, and the development of personal awareness and well-being.

Sara was in conversation with Porchlight's Managing Director Sally Haldorson.

SALLY HALDORSON'S mission as Porchlight’s Managing Director is to make Porchlight a great place to work for employees, and a consistently high-performing service organization for everyone in or orbiting the publishing industry. After 25 years working in book retail, she has developed a penchant for business strategy, both as a socio-economic force and a literary genre. Happy to put her English and Creative Writing degrees to work, she helped craft three editions of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time, and she reads, writes, and reviews for the company’s marketing team. Sally lives north of Milwaukee with her husband, son, and dog, and, in her spare time, rather doggedly works to perfect her writing skills and her tennis game, unsure which is the more Sisyphean endeavor.