We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Sandra Gurvis a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Sandra, thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?
As with everyone, I started out as a child. 🙂 However, while it might have appeared that I had “everything” including a stable, upper-middle class family, intelligence, good health and relative attractiveness, I felt completely isolated and lonely. And it being the late ’50s/early ’60s, in an elementary school which to this day reminds me of a prison, whose enforced rigid, conformist values influenced both teachers and students, created a perfect cocktail of torment and despair for any child who looked or felt different. And being sensitive and obvious in my feelings I was the perfect target for ridicule and humiliation. I remember thinking about suicide at age 10; perhaps not shocking today but back then, no one talked of such things. My parents, both kind, well-intentioned people, were at a loss and took me to get counseling, which may have helped. I honestly remember very little about grades kindergarten through 5 in that hellhole, which I had to attend until high school.
What did help was inspiration provided by the late President John F. Kennedy; our highly intelligent but underemployed Black cleaning lady Nancy; and the idea of writing. Kennedy’s Camelot was a beacon of hope – cultured, smart, diverse people celebrating creativity in a glittering setting (a woman who became a writing colleague actually performed in the youth ballet on the White House lawn during this period). While his assassination was devastating – at age 12, I didn’t grasp its true meaning until years later – it also provided the basis of what would become my career. At that time, his widow, Jackie, was creating a Presidential library in his honor and since I had acquired a great deal of books, articles and other memorabilia during his short presidency, I set up a paid “lending library” for classmates and friends, then donated the proceeds ($40) to his library. I still have the Dayton Daily News clipping about my project as well as a personal thank-you note from Jackie. I also wrote a poem about his death which my seventh grade teacher accused me of plagiarizing; it was later published in several places, including an anthology.
This set me on the right track to what later became my career in writing and journalism; years later, my former classmates apologized for their mistreatment of me but by then I had moved on, although I appreciated their intent.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
I suppose one might say I am a “generalist” in terms of my writing. During the course of my career I’ve done books and articles on everything from history to travel to business to medicine. I am the author of 18 commercially published books, two of which are novels. My most recent (2024-25) nonfiction projects are THREE RINGLING CIRCUS: A HISTORY OF SARASOTA, FLORIDA, AND THE FAMOUS RINGLING BROTHERS and DAY TRIPS FROM COLUMBUS (4th edition), both from Rowman & Littlefield. I moved to Sarasota/Bradenton from Columbus, Ohio in June 2020 and have embraced my new environment, while maintaining Ohio roots, friends and family (Having been born and raised there until I relocated, I still consider myself an Ohioan).
My latest project is DOING HARD TIME IN GEEZERVILLE – which I can say, since I’m in that demographic – the first of three planned mystery/satires set in The Villages, Florida. While I have written two novels, THE PIPE DREAMERS, about the student protests during the Vietnam era on an Ohio college campus and COUNTRY CLUB WIVES, about women, money and homeless animals in “New Albany, oops, New Wellington Ohio,” these books are new territory for me, although they are neither “cozy” or hardcore mysteries. I’m about 2/3 of the way through the first book; time will tell, but it is great fun to write (the series is also set through 2009-14, before major political divisiveness).
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
1. There is a book, The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom by by Don Miguel Ruiz, which I found especially helpful when dealing with adversity and even during good times. Essentially, these agreements are – to be impeccable with your word; not to take anything personally; never to assume anything; and always do your best. While simple, they may not always be easy to apply and can take concerted effort. I sometimes call it “doing the hard thing.” And they also help make sense out of things. 2. The second came from my son’s widow: Always find three things to be grateful for every day. My late son Alex was a Army Reserve veteran who became addicted to oxycodone (and eventually other drugs) as a result of a car accident in 2005 while on active duty in Virginia. His struggles with addiction informed eight years of my life until he passed away at age 34 on Jan. 1, 2017, He left his widow, his daughter (my grandaughter Hope) and his cat Peabody, who I took with me to Florida when I moved there in 2020. (Peabody passed away in late 2021, almost to the day of the anniversary of Alex’s passing) The years immediately following Alex’s death were a struggle and sometimes my “three gratitudes” took the form of a nice meal, a sunny day and getting a paycheck on time.
3. The third thing happened to me when I was in my mid-50s. I had been divorced for a few years and seemingly suddenly realized how much of my life I was wasting by being negative or worrying about negative outcomes. Things were going to happen the way they would happen and I could choose to be positive/realistic or negative, the latter creating even more unhappiness. Changing my thinking was quite a struggle, but also a blessing because it helped provide the resilience needed in understanding, recognizing and dealing with Alex’s addiction.
What was the most impactful thing your parents did for you?
T<span style=”font-weight: bold; white-space-collapse: collapse;”> What was the most impactful thing your parents did for you?</span><div class=”PreviewContentStyle Preview-Line-Height” style=”line-height: 36px; margin-bottom: 5px; white-space-collapse: collapse; font-weight: bold;”></div> Two things – their support and example. My parents were a product of the Depression. My father’s mother, who was widowed during the flu epidemic of 1918, was a Russian immigrant who sold apples on the streets of Columbus and could not read English. My father nonethless managed to get a degree as an optometrist, start his own successful business and provide for his three daughters, paying for our education and leaving an inheritance, while enjoying an upper-middle class life. My mother’s family emigrated from Hungary/Transylvania shortly before WWI; nearly all of them were highly educated, with college degrees, including a physician who taught medicine at Ohio State; a physicist and college professor who co-wrote a book on selenium which is still in print; and a pharmacist, one of the first females to graduate in that field in the 1920s. My aunt Irene, the physicist, also lost her leg in a ice skating accident when she was 11.
These were the stories and the people I grew up with. While I didn’t always appreciate them and at times found them incredibly annoying, as the years passed, I found myself reflecting on what my familly went through and the obstacles they had to overcome while reaching their goals. My biggest regret is that my parents didn’t live longer; they passed away when I was 40 and I never really had an adult conversation with them, which makes me sad. Nevertheless I have tried to live by their example, especially in terms of honesty and integrity, both personally and through my work.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.sandragurvis.com
- Instagram: @sandragurvis
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/sandra.gurvis
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandragurvis
- Other: Bluesky: @sandragurvis.bsky.social
