When several high school students visited her second-grade class for a week to help each one write their own book, Sarah (Norton) Solmonson ’10 wrote not just one, but five of them, including what she considers to be the first draft of the book she just published this past summer. The book, Taking Flight, gives the reader a window into Solmonson’s life, with particular focus on the joy of working with her father in their basement for six years to build his own VP-1 airplane, the excitement of flying with him often, and the painful loss she endured when, due to a wind fluke, the plane went down three months after its first flight, killing her father instantly. That was when Sarah was 16.
Writing the book, then, was a natural outlet. Grateful that her parents read to her often, Solmonson credits her Augsburg experience with instilling in her the drive and discipline required to write the book. She says pushing herself through night and weekend classes while working full-time was the most exhausting and rewarding period of her life thus far. She especially remembers the challenge of Professor Cowgill’s English and Irish Literature course, and still relishes his encouraging words about her D.H. Lawrence paper—“Sarah, you are a writer.” (She keeps the paper with Cowgill’s comments in her “motivational tool kit.”). When she stood at the Augsburg Bookstore on graduation day, with aspirations to be an author, she thought once again, “Some day…”
Fond of narrative non-fiction and memoir genres, Solmonson is convinced that being an author is the career she wants to continue to pursue, and completing her first book has given her an amazing sense of accomplishment. The subject of her second book will be the life-changing trip through Germany and Poland that she took with Professors Cowgill and DeVries, along with Auggie classmates (many of them now long-term friends), in connection with a dual course in the History and Literature of Post WWII.
Her book is available through Amazon.