Whose words are you drinking?

amelia sauter is a psychotherapist, sometimes more psycho, and sometimes more therapist. She is also a writer, artist, musician, meditation teacher, former martini lounge owner, and former brewery/bakery owner living with her dynamic wife and their rescue pit bull near Ithaca, NY. Yes, she really does all those things, and yes, there have been times she thought she might lose her mind. (She hasn’t yet.) (Or maybe she has.)

amelia worked in the social work field for seventeen years before opening a cocktail lounge and throwing herself into the chaotic life of a restaurant, brewery, and bakery owner. Now she has opened a psychotherapy private practice in Trumansburg, NY with a focus on anxiety (oh hey anxiety!) along with a specialty in gender and identity issues.

amelia has been published as a humor columnist, cartoonist, and feature writer for The Ithaca Post. Back in the old days when newspapers thrived, she wrote a regular cocktail column for the Ithaca Journal. Currently she shares her cocktail and culinary adventures in Edible Finger Lakes, and freelances with occasional food or drink-related assignments.

She is published in the anthology Dear John, I Love Jane: Women Write About Leaving Men For Women (Seal Press, 2010). A segment from her graphic memoir/comic, “As The Girl Turns,” was included in the anthology Here Come The Brides (Seal Press, 2012). She is also published in Greetings from Janeland: Women Write More About Leaving Men for Women (Cleis Press, 2017). She has a piece about being a hospice social worker under a pseudonym in a respected literary journal, but since it’s an anonymous piece, she can’t tell you which journal so you’ll just have to believe her.

amelia and her wife have a couple of other neglected blogs, one about her wife’s cancer and the other about their teardrop trailer adventures (www.alligatorteardrop.com).

amelia decided penning her memoir (Small Town, Big Cocktails) was like posting a narcisstic duckface selfie on Instagram so she put the project on hold. It was going to be about leaving a stable social work career to open a wild cocktail lounge, when she didn’t even know how the heck to make a gin and tonic. Instead, she generated 48,000 words of her first novel, In the Weeds, about a queer teenage girl who finds herself competing with her cis male best friend for the person of her dreams. It’s not done yet. Maybe this year is the year! Or maybe she’ll keep working on her new novel, Oh Dear, Therapist, a kinda-fictitious epistolary documenting the letters of a very, very anxious person to a therapist during a pandemic.

In the meantime, enjoy this blog.

Follow amelia on Instagram at @inviteanxietytodinner.

You can contact amelia at ameliasauter@gmail.com.

Reviews of amelia’s essay in Dear John, I Love Jane:

“sauter’s writing is a delicious mixture of humor and insight – one part Dave Barry and one part David Sedaris – with a distinctive voice all her own. ‘Falling for Leah,’ sauter’s contribution to Dear John, I Love Jane is a spellbinding tale, even if you happen to know the happy outcome.” – Luke Z. Fenchel, The Ithaca Times

“I would feel biased in saying that local celebrity and fellow Ithaca Post contributor amelia sauter is the standout in the group, if it weren’t for the fact that much of the publicity surrounding the book and Dr. Lisa Diamond, the author of Sexual Fluidity who provides the book’s introduction, seem to agree with me.  Many of the prize quotes pulled from the text by Dr. Diamond are from mx. sauter’s essay, and with good reason.  In the manner of some of the best memoirists, sauter manages to mix a compelling level of detail with deft insight and a command of language.  Heartbreaking sentences like “I was in love, and I was terribly lonely” are personal enough to give the reader a strong sense of the narrator, but resonate at a shared level by leaving the reader space to insert their own experiences. It is precisely within a sentence like this that identification and empathy between reader and writer are cemented.” – Bob Proehl, The Ithaca Post