Meet Sasha Bailyn

Sasha Bailyn's Wild Ride

Author Sasha Bailyn is driven by the question: What are the stories we live by? In her career pursuits, she has turned to various vehicles—literal, in the case of theme park ride design, and investigative, in the case of journalism—to explore this question.

Sasha admits with a rueful grin that her childhood dream was “to be the next Walt Disney. I wanted to be a wizard of imagination, and make it my career.”
Drawn to genres like magical realism, fairy tale, and memoir, Sasha addresses complex, personal topics and deftly picks apart philosophical and psychological themes.

“In classic fairy tales, magic just is; there’s rarely a why. But there’s always a why for how we come to be who we are.” - Sasha Bailyn

Work & Publications

Anatomy of a Wave” (Open: Journal of Arts and Letters, January 2024)

Erasure: How You Were Made” (The Maine Review, September 2022)

“Rocky Road” (Literary Mama, January 2020)

“Making Mom Friends is Hard AF” (The Bold Italic, November 2019)

Sasha Bailyn is an MFA candidate at Vermont College of Fine Arts building Inglenook Lit, an online lit mag for magic and memoir.

Admit One


Born in San Francisco, Sasha grew up with her dad, stepmom, and siblings in a suburb of the East Bay. Imagination helped her cope with complicated family dynamics and the absence of her mother, fostering an interest in storytelling. Writing and world building were her escape route to enchanted realms.

Keep Hands and Feet Inside the Vehicle


Equipped with a B.S. in communications from New York University (NYU), Sasha blogged her way into the world of theme park design. Mentored by some of the biggest names in an extremely niche industry, she commuted to L.A. and Orlando to work with some of the field’s best designers as a concept writer, project coordinator, and later, a business development manager.

Please Exit the Vehicle


Though she looked like she was living her dream, there came a moment when Sasha realized that the stories she needed to tell, the ones closing in on her heart, wouldn’t pair well with theme parks. She was running a successful industry news site, creating proposals for billion-dollar projects, and helping design the storylines for world-class attractions. But none of it spoke to the emotional complexity of her inner world.

Pregnancy spurred her career as an author, pushing her to reconsider themes of family, parenting, and folklore on a deeper personal level.

World-Building Continues


Sasha bolsters her writing career by doing what she does best: constructing magical spaces. Inglenook is an online community she’s created for bibliophiles, authors, publishers, and academics who love magic and memoir. 

Inglenook’s mission is to present opportunities for connection with other magically minded readers and to sprinkle inspiration and enchantment over the literary community. Guided by Sasha Bailyn, Inglenook highlights trending authors in genres related to memoir and magical realism, and topics including parenthood, spiritual discovery, healing, and folklore. This is a place for exploring arcane or ancient ideas about the unexplainable and the liminal space between fiction and reality. Inglenook is a place where magic lives and thrives. Please join us!