I sat down with Sarah Marshall, author, former Silicon Valley operative, and longtime Burning Man attendee, to talk about her novel Playa Dust in My Soul. I went in expecting a conversation about a book. I came out feeling like I’d been handed a guided tour of a place that refuses to sit still long enough to be neatly described.
Sarah’s take is simple and slightly maddening: Burning Man is not something you can summarise. Ask ten people what it is and you will get ten wildly different answers, all of them true, none of them complete.
So, we start at the basics. Burning Man is an annual event in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, a landscape that sounds actively hostile to human optimism. Dust storms, high winds, scorching days, freezing nights, and nothing that naturally wants to grow there. Which is exactly why it becomes so surreal. The city, the art, the infrastructure, the stories, all of it exists only because people haul it in, build it, and imagine it into being. Nothing is permanent. Nothing is scripted. And yet, every year, the place takes shape.
For writers, this is where it gets interesting. Even though this is a real-world setting, the craft challenge looks a lot like speculative fiction: how do you make an unfamiliar world feel coherent, lived-in, and emotionally believable without dumping an encyclopaedia on the reader? Sarah talks about Burning Man as a kind of cultural recalibration, with rules that behave like world rules.
Two principles stood out.
Gifting: bringing something to share freely, with no expectation of payback. A meal, a service, an experience, a small act of care. In normal life that can feel suspicious. In this temporary city it is the point.
Participation: no passive spectators. You do not show up to watch. You show up to join in, to contribute, to take a risk socially, creatively, and sometimes physically. Sarah is very honest that this can be uncomfortable. She also argues that the discomfort is part of what makes the experience matter.
Her novel approaches this world through seven different perspectives, and that structure is one of the most useful worldbuilding techniques we discussed. The festival is not presented as a fixed “setting”. It is revealed as it forms. Early characters arrive when the desert is still mostly empty, with crews carving basic infrastructure from nothing. Later characters arrive as the city becomes louder, stranger, and more fully realised. The reader learns the world the way a participant would: by arriving, adapting, and discovering what the place demands of you.
We also talk about identity and belonging, including Sarah’s own early experiences after transitioning. She describes feeling like an outsider in most places, with trans identity sitting at the front of how she was seen and how she moved through the world. At Burning Man, that label did not vanish, but it became less central. People weren’t interested in placing her inside a story they already understood. They were interested in who she was, right there, in that moment. That shift, she suggests, can be startling. It can also be freeing. The novel’s characters carry their own baggage into the desert, and the event has a way of putting that baggage on the floor and asking, “Right, are you still sure you need all this?”
Sarah is clear that Playa Dust in My Soul is not about the obvious surface elements. Not the art, not the music, not the “big lascivious party vibes” (her words, and yes, she grins when she says it). It is about community, about connection and disconnection, and about the quiet human question sitting underneath the spectacle: how do we belong?
The long-haul writing story is also worth hearing. Sarah didn’t begin as someone who thought of herself as a fiction writer. She had an “encyclopaedia” of experiences, and it took more than two decades of intermittent drafting to carve that mass of anecdotes into a narrative that works on the page. That process ran in parallel with a Silicon Valley career, which is about as far from Burning Man’s ethos as you can get without moving to the Moon.
In the end, this conversation lands in a tension that will feel familiar to anyone who builds worlds for a living: the clash between raw experience and clean storytelling. Burning Man is messy, contradictory, and impossible to pin down. Fiction demands shape. Sarah’s achievement is turning something that refuses categorisation into a story you can actually inhabit.
If you’re a reader curious about this strange temporary city, or a writer looking for worldbuilding techniques that work even when your “world” is real, this one is for you.
Sarah’s site: https://www.playadustinmysoul.com/