The building at 670 4th Avenue North in downtown Fargo has spent most of its life as a place where people gathered to make meaning out of the biggest questions. In 2016 it reopened as the Sanctuary Events Center, a concert and event hall that kept the old name and, with it, a certain echo. On October 8, 2026, that echo will get a little louder when Sasha Sagan takes the stage to talk about science, ritual, and wonder in a room that was built for exactly those things.
The event is a book talk for "For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World," Sagan's debut, published by Penguin Random House. It is free and open to the public, with registration requested, and it closes with a live audience Q&A. The Fargo-Moorhead Convention & Visitors Bureau lists it as one of the region's marquee happenings. No ticket platform, no capacity cap, no barrier between the curious and the conversation.
The title itself is an inheritance. It comes from a line attributed to Carl Sagan: "For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love." The elder Sagan, the astronomer and science communicator who hosted the landmark 1980 PBS series "Cosmos," wrote those words with his wife, the writer and producer Ann Druyan, who co-wrote "Cosmos" and later led the revival of the franchise. Their daughter, born Alexandra Rachel "Sasha" Druyan Sagan in 1982, grew up in Ithaca, New York, in a house where the scientific method was discussed at the dinner table and where skepticism was never allowed to curdle into pessimism.
That upbringing is the engine of the book. Sagan has said the inspiration for it was the realization that "the provable, scientific things are thrilling and majestic and beautiful" — that awe does not require faith to be real. But the book did not begin as a manifesto. It began, by her own account, with motherhood. When Sagan became a mother herself, she started hunting for the natural phenomena behind the occasions humans mark — births and deaths, holidays and weddings, anniversaries and the turning of the seasons — and building a set of rituals for her young daughter that honored each experience without leaning on a religious framework. "For years, people told me that once I had children I would become more religious," she wrote. "I would usually get a little defensive. But they were partially right. I do now have an increased urge to celebrate things with our daughter. I want to create moments that make us feel united with other Earthlings, without the dogma that divides us."
What emerged is a book that is part memoir, part guidebook, and part social history — a survey of how cultures across the world and across time have marked the passages of a life, read through a scientific lens. The reviews were warm from the start. Bill Nye called it a place where Sagan "finds its meaning everywhere — with her family, around the world, and especially among the stars of the cosmos." Booklist, in a starred review, noted that it is "an eye-opening book for those who might question traditional religious celebrations but feel connected to the community, rituals, and comforts they provide." Good Housekeeping, less interested in the philosophy, simply called it "a wonderful gift for your favorite reader."
There is a particular weight to the personal history underneath all of it. Carl Sagan died in 1996, when Sasha was fourteen. The book is, in the publisher's words, "a tribute to a father, a newborn daughter, a marriage, and the natural world." It is also, unavoidably, a continuation of a family project. Carl Sagan spent his career insisting that the cosmos was not cold or indifferent but astonishing, and that human beings could feel genuine reverence for it without inventing anything. Ann Druyan carried that work forward through "Cosmos" and the science-communication organization her husband founded. Sasha Sagan, who studied at NYU and has worked as a writer, television producer, filmmaker, and editor in New York, Boston, and London, took it in a different direction — inward, toward the small daily ceremonies by which people make a life feel like it means something.
Her essays and interviews on death, history, travel, and ritual have appeared in New York Magazine, O, The Oprah Magazine, Literary Hub, and Mashable, and she is a contributing editor for the British fashion magazine The Violet Book. She lives in Boston with her husband and daughter. "For Small Creatures Such as We" remains her only book.
Which brings the conversation back to the room. The Sanctuary Events Center seats up to 375 for a ceremony and holds 600 standing, and it is a venue that wears its past openly — the listings still classify it under "Chapel / Church / Temple" alongside "Historic / Landmark Building." It is a former Lutheran church that now hosts soul singers, weddings, and, on this night, a secular meditation on how to celebrate a life. The setting is not incidental. A book about finding ritual outside of religion, delivered in a deconsecrated sanctuary in downtown Fargo, is the kind of symmetry that a writer might be tempted to invent. This one just happens to be true.
The evening is presented as part of the Fargo-Moorhead area's cultural calendar, and it is the sort of event that could easily be mistaken for something narrower than it is. It is not a lecture for astronomers, and it is not a debate about belief. It is an invitation, in a room that once held hymns, to consider how a person might mark a birthday, a solstice, a death, or a Tuesday without appealing to anything beyond the world in front of them. Sagan will talk, take questions, and presumably make the case that the vastness — the one her father wrote about — is not something to be endured. It is something to be celebrated, and the celebrating is the point.