Sarah’s Story

My grandparents bought a house in Key West in 1977, six years before I would be born. My grandfather said he wanted to drive as far as he could, somewhere that it would still be hot, year round, yet remain in the United States. They ended up at the literal end of the line: buying a property across from turn-of-the-century millionaire developer Henry Flagler’s far flung hotel, The Casa Marina, at the end of the U.S. 1. The first summer I spent in Key West, at ten, I vowed to live there someday.

When I was a junior in high school, I wrote a paper on Ernest Hemingway, and that was when I first understood his legacy and time in Key West. It was the town that introduced him to marlin fishing, inspiring “The Old Man and The Sea,” to great rum (and perhaps his greatest demon) and where he began “A Farewell to Arms.” Years later, in college, I encountered the poet Elizabeth Bishop, and was wowed by her villanelle “One Art” and the idea that losing things was actually an art and not a character flaw. Later, I met Tennessee Williams on the page, who taught me that gold could be spun from the dysfunction of a Southern childhood.

I had always “wanted to be a writer,” believing that was a job for which I could apply, and if I accumulated enough skills and slights of the hand, I might easily fall into that role. Not so, as it turns out—“being a writer” has turned out to be a quest rather than a destination. I worked in book publishing in New York, and upon becoming too envious of the authors that I publicized and marketed for Penguin and Macmillan, I ultimately returned to school. This time, I went for a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction at Columbia University in order to get better at the skill I had, up to that point, only admired in others (while jotting verses in the margins of meeting notes).

I began to freelance write, regularly for the Huffington Post, which at the time was an agent in changing the publishing paradigm in New York, and even the world, leveling a playing field of political journalism and opening the field of opinion beyond the pages of a traditional newspaper. I wrote about social issues that affected me as a student, and then as a teacher, at Columbia. I was living in fast-gentrifying Harlem, which bumped up against Morningside Heights, a neighborhood created by the university to assure parents that their children weren’t matriculating to “Harlem.” I was lonely--the chronic condition of the New Yorker—and the writing of Joan Didion and James Baldwin served as analgesics.

That moment in time guided me to write about race, feminism, interracial relationships, the romanticized poverty of being an artist, the intersection of immigration and religion, and a number of topics of that time and place. There were certainly plenty of pieces that I wrote that never saw the (web) page, and some for the better.

On the eve of my grandmother’s 90th birthday, she reminded me of my aspirations to move back to Key West, the town I had always hoped I’d some day call “home.” I had become frustrated as an uninsured adjunct professor at a university with a multi-billion-dollar endowment, and New York winters had begun chilling my bones in a way that I worried I’d never shake. After ten years, the winds of change stirred and pointed me south.

When I moved to Key West in the fall of 2015, I began to follow the paths of writers before me, literally: Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Shel Silverstein, Judy Blume. I took notes and interviewed local writers and historians. The Monroe County Library became a welcome cocoon. I tended bar at a beachside restaurant, and I researched what would ultimately become the Old Town Literary Walking Tour, a creation in the tradition of late novelist David Kaufelt’s walking tour.

The Key West Literary Seminar, a nonprofit organization that brings luminaries like Billy Collins, Jamaica Kincaid, Hilton Als, and personal heroine of mine, Margaret Atwood, to our little literary island, worked with me on the development of the tour. KWLS offered to acquire the tour as part of their effort to maintain literary education in Key West in 2016. I agreed and stepped down from my post as full-time tour guide to take over the position of editor at an excellent, cheeky local weekly, Key West Weekly. The Weekly has given me the opportunity to not only learn about the machinations of the best small town in the U.S., but also interview brilliant musicians, visual artists, conservationists, and climate scientists drawn to our little island.

The twist? I fell in love. Tending bar at the best little rum joint on the island, in walked a tall, handsome Scot (coincidentally, wearing a “Brooklyn” t-shirt), and a new story began. Andrew, a business writer and psychologist, and I struck up a conversation that has continued across multiple countries and time zones. In October 2019, I ultimately made the choice to cross the pond to start the greatest collaboration of my life. I now split my time between the Caribbean and the shoreline along sprawling Lake Geneva, where Andrew lives, in Switzerland.

I have written a novel inspired by my time in the Keys and the Caribbean, titled THE SNOWBIRD, and I’m continuing to freelance write non-fiction, both journalistic and personal narrative, while Stateside and in Switzerland.

Stay a while, say “hi,” read some writing, drink rum, fall in love, write your story.

Thanks for stopping by.

Sarah