Bougainvillea shading the Key West cemetery
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, to somewhere that it would 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. Studying English at Tulane, I was wowed by the confessional poetry of Elizabeth Bishop; later, I met Tennessee Williams on the page, who demonstrated that gold could be spun from a dysfunctional Southern childhood.
The poet Elizabeth Bishop with her bicycle in Key West in the mid 1930s.
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. “Being a writer” has turned out to be a humbling quest rather than a destination. I worked in book publishing in New York, and upon becoming too envious of the authors that I publicized for Penguin and Macmillan, I ultimately returned to school. This time, I went for an MFA at Columbia University.
I began to contribute to the Huffington Post, which at the time was an agent in changing the publishing paradigm, leveling a playing field of political journalism and opening 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, living in fast-gentrifying Harlem. I was lonely--the chronic condition of the New Yorker—and the writing of Joan Didion and James Baldwin served as analgesics.
Sarah with Margaret Atwood at the 2019 Key West Literary Seminary, “Under the Influence,” where Ms. Atwood was the keynote speaker.
On the eve of my grandmother’s 90th birthday, she reminded me of my promise to move back to Key West, the town I had always hoped to call “home.” I had become frustrated as an uninsured adjunct professor and New York winters had begun chilling my bones. After ten years, the winds of change stirred and pointed me south.
When I moved to Key West in 2015, I strolled in the shadows of the greats: 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 literary island, worked with me on the development of the tour. KWLS took over running the tour, as I took the helm as Editor of the wonderful Key West Weekly. The Weekly gave me the opportunity to interview brilliant musicians, local politicians, artists, conservationists, and climate scientists drawn to the Keys.
Lucas, Sarah, Skye and Andrew, in Scotland in the summer of 2025.
Then, a Scotsman walked into a rum bar on Duval Street. In 2018, Andrew, a psychologist, and I struck up a conversation over a glass of Diplomatico that has continued across multiple time zones. In 2019, I decided to cross the pond to start the greatest collaboration of my life. I now split my time between the Caribbean and the shoreline along Lake Geneva, where we now live with our family, in Switzerland.
In 2020, I was hired by a United Nations agency, the International Labour Organization, to work in communications. This work has offered me a sprawling view of the geo-political shifts affecting our modern world and have informed and inspired new writing. Now, my writing advocates for social justice and decent work for the world’s most vulnerable workers, promotes corporate responsibility, and explores implications of the new digital world of work.
Off the page, Skye and Lucas were born, in 2022 and 2023 respectively. Being a mother has irreversibly changed who I am as a writer and a human being. Chiefly, it has allowed me to access a well of empathy for all children of the world in a way that is illuminating and painful. It has also deprived me of time and sleep, allowing the unruly stack of unread books on my nightstand to grow at a breakneck speed.
I continue to write for organizations, publications, and myself. I have written a novel inspired by my time in the Keys and the Caribbean, titled THE SNOWBIRD, and I am working on a collection of essays on navigating motherhood as an unlikely immigrant in the Swiss countryside, called SPILLED MILK.
Stay a while, say “hi,” read some writing, drink rum, fall in love, write your story.
Thanks for stopping by.