Tell your story.
Sarah is available by request for group or individual memoir and fiction writing classes. She loves to help people discover their voice and craft their narrative and has experience leading writers through every stage of the process, from brainstorming to polished piece.
Take a class.
Unruly Mothers & Other Stories
Course Description: Unruly Mothers & Other Stories will center around texts–three novels and one memoir– that examine and, more importantly, challenge representations of mother figures. Beginning with one of the seminal novels about an “unruly mother” and moving to more contemporary representations of motherhood, we’ll examine how each text defines or upsets traditional narratives about mothers and how it reckons with tensions between personal freedom and responsibility and creation and destruction. Finally, we’ll explore the intersections of motherhood, feminism, race, and class and ask how the readings are in conversation with one another and with the world we live in. Together, we’ll read The Awakening by Kate Chopin, The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan, The Garden by Clare Beams, and Mothers and Other Fictional Characters by Nicole Graev Lipson.
Required Reading
10/03 The Awakening by Kate Chopin
11/07 The Garden by Clare Beams
12/05 The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan
Essays from Mothers and Other Fictional Characters by Nicole Graev Lipson, will be assigned for each meeting.
Offered Fall 2025 through the Osher Institute of Lifelong Learning at Colorado State University
The Great Gatsby Book Club
2025 marked the 100th anniversary of the publication of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, a book that offers enduring–and interesting–insights into the American Dream, money, race, class, and desire. Of course, the man at the heart of the novel, Jay Gatsby, is also a great American imposter. Indeed, in “It’s Gatsby’s World, We Just Live in It,” New York Times journalist A.O. Scott notes,”What we think about Gatsby illuminates what we think about money, race, romance and history. How we imagine him has a lot to do with how we see ourselves.” Together, let’s think closely about Gatsby and investigate what our response to the novel reveals about ourselves and the world we live in. Over the course of three meetings, we’ll read The Great Gatsby, as well as two novels, Mrs. Wilson’s Affair: A Great Gatsby Retelling and The Midcoast, that offer a different lens on the classic.
Required Reading:
2/3: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
3/2: Mrs. Wilson’s Affair: A Great Gatsby Retelling by Allyson Reedy
4/6: The Midcoast by Adam White
Offered Spring 2026 through the Osher Institute of Lifelong Learning at Colorado State University