How I can help

Working from home should, in theory, be an easy setup. You’ve got your hot drink, you’ve chosen the music and the laptop is waking up. And yet, the thought of sitting at a desk makes you feel like running in the other direction. Looking at your to-do list makes you feel like setting fire to it. ‘More discipline’ probably isn’t going to do much good, especially if you feel like you’ve already done a day’s emotional and logistical labour before work even starts.

I work alongside solo creators who want to take a fresh look at what work could feel like, helping you find and claim your own ways of settling into, developing, and enjoying your work.

Creating atmospheres

Remote work is here to stay, but it needn’t look like the traditional office—or the traditional institution. Many of us are (or feel) both inside and outside of a company, a culture, or a university, at the same time. This means we're constantly improvising—building the structure around our work at the same time as doing the work itself—but it also gives us options, a little space to manoeuvre and make new choices. Maybe you don’t need a desk, for example; you need the hum of a café instead. Maybe you don’t need more grit or determination; you need to rediscover why this project matters.

I’m Sarah. I provide coaching, mentoring, and training designed to help you create lively mental and physical atmospheres where your thinking can take hold and settle in.

I spent twenty five years at the University of East Anglia, where I was fortunate enough to teach and research across American literature, visual culture, modernism, and the gothic. Next to this, I spent just as long working out how to work, how to sustain my own writing and cooking and sewing and painting practices, sometimes as part of the work itself, sometimes in the margins around it. As a first-generation academic I had to draw my own map, working out bit by bit what professionalism looked like for me.