My approach

I’m Sarah. I provide mentoring, and training to help you create interesting mental and physical atmospheres where creative thinking can emerge, unfurl and settle in.

I work with people who want to take a fresh look at what work could feel like, helping you find and claim your own ways of developing and enjoying your work.

Improvising work

Many of us are (or feel) both inside and outside of a company, a culture, or a university, at the same time. We're constantly improvising—building the structure around our work at the same time as doing the work. This is often hard going, but it does allow us the latitude to manoeuvre and make new choices about how we work. Maybe you don’t need a desk, maybe you need the hum of a café instead. Maybe ‘grit’ isn’t as important as rediscovering why a project matters to you and re-engineering it so that it points at that excitement.

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, adjusting and readjusting to keep my own writing and cooking and sewing and painting practices afloat, 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.