Hey friend—

Thanks for taking the time to check out my stuff!

My name is Sarah and I’ve been a working journalist for about 20 years now, with a special focus on stories about the environment, natural history, science, place, and how we find home in our bodies and in the world.

Though I’ve always been a writer, my formal education is in studio art and biology. For the last decade or so, I’ve been lucky enough to bring my art into my writing through the support of trusted editors, publications like YES! Magazine, The Atlantic, High Country News, and SIERRA that gave my most ambitious illustrated projects a home, and a blog called The Last Word on Nothing, which gave me a pressure-free place to play.

YES! in particular allowed me to develop a form of essay that is at least as much driven by images as by words. Ever since that magazine stopped producing its print edition in 2025, I’ve wondered what to do with that project, called Terra Affirma. So here we are on Substack in 2026, where I’m hoping devoted readers like you can help me keep it alive and perhaps even build it back in a more expansive way, under this newsletter of the same name.

Why subscribe?

All subscribers get access to posts roughly once a week, as I pace out previously published comics poems and essays over the coming year to introduce them to new readers and collect them in one place. Roughly once a month, I will publish a new illustrated comic. Should you choose to support this project with a paid subscription, you’ll get exclusive early access to new work, and help bankroll the more ambitious illustrated essays I aim to produce in this form, hopefully at a rate of two per year. Paid subscribers also receive full access to my publication archives.

Like my artwork enough to hang it on your wall?

You’re in luck! It turns out I also have an Etsy shop called Hidden Drawer Designs, where I sell archival reproductions (called giclee prints) of my original paintings and illustrations.

And if you want to keep up with my art and writing in other ways, please consider following me on Bluesky and Instagram, where I post the work I publish in magazines and books, along with information about sales and other fun stuff like my first mural commission! So excited about that one:

I’m thrilled to know that you’re along for this storytelling journey! Here’s to a deeper understanding of our living world, and the other beings with whom we share it.