About
About the Stories
I finished these six stories in 2024. I started writing the first one around 2010 (The Acoustic Arborist), and more showed up while I was at the Whidbey Island MFA program (The Bird Watchers, The Hole, Garbage Day). A couple of stories were started as a response to writing prompts during writing groups (Soul Mountain, The Fence Walker).
🌲 The Acoustic Arborist is about an arborist who trims trees to play music in the rain.
🦜 The Bird Watchers is a love story in a near-future, alternate-reality world.
⚫️ The Hole is short and sad, so plan to read one with a happier ending afterwards.
⛵️ Garbage Day is about garbage and breaking-up, so it's realism, nothing magical or sci-fi.
⛰️ Soul Mountain is an allegory about the journey of life.
👩💻 The Fence Walker is a sci-fi love story for people who like to think about emerging tech.
I worked on these six as a part of a larger collection with the help of editor Jazmine Kanengiser in 2022. Over the years, I've had the good fortune to receive feedback and encouragement while working with numerous writing groups and writing classes, online and in the Pacific Northwest. I'm indebted to many dozens of talented writers, editors, teachers and proofreaders who were part of the journey of these stories coming to completion. And for the record, I didn't use AI, which I would hope is obvious to the reader.
Four stories are available here on this website, and two more are on Kindle.
- Sarah
About the Author
Sarah Burt Howell lives in the Pacific Northwest. She loves to sail, play ping-pong in the park with her wife and son, read, and write. She practices qigong, and is taking boxing lessons. She has written about Yankee One Design sailboats for WoodenBoat Magazine.
Sarah currently researches and writes about how to improve LLM performance with AI prompts at soka.ai