Sara Morrison never expected to become a writer. In school, she was told she “wasn’t good at it,” and, assuming her teachers were the experts, she believed them. It wasn’t until college that she began to enjoy writing—largely by ignoring most of the rules. Research papers became experiments in joy and curiosity, often blending unexpected subjects like roller coasters and mythology into science and history assignments.

One of her early influences was a boyfriend determined to slip a Pink Floyd lyric into every college paper. He graduated with honors, and Sara graduated with an enduring sense that playing with words could be fun.

Today, writing is an everyday adventure for her—a place where adult analysis and childhood imagination merge to create short stories that might make Ray Bradbury smile.

In 2016, Sara was a resident writer for the now-defunct online journal Elephant Words, crafting weekly short stories from image prompts. The following year, her story “Mother” was published in The Radvocate, Issue 14. Ray Bradbury’s biographer, Sam Weller, described it as “a bit of Bradbury’s ‘Banshee’ in a Mexican milieu.”

Since 2012, Sara has been at work on a historical fiction novel centered on the nudist colony once located in San Diego’s Balboa Park. As the project nears completion, she shares her creative process and snippets of her work on Instagram at @sarashareswords