Sara Moss - Author

Creators who care, welcome.

Hi, I’m Sara: sustainability and built environment design student, nonfiction writer and author. My long-standing crush? Curiosity.

For the past 20 years, I’ve been a communications professional in multiple roles throughout Australia and overseas.

Building a rich array of skills — spanning journalism, copywriting, editing, photography and experience design — has been possible through work with government; big and small companies; and my own online business.

Press and magazine writing and photography credits include Australian Traveller, Let’s Travel (NZ), The Toronto Star and Everything France.

I’ve also been fortunate to review more than 1600 hotels globally for former hardcopy travel trade guides, known affectionately by UK travel agents as the ‘truth books’.

Raised amid a beautiful pocket of trees on the mid-north coast of New South Wales, I’ve since lived in Sydney, Canberra, Brisbane, London and rural France.

Now, home is on Giabal country mountains, in Toowoomba, Australia. This is a place of gardens, big skies and sometimes living in the clouds. I pay my respects to Elders past, present and emerging — and acknowledge their sovereignty was never ceded.

 
 
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Joining a healthier evolution

 
 

These days, I’m drawn to melding all my skills to enhance wellbeing By design.

The future I am looking toward fosters healthy environments, creativity and inclusive cultures.

Re-making the world calls for an understanding of ourselves as part of living and constructed ecosystems. Each are variable and vulnerable but strength emerges when we tend to ourselves, our communities, and our planet, as deserving of care.

We need more spaces that help us do this well.

For designers, built and natural environment professionals

Complementing my writing is my keen (re-kindled) interest in design for wellbeing in varied physical spaces.

This was originally sparked by personal experience with loved ones in hospital in 2013–14. It grew when I received a Women in Technology short course scholarship in Sydney in 2016 and researched others’ anxiety; and in New York in 2017, during the global interaction design conference which included wayfinding and placemaking in museums and health facilities by centring the body.

Of course, the pandemic years have given us a significant understanding of wellbeing related to place and space, too.

In mid-late 2023, I undertook a unit of postgraduate study in healthy architecture and community design at the University of Melbourne, and became an emerging practitioner member of Urban Design Forum Australia.

Studying sustainability at the University of Tasmania is my focus in 2024.

Please get in touch if you think we could help each other.

 
 
 

A book as a love letter, and other important notes

“So vivid, evocative. The book gave me new eyes to see the world.”

— Elizabeth, US reader of “GO”

GO: A memoir of wanderlust and anxiety is my love letter to exploration, special people and places. 

It’s also a refusal to attach stigma to varied states of mental health, and a tangible reminder that troublesome anxiety is only part of my experience. Keeping it a secret — so deeply and utterly, because I was ashamed — fed its power for too long. 

Anxiety was far more widespread than I’d imagined, each year affecting: more than 2 million people in Australia; 44 million in the US; 60 million in the EU.*

That was before the pandemic! I wasn’t alone. If you relate: neither are you.

Let’s normalise non-judgemental conversations about the spectrum of health and wellbeing, and the multi-faceted interplay determining our experience of life. 

*Sources: (AU) Beyond Blue; (US) NIMH; (EU) Brain and Behaviour journal.

Authorship is a teacher

GO took 2 years to write — including a research period and 5.5 drafts. Post-production took a further 6 months.

Writing this book taught me invaluable lessons about sustained effort and the associated emotional landscape of creative self-leadership. 

I’m proud of the finished product and how it has moved readers to say “I LOVED it” (their emphasis).

You can find out more and buy it from here.

 
 

Still curious?

I like that about you.

Fun facts, because you’ve read this far:

  • My nana taught me to say the alphabet backwards when I was 6; it’s been more useful than expected.

  • I was never really into organised sport. Then, on a whim as an adult, I tried fencing and archery and loved them! Now I can say Renaissance sports are my thing. ;-)

 
 

Brief notes for big thinkers

notes from the studio:
books, writing, design, life

I guarantee I’ll only write to you when I have something meaningful to share.

 
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