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.

 
 
SM-AboutHeader.jpg
 

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 environments which enhance human and ecological flourishing.

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, which prompted a recent return to university.

This interest 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-2023, I became an emerging practitioner member of Urban Design Forum Australia as I undertook a unit of graduate study in healthy architecture and community design at the University of Melbourne.

In 2024, I completed a sustainable living certification at the University of Tasmania, focusing on built environment design.

I’m returning to the University of Melbourne in 2025 for further graduate studies in design for health and wellbeing in the built environment, including applied design thinking.

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 places and people. 

It took 2 years to write, during which I learned invaluable lessons about sustained effort and the associated emotional landscape of creative self-leadership. I’m proud that it moved readers to say they loved it.

The book is also a refusal to attach stigma to varied states of mental health, and a tangible personal 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. 

During research, I discovered 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.

Find out more and buy GO here.

 
 

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.

 
SM-OptIn-Banner.jpg