Prolific Writer Sarah Gilbert '95 Founds New Magazine
A former investment banker turned award-winning memoirist and blogger, Sarah Gilbert, of the Class of 1995, is founder of the Portland, Ore., parenting community urbanmamas.com and also founder and editor-in-chief of a new magazine, Stealing Time.
The quarterly literary magazine for parents, which she got started through a Kickstarter campaign, gives “not judgment, not advice, but our stories.” In an interview last spring for Flyover Feminism website, Sarah talked about how the magazine came to be:
This idea came from where come all good ideas: the void. Specifically, a void of truly-told, carefully-examined parenting stories. There are many parenting stories in the mainstream media, but they’re often very flat and one-dimensional. In my experience as a consumer of other parenting stories and as a writer of them, I have repeatedly felt this hunger for better, clearer, wider-angle looks at the spectrum of parenting experience, told without the context of what you should do, or what a perfect socially-acceptable, best-of-all-possible-worlds parent would do, feel, think — but what we actually DO.
The parent of three sons, Sarah is also president of the Oregon Writers Colony board of directors and writes in a variety of styles on an even wider variety of topics — from food to photography to finances. She calls herself a “blogger by trade and a finance geek at heart.”
With an M.B.A. from Wharton, Sarah also writes for “Get Rich Slowly,” a blog devoted to “sensible personal finance.” Her most recent post there, from July 30, is titled “Can you be friends with rich people?” And she’s also won awards for her essays: “Veteran’s Day” received the 2011 Water-Stone Review Judith Kitchen Creative Nonfiction Prize. It was also nominated for a Pushcart Prize and listed as a “Notable Essay” in Best American Essays 2012.
In an interview last March with literary mama, Sarah indicated that “Veteran’s Day” is the basis for a book-length project that she’s working on titled “Penelope and Other Heroes: Retelling the Myth of the Waiting Wife.” Her husband has been serving with the Army Reserves in Kuwait.
And if all that isn’t enough, Sarah made some national headlines back in 2009 with her tweets of protest about being turned away from a hamburger chain’s drive-through because she and her three boys were all on a stretch bicycle. You can still read about that incident on USA Today, and you need to remember that this was back when Twitter was really in its infancy.
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