Sara Stegen is a Dutch writer, poet and equity & inclusion advocate. She writes about people and the Dutch rural landscape she lives in. Sara is currently working on a memoir about apples and autism. She is mother of two neurodivergent sons: one a black belt lockpicker, the other a fourth-time Dutch bike trial champion. And she helps families struggling in the education system.
She has published in The Brussels Review, Spelt, Ranchlands Review, in the International Women’s Writing Guild (IWWG) publication ‘IWWG Network Fall 2022’, and was short-listed in the 2022 Urban Tree Festival Writing Competition with her poem Trees of Ukraine. Sara has an MA in English from the University of Groningen and is a 2022 Rural Writing Institute alumnus, a retreat run by best-selling authors Kathryn Aalto (Writing Wild, The Natural World of Winnie-the-Pooh) and James Rebanks (English Pastoral, A Shepherd’s Life).
Besides being a writer, an avid recreational cyclist – there is no reason not to bike – and lover of stories, she works for the Research Centre Art&Society of Hanze University. Sara lives on a boulder-clay ridge in the northern Netherlands where her bike shed contains 8 bicycles.
Grass My mother became ill. A sky-high blood pressure, a stampeding heart, tingling limbs and her head hurt. She turned into a shadow of
The amaryllis in the white pot near the living room window is sporting a tiny green leaf coming up from the middle of the dried-up
What is your favorite apple? For my memoir about apples and autism I’m diving into the world of heirloom apples. This fall I’ve procured 25
What do heirloom apples, Frisian cows, farming, prehistoric burial chambers, little crater woods, autism, my family and a boulder clay ridge have in common? Not