Sarah Rabkin

Sarah is a teacher, editor, visual artist, and writer; her nonfiction collection What I Learned at Bug Camp: Essays on Finding a Home in the World was published in May 2011. She studied science communication in graduate school at UC Santa Cruz and has taught in UCSC’s writing and journalism programs and environmental studies department since 1985. Writing and sketching serves her as conduits to a closer relationship with the world; she leads outdoor illustrated-field-journal workshops as a way of sharing those tools. Sarah grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, went to college in New England, and taught high-school science in Colorado before putting down roots on the shore of Monterey Bay. She has served on the board of the Natural History Network for the past two years.

Conversations:

• A record
• Hummingbird nostril hitchhikers

Workshops:

• Synthesis

I have about three shelves of a bookcase that are filled with journals that I've been keeping since 1971, and most of those I don't take out for show-and-tell. I'm not an accomplished artist in the sense that they're all beautiful pages. Once in a while, I end up with something that is not only instructive for me, but aesthetically interesting to look at. But most of the pages in most of those journals are scribble and scrawl and messes, and I sometimes think about not keeping them. But they are a record of both the observations and the observer.