Sarah B. Mohler

About

I grew up in Watertown, WI. My mother instilled a love of books in me early by reading The Secret Garden and The Little Princess out loud to me. I read and reread the works of Louisa May Alcott, Frances Hodgson Burnett, L. M. Montgomery, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Sydney Taylor, Mary Norton, Elizabeth Enright, Madeline L’Engle, and Lloyd Alexander throughout my childhood. In my tweens, I was obsessed with The Bobbsey Twins and Trixie Belden. In my teens, these childhood favorites gave way to the works of Jane Austen, George Eliot, Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and John Steinbeck. I dreamed of becoming a writer.

My favorite summer memories were camping with my family, where we’d swim and fish all day long and gather around the campfire at night for popcorn, pudgie pies, and s’mores.

Since the age of fifteen, I worked part-time at my local library shelving, mending, and cataloging books. But, if you asked me at the age of eighteen, what my future career would be, I would have told you journalism. I edited both my high school newspaper and yearbook and had a weekly column in the Watertown Daily Times. I was accepted by my dream school, Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. However, I had no more than arrived at Northwestern when I fell passionately in love with the works of Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov while taking a course with Prof. Saul Morson. I went home winter break and told my parents I was switching my major to Slavic Studies. In 1993, I was studying abroad in Moscow and witnessed the October coup.

As a first-generation college student, I had never dreamed of going to graduate school, but with Saul Morson’s encouragement, I applied to and was accepted by Princeton, where I continued my studies of Russian and Eastern European literature. I had many wonderful mentors, including Caryl Emerson, Olga Hasty, Ellen Chances, and Michael Wachtel. Princeton is also where I met my husband, Chad Mohler, who was studying philosophy. We married and moved to Kirksville, MO where we both accepted positions at Truman State University.

In 2003, I was diagnosed with a life-threatening blood-clotting disorder, caused by an MTHFR gene mutation, which I later found out was also linked to my infertility and, to my sudden 60% hearing loss in my forties. I will always be grateful for the love and support shown to me by the doctors and nurses who saved my life and cared for me during my illness, and my family, friends and colleagues, who stayed with me, supported me, and packed up all our possessions and moved them to the house we bought the day I was admitted to the hospital.

Everything in my life after 2003 has been a blessing. In 2006, my husband and I traveled to China to adopt our amazing child. In 2011, I stood awestruck in front of the Taj Mahal and wished I could have whispered to my twelve-year-old self, “You’ll travel to so many wonderful places one day.” In 2018, I decided to do something about those childhood dreams of becoming a writer and started creating the characters that appear in my novel, The Silence Between the Notes. In 2019, I received tenure and was promoted to associate professor. I can’t wait to see where life takes me next.

Facts

• Pronouns: (she, her)
• Lives in Kirksville, MO
• Married
• Mom to a wonderful child
• Born in 1972, in Watertown, WI
• One of the smallest, premature babies to survive in the just-opened neonatal care unit of St. Mary’s hospital in Madison, WI
• Worked one summer as a Swiss Maid in a Wisconsin Dells fudge shop
• Left-handed
• Loves the color blue
• Adores rain and snow
• Loves doing The New York Times crossword
• Can’t dance, sing, paint, garden, or ride a bike, but occasionally tries anyway
• Thinks breakfast is the most wonderful meal of the day
• Drinks coffee in the morning, tea in the afternoon, and cocoa before bed
• Still hopes to visit Great Britain, Denmark, and Iceland someday
• Thinks Acadia National Park is heaven
• Will never say no to Indian, Ethiopian or Chinese food