Essays & Stories
 

Sarah Harley is a nonfiction writer whose essays explore trauma, memory, and identity. Her work has appeared in West Trade Review, Glassworks Magazine, Mud Season Review, and other literary journals. She is currently completing a collection titled Back to Blue: A Braided Memoir in Essays, as well as a novella, The Age of Consent.
 

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2026

The Deep Blue Fugue Reprint​​

SugarSugarSalt Lit Magazine (July)

— I learned how to walk in and out of the fugue that surrounded my mother when I was seven. It was edged with a shimmery iridescent light, which marked its end and its beginning. ​

 

 

Jetty Marsh​​

Cagibi, Issue 28 (July)

​— Cattails. Reed grass. Small birds flitting through the shadows. Nightingales came out at dusk but I didn’t fully recognize their songs.

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Through the Tunnel

Multiplicity, (Summer)

​— I try to piece together what has been dragged in with the tide: parts of lost nets and small polished stones; emotions and hardships, weathered by time. 

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Back to Blue

Orange Blossom Review (June)

— After he was gone, I had to find my way back to myself, like searching for a path through an overgrown garden.

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Cross Your Heart and Hope to Die

Solstice Literary Magazine (April)

— I’d learned early that the female body was both weapon and wound — desired, feared, and always under inspection, even by its owner.​

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Hard Truths and Plum Pie

The Write Launch (March)

— A gas oven, compact and white, was central to the claustrophobic kitchen of the childhood house. Stillness felt heavier than air.​​

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The Oath I Took

Front Porch Republic (February)​

— Through the storefront windows, we looked at displays of pink and white sugar meringues and intricate three-tiered wedding cakes.

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Toward the Edge of Nothing

Sonora Review (January)

— Outside, just before nightfall, swallows cut the sky in frantic spirals. Light begins to fade, the sky sinks into a darker grey.

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2025

The Rest

Press Pause Press Volume 11 (October)

— The forest always takes me back, kindly and tenderly, as if I'd never left. She wraps herself around me as a lover would. 

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The House of Dolls

The Hemlock Journal (October)

— I longed to protect the dolls, as if they were baby doves we had brought home from the woods.

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The Eiderdown

Pithead Chapel, Volume 14 (October)​​​

— We twirl across a wooden floor to an old song, the kind she might have played on a crackling record player when she was young.

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Pernod: A Love Story

Chaotic Merge Magazine, Issue 9 (September)

— The first sip always evokes something half-remembered, bitter herbs and damp earth, the memory of a garden after rain— as if the past was dissolved into a single glass.

Read Full Essay (PDF)

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​Night Swimming

EcoTheo Collective (September) 

— We were migrating too, although I didn’t know it at the time. We were migrating through each other’s lives, without a shared destination.

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Where the Water Goes

The Awakenings Review (Fall)

— I was like the river, wanting to reach the sea and let go of everything I had been carrying: memories, hurt, clutches of abandonment; silt and broken branches.​​

Read Full Essay (PDF)

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The Emptying

Ginosko Literary Journal (Spring-Summer 2025)  

— It is June. Rooms are filled with slants of golden light; the air is thick with damp earthiness. 

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The Weather
Wayfarer Magazine (July)
— We were lost in our own world — the lovers' world. 

​The End in the Beginning
Quail Bell Magazine (May)—(Archived)

Read Full Essay (PDF)
​— The longing pulled me like a river, for him to be my end and my beginning.

How to Love in Reverse
The Write Launch, Issue 92 (February)
— In the beginning, a farewell. Two lovers say goodbye. An embrace begins to loosen before letting go. 

The Paper Flowers​
Pensive, A Global Journal of Spirituality & the Arts (January)
— Everything big is made up of a collection of the small. In the smallness of the flowers, my father brought a part of the forest home with him.

​Walking the Line
Bluestem Magazine (Winter) 

— I built a watchtower along the borderland between normal and delusion. 

2024
Dimensions of a Coffin Reprint
SugarSugarSalt Magazine (November)

— I can see her twirling, in a dark blue raincoat, cinched at the waist over the bright flash of her favorite dress.

All Things Parallel
Chicago Story Press (October)
​— She possessed a need to become the tiniest version of herself. So she became smaller and smaller, as if she would, one day, vanish altogether. 

​All That Glitters
Please See Me, Issue 15 (October) 
​— It started with an eyelash, the feeling of a twinkling presence. I wondered if it was the earliest formation of a wish.

The Atlantic Hotel​
Mud Season Review, Issue 75 (September) 
— There’s a hotel room in my mind. White walls and narrow windows with rippling glass, tall enough to walk through like a door.

​The Bridge to Nowhere
Halfway Down the Stairs (September)  
— We lived with the goats in the lyrical colors, yellow and pale blue, of a Norwegian spring, a faraway hill in imagined safety.

The Bridge
Where Meadows, Issue 2.2 (September) 
—The bridge goes from one place called nowhere to another. 
Read Full Essay (PDF)

Drinking
The Perch, Yale University, Volume 7 (Spring)
— People say that a love for the bottle runs in families, altering the course of people’s lives like a river carving out a valley. In our family, the river ran deep. 

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Love by the Tracks
Litro Online (April)
 — Love is the vestige in which the sweetness of all things lost remains.

The Wings
West Trade Review, Volume 15 (Spring)

Read Full Essay (PDF)

— With gossamer threads and silver light, and stinging nettles, the wings were woven together. The anatomy of the wings was such that they would be attached to my brother’s shoulders. 

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Have You Got the Moon Safe?
Glassworks Magazine, Issue 28 (Spring)

— I started to carry an imaginary moon everywhere with me, folded up inside a string bag, hoping it wouldn’t be crushed by a loaf of bread or a bag of clementines.

The Things We Neglect
Press Pause Press, Volume 9 (February)

— We ate the salad in the garden like defunct Italian lovers outside a villa.

The Deep Blue Fugue
Quail Bell Magazine (February)—(Archived)

Read Full Essay (PDF)

2023
Lost at Sea

Longridge Review (Fall)

— There’s a lullaby, a gentle rocking, a hush-a-bye song about pretty little horses, white horses clipping along in the waves.

The Character Lessons
Litro Online (June)

— My father was the falconer. As a fledgeling, I was expected to alight on his outstretched arm, in a flawless landing, rearrange my feathers this way and that. 

The Episodes
Herstry (June)

— I imagine my troubled mother glancing at the triplicate versions of herself, the three selves in the looking glass.

Paper Dolls
Quail Bell Magazine (May)—(Archived)
—  I see it now: the dolls were tiny replicas of my young mother. 

Read Full Essay (PDF)

The Arc of Motherhood
The Thieving Magpie (Spring)
 — The story was told in a dark cave where spells and mirth were made, where curses were cast.

When the Hills Fell
Idle Ink - Curiouser & Curiouser (February)
 —  We grew up in the damage, in the ruins wrenched by the fault line from which our family was created.

  
 2022
Dimensions of a Coffin
Halfway Down the Stairs (June)

 —​ Pain has rented a space in me in exchange for a piece of myself.