When her writing is hot, Susan feels as if she has no pants on. If she feels comfortable and well-dressed, she knows she hasn’t been honest enough for the words to matter.
As a child, she’d climb inside the linen closet, away from siblings’ prying eyes, to write what couldn’t be spoken in a red leather diary the size of her hand. It had a tiny gold key to unlock the clasp. Her writing is like that little key working that diary’s lock.
Susan spent the summer she turned seventeen in an attic room in old Quebec handwriting her first novel. Print run of 0. Since then, she’s traveled through and lived in Europe, Central America, the Caribbean, Canada, and India. Her day jobs have included factory work in textiles and herring processing, the service industry from cocktail waitress to fine dining to management, and since 1990, the world of healing – from therapeutic bodywork to experiential awareness retreats. But Susan has always had a pen in hand.
After completing A Novel Approach with Sue Reynolds in 2009 – a year-long course to write a novel’s first draft, Susan attended numerous workshops, retreats, and courses, including The Humber School for Writers, to hone her writing craft. In 2014, she was certified as an Amherst Writers & Artists writing workshop facilitator. Since then, she’s led workshops and retreats in the AWA method internationally and closer to home. At the beginning of the pandemic, Susan took her workshops to Zoom, creating a much wider community of writers.
The first three chapters of What the Living Do won first place in Lazuli Literary Group’s prose contest in 2017 and published in Azure magazine. In 2016, Susan’s story, “Tender Fruit,” won The Writers’ Union of Canada’s prose contest. Her work has appeared in The Blood Pudding, WOW-Women on Writing, The Writing District, Room, and carte blanche magazines, as well as several anthologies.
As a settler married for ten years to an Ojibwe man and with whom she has a son, Susan’s experiences with that culture color much of her work.
She lives beside a quiet river in Sebright, Ontario, Canada with her son, his partner, and two oddball cats.
Regal House Publishing is proud to bring you What the Living Do in the spring of 2024
