Meet Susan

I grew up a Tomboy in Minnesota and Wisconsin with either my nose in a book or my toes in the water. After graduating with a Masters in International Management from AGSIM-Thunderbird, I spent fifteen years as a business executive calling on breweries worldwide. The experience writ large was mind-blowing. I gained a treasured perspective on cultural, human, and environmental diversity. I gobbled up each new opportunity for learning, giving, and growing.

Though technically retired, I still work part-time for a company focused on regional agriculture, new technologies, and craft brewing.

Always a writer, I often attempt to solve my problems in the third person, creating fictionalized versions of myself and the main characters in my life—mostly in my head, but sometimes on paper. Nearly a decade ago, in the days after discovering my own adoption story for the first time, I turned to my imagination to trick my reeling mind so I could get a good night’s sleep.

A THREAD SO FINE was born of those creative threads weaving into nocturnal dreams as I struggled to re-write the beginning of my own life story.

I created Shannon and Eliza, Nell, and Miriam as a way to imagine how women such as my Midwestern birth mother and adoptive mother might have overcome challenges as young Catholic women in an optimistic, but socially restrictive post-World War II culture. Except for FDR’s Labor Secretary, Mrs. Frances Perkins, the people in A THREAD SO FINE are all much-loved fabrications layered with realities, truths, and insights about my cherished mother, my brave birth mother, my beloved mother-in-law, my younger sister, and myself.

I’m working on a second novel set in Seattle in the early 2000s. Wish me luck! When not traveling for work or pleasure, I’m on either the family houseboat in Seattle or in a cabin in the dark and rainy, sometimes balmy woods of Lummi Island – and if I’m lucky, my husband Bruce is right there with me.