Susan Stinson
What others say about Susan Stinson and Venus of Chalk: "I am an enormous fan of Susan Stinson's work, and, as a fan, consider it my duty to help more and more people know about its wonders: I can think of no-one who writes with more love, passion, and precision about the pleasures of the body and the pleasures of the soul, and that nebulous (often neglected) intersection of body and soul. She writes extraordinary love stories, with intelligence and generosity and a wild imagination." Elizabeth McCracken, author The Giant's House (National Book Award finalist) "Through an ardent faith in the written word Susan Stinson is a novelist who translates a mundane world into the most poetic of possibilities." Alice Sebold, author The Lovely Bones "Venus of Chalk is a classic road novel, full of unexpected revelations and parallels between Carline's old world and her new, but her interior and physical life are like nothing you've ever read before. " Chicago Reader "Like her characters, Stinson is “chronically interested” in every aspect of life and her incredible eye for detail is astonishing and translates movingly into the pages of this wonderful novel." Altar Magazine "The magic of this elegant novel is that it embraces both the surreal and the so real with sublime charm." Richard Labonte, Book Marks "Stinson's prose style is reminiscent of some independent films--quiet, plain, quirky and true." The Women's Times "...one of the best books of the year." Midwest Book Review "Susan Stinson uses her exceptional literary vision to take the readers along on a wild bus ride of our own, all the while facing ourselves, and returning, renewed, to our extraordinary lives." Janet Mason This Way Out |
WritingSpider In a Tree
Spider In A Tree Mr. Edwards was aware of how much he loved to write letters. He searched the sources and limits of everything he felt in order to ensure that his affections were entirely in service of his love of God, never threatening to displace or surpass it, never feeding any illusion of control on his part in conflict with the truth that all things were in the hands of his perfectly Sovereign God. So he noted the ways that his heart beat faster whenever he dipped his quill into the ink. There was a rhythm to writing letters that he thought might be tied to the breath, and so, of course, to the soul. Certainly, yes, this was felt in the curl and press of the fingers on a quill, in the way an arm slid along a page, how a sleeve might pick up ink, might smear the words of the careless. Certain ministers – Mr. Edwards was one of them, and Solomon Stoddard, even more so – could write so small as to get the full hours of a sermon onto one or two sides of a most diminutive page. A whole town, even one peopled with those who fought each other over the right to build hog pens on the commons, could be held still by the rise and lean of the inked letters, to wait for God in his disordered house under a steady rain of argument and exhortation from a poet preacher with a logician's discipline and fierceness drawn from total submission to the spirit and language of the one true Word of God. To write a letter was to reach for another person in a private, circumspect way. A letter that might be published was still allowed a certain personal expression, a feeling of casual discourse, not to say intimacy, that was rarely approached in a sermon. How to get a letter from one place to another was a perpetual question. The safest way would be to take it oneself, but then one might as well simply ride and talk, not write. Ship's captains were known to be rascals. One had famously actually cursed God when hot tar was spilled on his foot. (He had been prosecuted and convicted of blasphemy.) Otherwise dear friends might prove careless in ensuring a letter's safe delivery. An important communication might sit on a neighbor's mantelpiece for weeks, unless the addressee, moved by gossip or intuition, came in search of it. Or a traveler might be standing in the hallway, ready to get a difficult journey underway, whilst the writer, seizing the chance to get word of themselves to distant parties, worked in haste. Overseas communications were all the more slow and uncertain. But a letter writer could feel the pull of a true correspondent from the other end of the world. There was that itch, that opening of feeling in privacy, the recalcitrant pleasures of pressing meaning into a surface, of letting a calmly silent version of ones voice spill recklessly across the page, or in tracing the minutest inflections of beloved matters in careful sentences, composed and reflected upon, then copied again. And then, bravely, uncertainly, irrevocably, sent. Mr. Edwards knew himself best as a writer. It was where he most openly showed his tenderness. He wanted to disappear in the words, wanted to be unheard, unread, less than dust while God danced in his letters like specks in the sun, filtering every word through His Light. That was what Mr. Edwards wanted, except when he was seized by pride. A whole town could be held still, except for those in it who were not.  Venus of Chalk
Venus of Chalk, Susan's most recent novel, was published by Firebrand Books in 2004. It is the story unlikely companions on a fast bus to Texas. VENUS OF CHALK was one of BOOK MARK's top ten fiction books of 2004.  Martha Moody
Winner of the Benjamin Franklin Award in Fiction, Martha Moody is a speculative western, embracing both ordinary and magical details of women's lives in the old west. It is, also, an old-fashioned love story. In precise language that dips into the sensuous delights of the flesh and the palate, the reader witnesses the love in Amanda Linger's life. "A tale of longing and self identification and reconciliation. Amanda Linger pines for shop owner Martha Moody whose girth, sensuous folds of flesh and loving caresses pull Amanda out of the stasis of a loveless marriage...MARTHA MOODY is a tender exquisitely rendered story with strong characters, a sense of love and magic surrounding them, and one incredible cow." Icon Magazine, Toronto  Fat Girl Dances with Rocks
It's the summer of drinking and driving, disco and diets, fake IDs and geology, and fat 17-year-old Char is wondering if she is animal, vegetable, or mineral. What does it mean when your best friend French-braids your hair, kisses you on the lips, and leaves town? Char gets a summer job in a nursing home, and meets people with bodies and abilities as various as the textures of the rocks her friend Felice collects. Fat Girl Dances with Rocks is a novel about the many shapes of beauty: the fold of a belly, the green swelling of seedlings, the sharp edges of granite, obsidian, and flint. Fat Girl Dances with Rocks is a coming of age story. It is a coming out story, and for Char, it is a story of coming into her own body - all the way to the edges of her skin. |
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