Third of a weekly series of four essays about writing craft. "I want writers at every point of their career to know that they can do this. It is possible to write work that no one except you and a few other pockets of literary adventurers have even dreamed of wanting to read."
Hey! Small Beer Press has reissued my beloved, weird, fat lesbian novel Martha Moody! I love the cover art by Theo Black! Here's a link to the Martha Moody page at Small Beer Press.
About the book from the website: "At once a love story and a lush comic masterpiece, Martha Moody is a speculative western which embraces the ordinary and gritty details -- as well as the magic -- of women's lives in the old west."
Now there's a link at Book Moon Books so that if you've got a US mailing address, you can get almost all of my books, including Belly Songs. What you do is, click the button to order Martha Moody, then write in "Belly Songs" or "Venus of Chalk" or "Spider in a Tree." Then, you'll get the book and the money goes to me. It works that way because these small and micro press books aren't on the distributor's website, but Gavin from Book Moon came to my stairs and fetched the books, so I know they are there. (Fat Girl Dances With Rocks isn't available because it's out of print and I don't have copies.)
I am a novelist and poet whose work centers on the lives of characters who love rules yet cannot live within them. These stories are fueled by beauty that transgresses conventions of body size, sexuality and historical identity. My books are about ideology and disorder, continuity and disruption, bodies and souls.
Recent Work
Susan's novel, Spider in a Tree, is about Northampton, Massachusetts in the time of Jonathan Edwards, the eighteenth century preacher and theologian best known for his sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of An Angry God." Leah and Saul, enslaved in the Edwards household, are central to the story. Susan lives across Bridge Street from the Northampton cemetery where Jonathan Edwards and many of his family have memorials and graves. Time spent in that beautiful, place inspired the book. In Spring 2019, she is teaching a class on Writing Historical Fiction at Amherst College.
Susan is now at work on a novel set in seventeenth century Connecticut. It is inspired by events in the life of Elizabeth Tuttle, Jonathan Edwards's grandmother. She has had fellowships at Hawthornden Castle in Scotland and the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester in support of writing and research for this novel.
Contact
Susan Stinson
PO Box 1272
Northampton, MA
01061
susan@susanstinson.net