Susan Hanson teaches in the English Department at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. She also worked for 20 years as a newspaper journalist and has served as lay chaplain for the Episcopal campus ministry at Texas State since 1995. She is married and is the mother of a grown daughter.
Susan's favorite pastimes are native plant gardening, hiking, watching birds and other wildlife, traveling in the American West, photographing plants and landscapes, playing 12-string guitar, reading mysteries, and creating Web sites.
Besides mysteries, her reading interests include contemporary nature writing/creative nonfiction, memoir, social commentary, and the work of Christian mystics and contemplatives. One vein of her own writing focuses on the topics of nature and spirituality, while another takes a satiric look at the absurdities of everyday life. Her essay collection Icons of Loss and Grace: Moments from the Natural World was published by Texas Tech University Press in 2004. In addition, her nonfiction has appeared in Texas Parks & Wildlife magazine, EarthLight, The Nature Writing Newsletter, ISLE (the journal of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment), Southwestern Literature, Texas Books in Review, and Northern Lights. She will have an essay in the collections Let There Be Night, forthcoming from the University of Nevada Press, and The New Nature Writers: A Junction Anthology, from Texas Tech University Press.
A Note from Susan:
Like the other Story Circle mentors, I developed a love of writing at a very early age. My epiphany—the one in which I realized that writing is a part of who I am—occurred in Mrs. Donnaway's second grade class. We had been composing sentences with our spelling words that day, and when I put mine on the board, Mrs. Donnaway remarked that it was good. Oddly enough, that was all it took. The idea that the words in my head could actually create a bridge from my consciousness to someone else's was instructive and empowering. Of course, at the time I had no understanding of what was going on, but reflecting on it now, I can see how formational this simple experience was.
The spelling word? If memory serves, it was butterfly.
Throughout my childhood, reading and writing increasingly became my passions. Although I enjoyed some works of fiction—Nancy Drew mysteries and The Pink Motel by Carol Ryrie Brink among them—I was particularly drawn to that series of orange-backed biographies that was popular among young students at the time. I loved reading about Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox of Virginia; Jane Addams of Hull House; and the other historical figures featured in the series.
At the same time, I pored over books about science. I had long been fascinated by the natural world, by plants and birds and weather. Following my parents' lead, I became a gardener at an early age, and late in elementary school, I discovered the joys of camping. All would become fodder for writing I would do later on in life.
When I reached college, I found myself drawn equally in two directions—toward poetry, but also toward the essay, specifically the philosophical sort that examined the universal questions of life. In graduate school, however, I gravitated more toward poetry, so much so that for my thesis, I compiled a collection of original poetry, much of it focusing on nature. Some years later, well into my career teaching English at Texas State, I would swing in the other direction, going to work for the local newspaper, where I produced a weekly column as well as book reviews and features for nearly 20 years.
What my experience in journalism would give me, beyond a much-appreciated credibility with my students, was the confidence and mental dexterity that come from meeting multiple deadlines each week. During this time I would also discover the ways in which my training in poetry informed my work as a prose writer. I had learned to listen to the sounds of my words, to feel their rhythms, to be as concise as I could.
Although I continue to read and learn from poets like Mary Oliver and the late Jane Kenyon, I work only in the essay form these days, specifically the personal essay with a natural history twist. If this is a form you're attracted to as well, and you'd like to explore it under my mentorship, then I invite you to get in touch. I continue to teach writing at Texas State, so our work will need to take place via e-mail. Prospective students should have a good grasp of basic grammar as well as a clear idea of the sort of work they hope to produce.
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