Susie Meserve : part one

Susie Meserve is a poet and essayist whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, New York Times, Indiana Review, Gulf Coast, the San Francisco Chronicle, and many more. Her debut poetry collection, Little Prayers, won a Blue Light Award and was published by Blue Light Press in 2018. She is also the author of a chapbook, Faith. Born and raised in New England, Susie now lives in Northern California with her family.

Photo credit: Ashley Lauren Saks

What are you working on?

I’m actually writing a novel at the moment. I have a completed poetry manuscript that’s on submission, and I’m always writing poems around the edges, but over the spring and summer some material presented itself and as I tried to fill in the blanks to make sense of it, I realized I was creating characters. The novel’s got two protagonists, a current-day mother living in Northern California and a Swedish immigrant living on the prairie in the late 1800s with her family. The characters are autobiographical to some extent, and the book is requiring research; I’m excited about it (and a little terrified). I toggle between poetry and prose quite frequently, but a novel—it feels daunting, and it is, but I’m muddling through it.