In her middle age, Susan Rowland, born in London UK, ran away to marry American poet, Joel Weishaus. They now live in southern California where Susan is achieving her life-long ambition to write mystery novels about undervalued women. She is also a teacher and scholar of Jung, literary criticism, feminism and the arts. What she loves about teaching at Pacifica Graduate Institute is the fostering of the innate creativity of the psyche, which she does in the MA Engaged Humanities and in the Doctoral program in Jung and Archetypal Studies.
Susan attended Oxford University with a career that bears some resemblance to her protagonist, Mary Wandwalker. Characteristics she shares with the other members of the detecting trio, Caroline Jones and Anna Vronsky, may be deduced from the mysteries. Before taking up detective fiction, Susan wrote books about Jung, gender and the arts. Jung: A Feminist Revision is her most googled work, suggesting unfinished business with both his post-Romantic psychology and the man himself. Jung, Susan concludes, was dedicated to restoring the lost feminine of modernity, while deploring the necessity for equality between men and women.
Lucky to have two superb siblings, Susan visits the UK and wanders the wet woods of her childhood home in Surrey. Her greatest disappointments are that she is an awful gardener and a mediocre cook. Only in her writing does she intuit divine sparks that may just become articulate. She knows she should dance more and watch less TV. Above all, Susan wants to write and read stories with happy endings because there aren’t enough in real life. She regards her own story as proof that real love does exist and that soul mates will find each other, in this life or the next.
