My Studio Fare Resident Bio

A poet, essayist, and environmental scientist, Susan Rose April, has now published over 25 poems and essays, one of which ‘Chain Pickerel’ was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize after being published in the online journal Collateral. In Studio Faire, Susan was seeking a place that ‘feels like home but is also 6,184 km away’, where she could re-examine and order her past works in solitude, in order to bring them together into a united manuscript.

Written by Julia Douglas for Studio Faire

Photo by Colin Usher

My Testimonial From the Experience

If there exists a more perfect artist residency than Studio Faire with Colin and Julia in Nérac, I don’t know where that is. Nérac itself is a magical place. One of the best Saturday farmer’s markets in France. Watch—or better still—ride one of riverboats along the picturesque River Baïse that flows oddly green, but is in fact super healthy (due to phytoplankton), through the center of town. Walk. Stroll. Think. Write. Create art. Share pizza. Talk about everything. Or about nothing. Commune with fellow residents. Laugh. Cry. Admire the love and hard work that Julia and Colin have put into their home to make it so welcoming and fruitful to the arts. Even if it rains, you do not mind. It’s a healthy kind of rain. Cleansing. I am grateful to Studio Faire for two very special weeks I will never forget. Now stateside, I challenge myself weekly to find a decent bottle of French wine in rural Maryland (a real challenge) and drink a toast in the general direction of Nérac, to Julia and Colin, to their beloved fur-children, and to the me who wrote at first timidly, then more boldly, in a garden under the stairs.

August: Creative Nonfiction Memoir piece—Dancing at Holy Ghost Park—in the fourth installment of The Lowell Review. Page one! Last name starting with the letter A comes in handy. The Lowell Review here. A beautiful book.

September: Our West Coast son visits, we do stone wall repairs, birding in Cape May NJ. Then two art pieces out in The Closed Eye Open. “Sand” as a Featured Selection.

December: Poems to be published in Elk River Writers Workshop 10th Anniversary Anthology in (Spring 2025); also a flash essay about starlings, catalpa trees, and the death of my grandfather David while Marlin fishing in Florida, published in Frederick County Nature Council Anthology.

Origins of This Website

I have Dean Lunt, editor and publisher/founder of Islandport Press to thank for the idea of this website. We met on a bleak Saturday afternoon in Portland, Maine, at a Pitch-an-Agent-or-Publisher event. Dean and I had a brief seven minutes together. Seemed interested. Asked if I had a website. I said no. The door then flew open, which was my cue to exit. Dean shook his pocket notebook, “I like you. But it’s not much to go on.”

I got the point. So I launched this author-also-she’s-an-artist website. If it succeeds at being “much to go on,” that’s due to: Amanda Godlove of Lux Photography, for her patience & sense of humor; to Jeananne and O. Colin Stine of Elmwood Fields, for hosting us at their beautiful and historic farm in Shepherdstown, WV. Last but not least, to my web designer, Gerry Nelson, a special friend. I’ve felt like Lieutenant Colombo at times, “Just one more thing.” But Gerry has been understanding.

Welcome.