My 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.

Summer: essay, Dancing at Holy Ghost Park, out in the fourth installment of The Lowell Review. Page one! Last name starting with the letter A comes in handy. The Lowell Review here. Lots of great contributors. A beautiful book.

Autumn: a visit from my West Coast son, stone wall repairs, birding Cape May NJ. Two visuals out in Issue XII of The Closed Eye Open literary journal. Sand honored as a Featured Selection. The other is Kerouac at the Brook, a sliver of beer bottle glass actually collected Kerouac’s last home in St. Petersburg, Florida.nter: poems in Elk River Writers Workshop 10th Anniversary Anthology in (Spring 2025); and 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. Peace.

Website Launch

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

So today, I launch my author-and-artist website. If it succeeds at being “much to go on,” that’s due to: Amanda Godlove of Lux Photography, with thanks 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. Never tasted such an amazing cranberry cobbler. And those Red Angus heifers: darlings. Last but not least, to my web designer, Gerry Nelson, a special person. I’ve felt like Lieutenant Colombo at times, “Just one more thing.” Gerry has been understanding.

Welcome.