About Susan Adair Harris, Author

I started writing seriously in middle school where I entertained my girlfriends with dramatic readings of my noble novelettes of immense romance and adventure—a western, a Biblical epic, a Gothic mystery, and folksy Americana.  I didn’t care that I didn’t understand sex and neither did my fans.  I had learned innuendo!

I trudged in and out of teaching.  I taught students from universities, a community college, foreign countries, a prison, and public and private high schools—students who sometimes exhibited emotional illnesses or substance abuse issues; students who might have come from special education classes and students who were extraordinarily skilled at succeeding in school; students whose families were rich enough to finance a flying license or catered parties with live orchestras, and students whose families were so poor that they lived huddled together with other families in a single apartment.  I loved them all—with a very few glaring exceptions.  In workshops and webinars, I also trained instructors who often inspired me, although the institution of education didn’t.

In marriage, I came to understand the many aspects of love and what it is to be a stepmother and a wife.  My adoration of Nature that had begun in my childhood intensified.  My husband and I hiked the mountains; traveled a little; rode, tended, and trained our own horses; raised dogs and cats and a donkey, and worked on a tourist steam train.  We dabbled at art.  Death instructed my life as did joy and birth and friendship and misunderstandings.  I wrote screenplays with a film producer who became a lifelong friend and edited a photography e-zine.  I have much to share, because I love much.

What do I write?  Whatever my heart directs me to write—novels, mostly, because I’ve already spent too many years writing to inform.  Now I want to pose questions without simple answers and situations that challenge regular people to become extraordinary—questions and situations that make my readers think and laugh and cry.  Even if I’m writing literary fiction, fantasy, or science fiction, I’m always writing the reality of the heart, because that is where I live.