I write stories about movement, memory, and the quiet work of finding joy and meaning in the small moments of life.
My writing explores the fears that hold us back, the stories we tell ourselves to avoid change, and the possibilities that open when we slow down long enough to listen.
I don’t write as an expert with answers. I write as a companion—someone muddling through the messiness of life alongside you, asking new questions, noticing small moments, and trusting that attention itself can be a form of courage.
Much of my writing grew out of a season of transition. After decades working as an urban planner, raising three children, and building a demanding professional life, I found myself facing an empty nest and deep burnout. The day after my youngest left for college, I got behind the wheel of my 1970 Porsche 911T—affectionately known as the Blue Car—and set out on a solo cross-country road trip.
That journey lasted three and a half months and more than 14,000 miles, but the real movement happened within. The Blue Car became both companion and lens—a way to explore choice, pause, solitude, and the inner shifts that happen when we stop running and doing. While the road sparked my daily writing practice, my essays are not travel guides. They are reflections on change, grief, joy, agency, and the courage to begin again.
I am a late bloomer as a writer and delighted by it. I took my first writing class in 2023 and published my first essay a year later—about the Blue Car—inside Hagerty Car Club Magazine. What mattered most to me was not seeing my words in print but hearing from readers who recognized themselves in my story and wanted to share their own.
45 days and 6,193 miles into my 3-1/2 month, 14,000 cross- country road trip.
Before this writing chapter, I spent three decades as a city planner, listening to people talk about what they longed for and feared: community, belonging, change, stability. I taught graduate workshops as a Lecturer in Urban Planning and Design at MIT, led research funded by the Ford and MetLife Foundations, and spoke around the world about how ordinary people work together to make better lives and places. That work shaped how I see the world—and how I write.
Creativity has always been a throughline in my life. I grew up performing in community theater, renovated buildings to pay for college, and have spent years shaping cities and neighborhoods. Each of these parts of my story begins the same way: messy, uncertain, unfinished. I love that stage—the empty lot, the first draft, the bare walls—because it’s where possibility lives.
Susan age 5
I write early in the morning, when the world is quiet. I am a sunrise junkie, a passionate photographer, and someone who believes deeply in everyday beauty. Not the razzle dazzle kind but the simple make-you-smile kind. I use my good china every day. I drive the Blue Car on winding Vermont roads whenever I can. And I am always asking the same question, on the page and in life:
What are we waiting for?
A sunrise moment at Grand Teton National Park
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