Suzanne Strempek Shea
Now accepting applications for Dingle Writers' Workshop!
Now accepting applications for Dingle Writers' Workshop!
About
Suzanne Strempek Shea grew up in a small Polish-American Western Massachusetts village, dreaming of becoming a horse trainer or an artist. Her first published writing was a newspaper she handwrote and drew for her parents every Saturday night when they went polka dancing and she stayed overnight downstairs at the home of her maternal grandparents. OK, so The Nutty News had only a circulation of one copy, but it was a start. She fell into writing in high school, when she went down to the office of The Palmer Journal and Monson Register, her town’s newspaper, to complain that it never wrote a story about the high school’s hockey team, which contained both a sport and a couple of boys she loved. The editor told her there were no reporters free to go to the games, and if she went, as she did to every game, she and her pal Barbara Sekula being the statisticians, why didn’t she just write up a story each week and hand it in for publication. She learned to write and shoot and develop on deadline. She also learned that it paid to complain.
Books
Selling the Lite of Heaven
The unnamed narrator, ingenuous yet unflappable, is the 32-year-old daughter of Polish immigrants who throughout life have slathered her in Vicks and mild exasperation. Still living under her parents’ roof, she is abandoned not at the altar but for the altar as her fiance leaves her for the priesthood. Attempting to sell her engagement ring through the newspaper classifieds, she meets a string of browsers, and her future.
Songs From a Leadlined Room
Songs from a Lead-Lined Room is a memoir rooted in truth and raw experience, with a sure and compelling voice. The lead-lined room is the radiation therapy unit where Suzanne was treated for breast cancer and is one of the settings of this diary she kept over those six and a half weeks, sharing her despair, confusion, and fear as well as the compassion and caring of her friends, her husband, and her fellow patients.
Shelf Life
While recovering from radiation therapy, Shea heard from a friend who was looking for help at her bookstore. Shea volunteered, seeing it as nothing more than a way to get out of her pajamas and back into the world. But over next twelve months, from St. Patrick’s Day through Poetry Month, graduation/Father’s Day/summer reading/Christmas and back again to those shamrock displays, Shea lived and breathed books in a place she says sells “ideas, stories, encouragement, answers, solace, validation, the basic ammunition for daily life.”