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.

She did that, writing about a team that never won a game but was happy to have both Suzanne’s stories and photographs of each debacles in the paper when it came out every Thursday. At the same time, she got a parttime job photographing for the Sports section of The Springfield Daily News when at one of the hockey games she went up to the Daily News’ sports reporter to ask him why he never wrote about the Palmer Panthers. He began to write about the team, he and Suzanne became friends and he got Suzanne the photo job that, when she was home for the summers during college, expanded to writing for the Sports Department. Again, it paid to complain.

Suzanne went off to study photography at the Portland School of Art (now the Maine College of Art), inspired by her mother, who photographed weddings for sobbing brides, and feature photos for the Palmer Journal and Monson Register, and often took Suzanne along to dole out the fresh flashbulb needed for each shot. She graduated from PSA in 1980 and, unable to find writing work in Maine, returned home to start a fulltime job in the Daily News’ “Close-Up” section, a form of the “women’s sections” many newspapers included back in the days when society felt it was big news that any female was doing anything other than being a sobbing bride and going on to raise kids. The job included covering the spring and fall fashion shows held in New York City twice yearly, which had Suzanne lugging a 25-pound computer to New York for three weeks of reporting from the front lines of hemlines, viewing shows alongside Andy Warhol, Bianca Jagger and Anna Wintour, and seeing final collections offered by names like Willi Smith and Perry Ellis as AIDS decimated the fashion industry. Over a15-year career, Suzanne went on to write features and news in Western Massachusetts and also for The Providence Journal. She loved newspapers, and she by then loved a certain newspaperman, the same guy to whom she’d complained about his not covering the Palmer Panthers’ hockey team. Ten years after that gripe, she married Tommy Shea. This spring they’ll mark 40 years of marriage. This fall is the 50th anniversary of that initial complaint that paid off quite well.

Suzanne began writing fiction in her spare time when working a night shift at the paper in 1990. Most awake in the day, she used that time to invent stories, something she was not allowed to do once she arrived in the newsroom at 2 p.m. One of the invented stories grew from a few pages to 60. At the same time, Tommy, who by then was writing general assignment for the newspaper, interviewed Elinor Lipman, then a Western Massachusetts author with a second book being published. He asked how one got a book published in the first place, because his wife was writing something that was seeing no end. Elinor kindly offered to take a look at it, and after reading only the first few pages, sent it on to her friend who was an agent and also to her own editor, each of whom offered to work with Suzanne once she finished the book. Within the year, the novel Selling the Lite of Heaven, about a Polish-American woman who sells her engagement ring in the newspaper classifieds when her fiancé leaves her for the priesthood, was accepted for publication. That book is 30 years old this year, and was followed by six novels, and four works of nonfiction including three memoirs and a biography. 

Winner of the 2000 New England Book Award, which recognizes a literary body of work’s contribution to the region, Suzanne also has written freelance journalism and fiction for newspapers and magazines including The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Irish Times, Yankee, Golf World, Down East, The Bark, Organic Style and ESPN the Magazine. She was a regular contributor to Obit magazine.

Along the way, Suzanne frequently taught creative writing, including in the MFA programs at Emerson College and the University of South Florida. She taught in the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA from 2003 to 2021, and in 2015 created Bay Path University’s MFA in nonfiction, one of the country’s initial all-online MFA programs. Her work at Bay Path actually also began because of a complaint, one she sent to the university when it never responded to her reply to a classified ad asking professionals to propose classes they might teach. As its writer in residence, Suzanne taught at Bay Path for 15 years, work that also included co-creating a Narrative Medicine Certificate and coordinating an annual writing week in Ireland whose faculty over the years included Ann Hood, Dinty Moore, Andre Dubus III, Nuala O’Connor and Paul Muldoon.

Suzanne is co-director of Iota Short Forms Writing, which focuses on short work in all writing genres via an annual conference on the Northernmost coast of Maine each October, and online generative writing sessions. Next May, she will return to offering a writing seminar in Dingle, Ireland.

Tommy Shea wrote for the Springfield Newspapers for 39 years, covering the Boston Red Sox for a dozen years, the pedophile priest scourge for six, and unsung local heroes thrice weekly for 17 years in a column nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He went on to become senior foreign editor at The National, the English-language newspaper of record in Abu Dhabi, The United Arab Emirates. Tommy has taught journalism and other aspects of media and communications at Springfield, Elms and Holyoke Community Colleges, and at Bay Path University. His most recent book is Dingers: The 101 Most Memorable Hits in Baseball History (Sports Publishing), co-written with Joshua Shifrin.

Suzanne and Tommy write at their respective sides of a four-by-four-foot 100-year-old desk in their home in Western Massachusetts. They cannot complain.