Fika With Vicky Welcomes Guest Susan Bass Marcus - July 20th, 2023

Fika with Vicky’s guest this week is Author Susan Bass Marcus. We’ll be discussing the inspiration behind each of the stories in her anthology The Wrong Move and Other Stories. We’ll also be discussing how writing scripts for her work in puppetry has evolved into the writing of novels, short stories, and blogs. Oh, and did I mention her Gerty doodles? Susan flows with multiple ways to live her creativity and share it. And she’s bringing her puppets! I love puppets! Susan Bass Marcus is a Chicago-based published writer of fiction, essays, and reviews. After long and acclaimed careers in puppetry and museum education, she now devotes all her creative energy to visual art and writing, with some forays into cooking adventures. Her musings appear often on her Wordpress blog, “About Susan Marcus,” https://susanbassmarcus.net. Susan has published two fantasy novels, Malevir: Dragons Return (2015) and Where Dragons Follow (2018), offering a world of dragon clans, an enigmatic menace (the Malevir), sprites, goblins, questing humans, and magical giants. The Wrong Move and Other Stories launched in June, 2023 and is an anthology of stories, each about a different woman caught up in strange circumstances. All her novels are available on Amazon.com. Susan grew up in Chicago and has spent most of her life and careers in that beautiful city where she lives with her husband, Stephen. Her undergraduate and first masters degrees are in Italian language and literature. Later in life she earned another master’s degree in interdisciplinary arts in education with a practicum in museum education. Susan’s interest in puppetry has its origins in childhood play and a devotion to the early television series, “Kukla, Fran and Ollie,” which originated in Chicago. As a young woman, she studied with master puppeteers who encouraged her to plunge into what became a nearly 20-year career in sculpting and performing with puppets. Script-writing was a necessary part of her original productions and that eventually led to her decision to write for publication. The works mentioned above are the result of that decision. Perhaps a bridge exists between or alongside the road from puppetry to publication. For two years, Susan worked as the ‘story hour lady’ in a public library. Once a week she assembled and presented games, crafts, and picture book readings to a loyal group of 3-5 year-olds. While reading aloud some of those picture books, she often thought, “heck, I could write that!” And she did.