The Southern Storyteller Who Turned a Lifetime of Love, Into a Writing Career Worth Celebrating

Pull up a chair. Pour yourself a glass of iced tea. And get ready to smile.Because today's guest is going to remind you that the best writing lives are not always built in quiet studies and writing retreats and carefully curated creative routines. Sometimes they are built in classrooms full of students who needed someone to believe in them. On blind dates in high school that turn into four decades of love. In small Arkansas towns that the whole world overlooked, and one writer decided to set her entire series in anyway.Susan Gooch is a Southern girl through and through. She will not be caught dead in public without her hair and makeup done. She prefers everything fried and smothered in ketchup. She drinks enough iced tea to keep the South in business. And her favorite place in the entire world is at home in her pajamas, curled up with a good book.She also reads more than 200 books a year, champions other authors through her Instagram spotlight Y'all Have Got To Read This, and has built a romance writing career set entirely in her hometown of Searcy, Arkansas because she believes it is the best place on earth to raise a family. And she dared anyone to tell her otherwise.In this episode of Beyond the Draft, Susan opens up about the blind date in high school that became her favorite love story, and how much of it has quietly found its way onto her pages. About the decades she spent in the classroom helping students find their voice and what all of that teaching gave her as a storyteller. About closing the classroom door for the last time and stepping fully into a writing career and whether it felt like freedom or like falling. And about the most beautifully optimistic thing a writer can believe, that the best book is always the one you are about to write.This conversation is for every retired teacher who has a novel in her head. Every grandmother who has been saying someday. Every homebody who has a whole world inside her that no one has read yet.Susan Gooch just gave all of them permission to finally sit down and write it.And she delivered it, warm, funny, deeply wise, and smelling faintly of sweet tea and fried everything.Welcome home.🎙️ Host: Imma📚 Guest: Susan Gooch: Southern Storyteller/ Romance Author/ Retired Educator/ Book Champion📖 The Carrington Series: Susan Gooch.Author📸 Y'all Have Got To Read This on Instagram/ Susan Gooch AuthorBeyond the Draft — Where the real story begins after the writing is done.Your words have power. Your story matters. Keep writing.