Prompted to Write Nonsense
As leader of the Writers Group at Chicago’s Union League Club, I send a monthly online newsletter to its members. The email reviews each month’s meeting and always ends with writer’s prompts, designed to inspire members’ written contributions to our … Continue reading Prompted to Write Nonsense
New Publication
Can you hear them? The birds are calling. It’s Storytime!!! Of Birds and Words presents 40 drawings of birds. They share their stories in poetry and fable, written with a nod to 19th Century illustrators whose caricatures of anthropomorphic animals were laden with social commentary. There are owls and penguins, but also fantastic creatures created in the offbeat imagination of author, Susan Bass Marcus. Available in bookstores and online: August 11, 2025 for ebook, August 25, 2025 in paperback. This is my fifth book. Last year, I published Gerty’s Way, which combined illustrations and text about my beloved cartoon character, … Continue reading New Publication
Another Look at SciFi
What I wrote more than five years ago, seen in light of today’s circumstances. Diverging from Philip K. Dick After bingeing on at least four novels by Philip K. Dick [hereafter, PKD] and being discomfited by the future he envisioned—dark, … Continue reading Another Look at SciFi
Remembering Our Last Cat
If my character Gerty, who appears in so many of my drawings, were real, I’d want her to be my long-time next-door neighbor. She would become my friend and sometime confidante, reliable, but not stodgy. She’d elicit uncontrollable laughter with … Continue reading Remembering Our Last Cat
A Gothic Tale
Bibliomania Derek collected all sorts of books. No single theme or genre determined his purchases. His broad and varied collection astounded other booklovers not for its content but its depth. By the time Derek had refined his aims and focused … Continue reading A Gothic Tale
Applesauce
For the ULCC Writers Group She slept in their old wedding bed, now that her parents preferred twin beds. Her bedroom’s dim light played with a floral wallpaper pattern on the wall facing her bed; she imagined little devil heads shaking and winking at her. Shades darkening her room skimmed the bottom of windows that faced the backyard. A large black and yellow poster was attached to her bedroom door—“Keep Out! Quarantine!” it warned. Mostly she slept, waking occasionally to the feel of a cold washcloth or an icepack on her forehead. Her mother urged her to lie quietly, … Continue reading Applesauce
Salad and the Hotpoint Kitchen
In 1952, after the fifth attempted burglary of our house on 50th Street in Chicago, my parents decided to buy a lot on the North Shore and build a new home. Before that work could begin, they organized lawsuits with other prospective lot buyers to break a restrictive covenant governing all the empty lots on a recently divided family estate. Until the covenant became illegal, the owner would not sell real property to Blacks, Jews, or Asians. Almost as a celebration of their victory over prejudice, they built a ranch house on a wooded, half-acre lot on a private lane … Continue reading Salad and the Hotpoint Kitchen
The Blue-Crested Palaver and A Curiosity’s Sparrow
[The following is a hint of what you’ll find next year in my new work, a book of unusual bird illustrations and commentary. The art is mine and so is the story.] A man holding a heavy sack entered the forest. He trudged down a beaten path until he came to a grove of trees. A Blue-Crested Palaver and a sparrow were spying on him from separate branches of a twisted and gnarled beech tree. Neither knew that the other had been following the man. Yawning, the man sat cross-legged beneath the beech and loosened the ties of his sack. … Continue reading The Blue-Crested Palaver and A Curiosity’s Sparrow
On Reading Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’
31 “I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars” Where shadows run from themselves in the lee of a maple dropping its parasails she sits and scans his leaves of grass. Alone with … Continue reading On Reading Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’
Susan Bass Marcus Writes 