Susan Scott works at the crossroads of story, spirit, self, and culture, collaborating with artists, activists, and scholars to inspire change and heal across the generations.
Books include Body & Soul: Stories for Stories and Seekers, featuring women writers and poets, and Stories in My Neighbour’s Faith: Narratives from World Religions in Canada, introducing leading voices from across the country. Temple in a Teapot, a chapbook on the sublime and suppressed in American religious history, was launched on a 1,000-mile tour of western states.
New in 2025. The Spiritual Life Writing Workbook: From Concept to Bookshelf, co-authored with Lana Cullis and Sharon S. Hines, helps authors release their story to the world.
In-Progress: A new life-writing anthology with women writers and scholars in Canada and abroad. Also, Blood, Sand, Bread (a chapbook), plumbing the ecology of memory in Saugeen Country, which her ancestors (un)settled in the 1850s.
Editing, teaching & directing: Susan has midwifed 20+ books and dozens of award-winning essays. She has taught in communities and classrooms in the U.S. and Canada, including at Renison University College, St. Jerome’s University, and Wilfrid Laurier University, with guest lectures at the Yale Institute for Sacred Music (ISM). She has served as co-chair of the Region of Waterloo Arts Fund, associate creative director of the Wild Writers Literary Festival, and director of Write on the French River Creative Writing Retreat.
Susan is a Wild Writers mentor and a consulting editor with The New Quarterly (TNQ) (2020–), where she was the lead nonfiction editor (2012-9) and board vice-chair.
Award-winning collaborations include humanitarian arts initiatives, the Walkerton Water Stories Project and the Water Stories Project (2000-05); Native Immigrant’s culture work in Quebec and Chile (2013-23); and creative writing residencies in inner-city Boulder, Colorado in the 1990s.
Interdisciplinary expertise in anthropology, literature, and religious studies includes field work with Holocaust survivors (doctoral work, University of Pittsburgh). Susan holds a masters in Religion & Culture (Wilfrid Laurier University), a graduate certificate in spiritual direction (Jubilee Program, St. Michael’s College), and a graduate certificate in creative writing from the Humber School for Writers.
Watch for Susan cycling on her Simcoe, wicker basket brimming with baguettes.