Susan

Admin

Owner, Fern & Fiction

Profile

Join date: Nov 18, 2025

About

Susan is an elementary teacher–turned librarian–turned college professor, guided always by a love of reading and the quiet spaces books create.

She lives in Rochester, New York, with her husband and their cat, where winter is welcome and snow feels like an invitation to slow down. You’ll most often find her with a book close at hand, or planning her next small escape into nature.

Her favorite trip so far was to Glacier National Park, though her heart returns often to the Adirondack Mountains--anywhere quiet, wooded, and a little removed from the rush of everyday life.

Susan reads widely and without rules: romance, mystery, horror, fantasy, and historical fiction all have a place on her shelves. No matter the genre, she loves a physical book--something with weight, texture, and pages meant to be turned slowly--but has recently become hooked on audiobooks.

Through Fern & Fiction and Quiet Letters, Susan creates spaces for readers to rest, reflect, and reconnect with the quieter joys of reading and being.

Posts (4)

Jan 14, 2026 ∙ 2 min

Reading Through Hard Times

The world is a disaster right now. Not in an abstract way. Not in a someday historians will explain this way. In a right-now, hard-to-breathe, hard-to-look-away kind of way. The kind that makes your jaw tighten as you scroll. The kind that seeps into your body even when you’re trying to stay informed and intact. There’s a particular exhaustion that comes from watching power be used carelessly. From seeing cruelty framed as strength. From realizing that the world being built is not one you...

Jan 4, 2026 ∙ 3 min

Soft Reading Resolutions For 2026

January has a way of arriving with a clipboard. New habits. New goals. New versions of ourselves—sleeker, faster, more “on track.” Even our hobbies can start to feel like assignments. And if you’re anything like me, reading is one of the first places that pressure can sneak in. So this year, I’m choosing something quieter. Not a reading challenge. Not a number to hit. Not a stack that proves I kept up. Just a return. Below are a few Fern & Fiction–style New Year resolutions—soft, bookish, and...

Dec 23, 2025 ∙ 1 min

You don't have to finish the book.

There’s a quiet relief in saying this out loud: You don’t have to finish the book. You don’t have to power through pages that no longer feel like they’re speaking to you. You don’t have to keep reading something just because you once loved it, or because you should . Sometimes a book is meant to walk with us only part of the way. I think reading can be more like sitting beside someone than reaching a destination. We open a book for company. For comfort. For curiosity. And when that feeling...