One Word That Describes Susan Schoenberger as a Writer is . . .
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Persistent
adjective
“Thank God, it's not like gymnastics. There's not too many gymnasts, over 30, but very few writers are super successful early in their lives. They have to keep trying and keep plugging away.”
Susan Schoenberger fell into the world of women’s fiction completely by accident. She wanted to write the kind of books she wished to read, and it wasn’t until her agent declared her work as women's fiction that she claimed it as her home.
Schoenberger’s writing process is like making a smoothie where, “all your experience and things that you know about other people, and places you've been, and conversations you've overheard go in the blender, and then what comes out is something you hope that's new and original.”
When asked for a word to describe herself as an author, Schoenberger landed on persistent. "Thank God, it's not like gymnastics. There's not too many gymnasts over 30, but very few writers are super successful early in their lives. They have to keep trying and keep plugging away.” She began to take writing more seriously in her early thirties, yet her first novel wasn’t published until she was 48. Looking back, she feels the rejection was all part of the process, and what matters most is how she was able to carry herself back from it and keep persisting until she was successful.
Susan Schoenberger has published three novels, including A Watershed Year, which won the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Award. Her most recent work, The Liability of Love, received a starred Kirkus Review and the 2022 Gold Medal in Popular Fiction from the Independent Publisher Book Awards. She lives in West Hartford. https://www.susanschoenberger.com/
Interview by Isabella Karam