Susan Hubbard grew up in upstate New York and was the first in her family to go to college. She worked as a journalist and free-lance writer before returning to graduate school at Syracuse University, where she studied with Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff.
Hubbard is the author of two collections of short fiction, both winners of national prizes, and two novels; a new novel is forthcoming in 2007 from Simon & Schuster. Her short stories have appeared in TriQuarterly, The Mississippi Review, The North American Review, America West, Kalliope, Ploughshares, and other journals. She is coeditor of 100% Pure Florida Fiction, an anthology.
She has received teaching awards from Syracuse University, Cornell University, the University of Central Florida, and the South Atlantic Adminstrators of Departments of English. She has been a Writer in Residence at Pitzer College, Claremont, CA; Georgia State College and University, Milledgeville, GA; and The National Writer's Voice, Tampa. She has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, the Djerassi Resident Artists Project, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and Cill Rialaig.
Hubbard has given more than 90 fiction readings, and several addresses on the craft of writing, gender and fiction, and related topics. She's led writing workshops at more than sixty universities and arts programs in the United States and the United Kingdom. A former president of Associated Writing Programs, she has served as an assessor and curriculum consultant to several colleges and universities.
A graduate of Syracuse University, Hubbard currently is Professor of English at the University of Central Florida. She is an advocate for animal rights, social justice, and literacy. Her hobbies include running, salvaging, and collecting items of questionable taste.
The Syracuse Post-Standard
Sunday, July 04, 2004
Life in Syra - er, New Sparta
By Laura T. Ryan
Staff writer
In her debut novel, "Lisa Maria's Guide for the Perplexed," Syracuse native Susan Hubbard describes a Central New York city with a major university, a shopping mall built over swampland and a main boulevard where a thriving canal once flowed.
"It's a fictitious world - it has nothing to do with any real place," Hubbard says, giggling.
OK, OK. So maybe Syracuse did provide some inspiration for fabled New Sparta - the climatologically challenged, economically depressed hometown to which heroine Lisa Maria Marino must grudgingly returns after she loses her fancy-schmancy advertising job in Manhattan.
But only some.
"My novel is peppered with little specks of truth, or maybe we should say 'salted,' " says Hubbard, who lives in Orlando with husband, writer Robley Wilson. "In New Sparta, they're trying to create the largest mall in America. Can you imagine something like that? It's preposterous!"
Again, she giggles.
"Is Montague Street really Marshall Street? No, of course not," Hubbard continues in mock indignation. "Just as you need to protect your sources, I need to protect mine - my sources of inspiration."
Characters in the novel do their grocery shopping at Price Slasher. South Sardinia Street is a busy downtown thoroughfare.
The built-on-swampland Miracle Mall has a rain forest bar in the basement with talking totems. Nearby Draconia Lake is the most polluted lake in the country. And then there's Delphi Boulevard, where the Delphi Canal used to be.
"Where else in the world would they take the only decent body of water in town and cover it up?" Hubbard writes. "Only in New Sparta."
Hubbard grew up on West Onondaga Street in Syracuse and graduated from Corcoran High School and Syracuse University, where a professor talked her out of fiction writing.
So she majored in journalism, then wrote for the Binghamton Press, New Haven (Conn.) Journal-Courier and, finally, the Syracuse Herald-Journal. But fiction kept calling, so she returned to SU to study creative writing with Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff.
She later taught writing at SU and Cornell, but a writer-in-residence position in California permanently changed her geography.
"After I got a taste of sunshine, it just ruined me," she says.
Hubbard moved to Florida in 1995 and now teaches at the University of Central Florida. She is the author of two short-story collections, "Blue Money" (1999) and "Walking on Ice" (1990).
In "Lisa Maria's Guide for the Perplexed" (June, Red Dress Ink), the title character moves back in with her parents and makes money by cleaning houses and writing an advice column for a local newspaper. The longer Lisa Maria stays, the more her hard-nosed cynicism about New Sparta and its denizens melts away.
"By the end of the book, she's learned to appreciate Syrac. . . I mean New Sparta, in new ways," Hubbard says.
"Lisa Maria's a keeper for me," Hubbard says. "She does all the things that I might in my wildest dreams imagine doing. . . . She does have scruples, but they're not the kind of scruples nice people have."
And she'll be back in a sequel.
© 2004 The Post-Standard. Used with permission.
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