Susan Swan
Encyclopedia
Susan Swan is a Canadian
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

 author
Author
An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

. Born in Midland
Midland, Ontario
Midland is a town located on Georgian Bay in Simcoe County, Ontario, Canada.Situated at the southern end of Georgian Bay's 30,000 Islands, Midland is the economic centre of the region, with a 125-bed hospital and a local airport. It is the main town of the southern Georgian Bay area...

, Ontario
Ontario
Ontario is a province of Canada, located in east-central Canada. It is Canada's most populous province and second largest in total area. It is home to the nation's most populous city, Toronto, and the nation's capital, Ottawa....

, she studied at McGill University
McGill University
Mohammed Fathy is a public research university located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The university bears the name of James McGill, a prominent Montreal merchant from Glasgow, Scotland, whose bequest formed the beginning of the university...

. Her list of works includes The Wives of Bath
The Wives of Bath
The Wives of Bath is a novel by Susan Swan, inspired by her own childhood experiences at Havergal College in Toronto, Canada.-Plot introduction:...

(1993), and What Casanova Told Me (2004). The Wives of Bath was made into the film Lost and Delirious
Lost and Delirious
Lost and Delirious is a 2001 Canadian drama film directed by Léa Pool and loosely based on the novel The Wives of Bath by Susan Swan. Lost and Delirious is filmed from the perspective of Mary , who observes the changing love between her two teenage friends, Pauline and Victoria...

in 2001, starring Piper Perabo
Piper Perabo
Piper Lisa Perabo is a Golden Globe Award nominated American stage, film and television actress.-Early life:Perabo was born in Dallas, Texas and grew up in Toms River, New Jersey, the daughter of Mary Charlotte , a physical therapist, and George William Perabo, a professor of poetry at Ocean...

, Jessica Paré
Jessica Paré
Jessica Paré is a Canadian film and television actress. She has appeared in the films Stardom , Lost and Delirious , Wicker Park , Hot Tub Time Machine , and co-starred in the vampire horror-comedy Suck...

, and Mischa Barton
Mischa Barton
Mischa Anne Marsden Barton is a British-American fashion model, film, television, and stage actress, best known for her role as Marissa Cooper in the American television series The O.C..-Early life:...

. The film was listed in the official selection in the Sundance Film Festival
Sundance Film Festival
The Sundance Film Festival is a film festival that takes place annually in Utah, in the United States. It is the largest independent cinema festival in the United States. Held in January in Park City, Salt Lake City, and Ogden, as well as at the Sundance Resort, the festival is a showcase for new...

.
Swan has participated in the Humber College
Humber College
Humber College Institute of Technology & Advanced Learning is a polytechnic college in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Humber offers more than 150 programs including: bachelor’s degree, diploma, certificate, post-graduate certificate and apprenticeship programs, across 40 fields of study. Humber serves...

 Humber Writer's Circle at Lakeshore Campus. Susan Swan also taught at York University
York University
York University is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is Canada's third-largest university, Ontario's second-largest graduate school, and Canada's leading interdisciplinary university....

 and retired from there in 2007 to concentrate on her writing. She was Chair of The Writers' Union of Canada for 2007-2008.

Life

Swan grew up in Midland, Ontario, and has a younger brother John. Swan was a bookworm as a child and wrote stories to entertain herself and her friends. An early short story by Swan was deemed plagiarism by her Grade Seven teacher who said the writing was too good to have been written by a young girl. Swan’s parents were Jane Cowan of Sarnia, Ontario, and Dr. Churchill Swan, a Midland G.P.

Swan attended Midland Public School and as a teenager, she worked as a reporter on the Midland Free Press. From 1959 to 1963, she was a boarder at Toronto’s Havergal College
Havergal College
Havergal College is an independent boarding and day school for girls from Junior Kindergarten to Grade 12 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.Named for English hymn composer, author and humanitarian Frances Ridley Havergal, the school was founded in 1894 by a group of men led by The Honourable H...

, which inspired one of her novels. Swan has a general B.A. from McGill University
McGill University
Mohammed Fathy is a public research university located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The university bears the name of James McGill, a prominent Montreal merchant from Glasgow, Scotland, whose bequest formed the beginning of the university...

 (1964–67) where she worked on The McGill Daily
The McGill Daily
The McGill Daily is a campus newspaper created and run by students of McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The paper was first published in 1911.The paper was originally published daily, but is now issued twice a week...

. Swan was also editor of The McGill Scene, a newspaper for Montreal high school students that was banned under Swan’s editorship. Swan later worked as a reporter for several Toronto daily newspapers before turning to magazine freelance and novel writing.

On March 27, 1969 she married Barry Haywood in the boardroom of The Telegram, where Swan was the education reporter. They had one daughter, Samantha (1973-) and the two were later divorced. Swan’s longtime partner is Canadian publisher Patrick Crean.

Career

Swan is a writer and journalist who was also a performance artist from 1975 to 1979, performing odes on subjects like self-pity and figure skater Barbara Ann Scott. But she is best known for her critically praised fiction, which has been published in twenty countries. Gender is often a theme in her earlier books, which examined the dilemma of inhabiting a female body in a male-dominated Western culture. One critic called her “a contemporary Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity and fame than had any previous author during his lifetime, and he remains popular, having been responsible for some of English literature's most iconic...

” while another critic, The New Yorker writer James Wood, said her novels belong to the category of “the avant-garde of content,” a term Wood uses to describe his belief that the progressive development of fiction writing now centers on the subject matter a writer chooses to explore. Swan’s latest novels have expressed a young woman’s longing for fatherly love.

Her sixth and last book of fiction, What Casanova Told Me, links two women from different centuries through a long-lost journal about travels with Casanova in the Mediterranean. It celebrates travel as a form of love. What Casanova Told Me was published by Knopf in Canada (hardcover September 2004 and paperback 2005) and in the US by Bloomsbury (hardcover 2005 and paperback 2006). It was also published in Spain, Russia, Serbia and Portugal.

What Casanova Told Me was a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize
Commonwealth Writers' Prize
Commonwealth Writers is an initiative by the Commonwealth Foundation to unearth, develop and promote the best new fiction from across the Commonwealth. It's flagship are two literary awards and a website...

 (Canada and Caribbean Region). It was a Globe and Mail Best Book; a Calgary Herald
Calgary Herald
The Calgary Herald is a daily newspaper published in the Canadian city of Calgary, Alberta.- History :The paper was first published on August 31, 1883 by Andrew Armour and Thomas Braden as The Calgary Herald, Mining and Ranche Advocate and General Advertiser. It started as a weekly paper with only...

 Top 10; a Now (Toronto) Top 10; and a Sun Times (Owen Sound) Top 10; and Asked For Adams was named one of Maclean’s Top 5 literary characters for 2004. Swan shares a Puritan background with her heroine Asked For Adams. A branch of Swan’s family immigrated to America in 1635 and settled near Boston before moving to Canada two centuries later. What Casanova Told Me was made into Canada’s first five-minute bookshort by film producer Judith Keenan. It also inspired the song “What Casanova Told Me” by Albertan folk singer Cori Brewster who recorded it on her 2007 album Large Bird Leaving.

Swan’s 1993 novel, The Wives of Bath
The Wives of Bath
The Wives of Bath is a novel by Susan Swan, inspired by her own childhood experiences at Havergal College in Toronto, Canada.-Plot introduction:...

, (a darkly humorous tale about a murder in a girls’ boarding school) was a finalist for the UK’s Guardian Fiction Prize and Ontario’s [Trillium Book Award], and was picked by a U.S. Readers’ Guide as one of the best novels of the nineties. A feature film based on The Wives of Bath
The Wives of Bath
The Wives of Bath is a novel by Susan Swan, inspired by her own childhood experiences at Havergal College in Toronto, Canada.-Plot introduction:...

 was released in the summer of 2001 in the U.S. and Canada under the title Lost and Delirious
Lost and Delirious
Lost and Delirious is a 2001 Canadian drama film directed by Léa Pool and loosely based on the novel The Wives of Bath by Susan Swan. Lost and Delirious is filmed from the perspective of Mary , who observes the changing love between her two teenage friends, Pauline and Victoria...

. The film starring Piper Perabo
Piper Perabo
Piper Lisa Perabo is a Golden Globe Award nominated American stage, film and television actress.-Early life:Perabo was born in Dallas, Texas and grew up in Toms River, New Jersey, the daughter of Mary Charlotte , a physical therapist, and George William Perabo, a professor of poetry at Ocean...

, Jessica Paré
Jessica Paré
Jessica Paré is a Canadian film and television actress. She has appeared in the films Stardom , Lost and Delirious , Wicker Park , Hot Tub Time Machine , and co-starred in the vampire horror-comedy Suck...

, and Mischa Barton
Mischa Barton
Mischa Anne Marsden Barton is a British-American fashion model, film, television, and stage actress, best known for her role as Marissa Cooper in the American television series The O.C..-Early life:...

 was shown in 32 countries, and picked for premiere selection at Sundance
Sundance Film Festival
The Sundance Film Festival is a film festival that takes place annually in Utah, in the United States. It is the largest independent cinema festival in the United States. Held in January in Park City, Salt Lake City, and Ogden, as well as at the Sundance Resort, the festival is a showcase for new...

 and Berlin Film Festivalin 2001.

Swan’s other novels include The Biggest Modern Woman in the World, based on a true-life ancestor, a giantess who exhibited with P.T. Barnum, which was a finalist for Books in Canada First Novel Award
Books in Canada First Novel Award
The Amazon.ca First Novel Award, formerly the Books in Canada First Novel Award, is a literary award given annually to the best first novel in English published the previous year by a citizen or resident of Canada. It has been awarded since 1976....

 and the Governor General’s Award for Fiction. The Last of the Golden Girls, about the sexual awakening of young women in Ontario cottage country, was originally published in 1989, and recently reissued in hardcover. Her collection of short stories, Stupid Boys are Good to Relax With was published in 1996. Two of its stories were published in Granta
Granta
Granta is a literary magazine and publisher in the United Kingdom whose mission centers on its "belief in the power and urgency of the story, both in fiction and non-fiction, and the story’s supreme ability to describe, illuminate and make real." In 2007, The Observer stated, "In its blend of...

 and in Ms. Magazine
Ms. magazine
Ms. is an American feminist magazine co-founded by American feminist and activist Gloria Steinem and founding editor Letty Cottin Pogrebin together with founding editors Patricia Carbine, Joanne Edgar, Nina Finkelstein, and Mary Peacock, that first appeared in 1971 as an insert in New York magazine...

.

Swan is currently finishing work on her forthcoming novel The Hockey Killer, publication date to be announced. Her novel, The Biggest Modern Woman of the World, is currently being adapted for stage by Hannah Moscovitch
Hannah Moscovitch
Hannah Moscovitch is a Canadian playwright. She is best known for her plays East of Berlin, Essay, and The Russian Play.-Life and career:...

 for The Shaw Festival Fiftieth Anniversary in 2011.

Swan’s Literary Influence

Swan’s impact on the Canadian literary and political scene has been far-reaching. Swan coined the term “sexual gothic” to describe contemporary gothic novels that use the body as the site of the narrative the way nineteenth century gothic novels used a ruined building as their literary setting. “Gender gothic” is another name for sexual gothic since many novels in the nineties dealt with aspects of gender or gender changes. In the fall of 1993, a theatrical dramatization of The Wives of Bath
The Wives of Bath
The Wives of Bath is a novel by Susan Swan, inspired by her own childhood experiences at Havergal College in Toronto, Canada.-Plot introduction:...

 was performed in Toronto, Chicago and New York with the Canadian authors Barbara Gowdy
Barbara Gowdy
Barbara Gowdy, CM is a Canadian novelist and short story writer. Born in Windsor, Ontario, she is the long-time partner of poet Christopher Dewdney and resides in Toronto.-Literary career:...

 and Eric McCormack. The theatrical evening was billed, “An Evening of Sexual Gothic.”

Swan also coined the term “the burden of adjustment” to describe the adjustment demanded of readers by sexist or racist prose. For instance, many nineteenth novels have racist and sexist stereotypes embedded in the story. Swan compared the burden to the less difficult adjustment one makes reading Shakespeare or say, any novel where the gender and race of the protagonist is different than the gender and race of the reader.

Swan said: “The burden of adjustment becomes a problem when a great work of art or literature either appears to portray or portrays one of the groups you or I belong to as stereotyped or inferior.” Swan advocated putting up with the burden of adjustment when the text gave the reader a major reward. Swan’s theory was outlined in a talk at the York University
York University
York University is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is Canada's third-largest university, Ontario's second-largest graduate school, and Canada's leading interdisciplinary university....

 premier lecture series on Feb. 26, 1998.

Literary Influences

Early on, Swan was encouraged by the success of prominent Canadian women writers like Marian Engel
Marian Engel
Marian Engel, OC, née Marian Ruth Passmore was an award-winning Canadian novelist.-Summary:Born May 24, 1933 in Toronto, Ontario, to teacher parents Frederick Searle and Mary Elizabeth Passmore...

 who wrote the novel Bear and Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood
Margaret Eleanor Atwood, is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist. She is among the most-honoured authors of fiction in recent history; she is a winner of the Arthur C...

, who like Swan, works in many disciplines. Swan's first novel, The Biggest Modern Woman of the World, purportedly a lecture by a show business giantess, grew out of Swan's work in performance art during the 1970s.

Controversy

Swan's novels are no strangers to controversy. A Canadian customs' official once confiscated The Wives of Bath
The Wives of Bath
The Wives of Bath is a novel by Susan Swan, inspired by her own childhood experiences at Havergal College in Toronto, Canada.-Plot introduction:...

 at the Canadian border because he said it was obscene and shouldn't be read in Canada. By then the novel had already been nominated for Ontario's Trillium and the Guardian Fiction prize.

Swan herself has been involved in literary disputes. She once asked The Globe and Mail
The Globe and Mail
The Globe and Mail is a nationally distributed Canadian newspaper, based in Toronto and printed in six cities across the country. With a weekly readership of approximately 1 million, it is Canada's largest-circulation national newspaper and second-largest daily newspaper after the Toronto Star...

 fiction critic William French to resign on television because he criticized the apocalyptic ending of The Last of the Golden Girls as "unrealistic". Swan argued that literary realism is itself an artificial construct and not realistic in the sense French meant. Swan also criticized literary critic David Staines as "a tweedy pooh-bah mired in nineteenth century literary traditions" when he allegedly disparaged novels by Barbara Gowdy
Barbara Gowdy
Barbara Gowdy, CM is a Canadian novelist and short story writer. Born in Windsor, Ontario, she is the long-time partner of poet Christopher Dewdney and resides in Toronto.-Literary career:...

 and other Canadian writers chosen by Swan and other jurors for Canada’s 1997 Governor General's Award
Governor General's Award
The Governor General's Awards are a collection of awards presented by the Governor General of Canada, marking distinction in a number of academic, artistic and social fields. The first was conceived in 1937 by Lord Tweedsmuir, a prolific author of fiction and non-fiction who created the Governor...

. The dispute was widely publicized in Canadian newspapers. Staines later told Swan he had been misquoted.

Teaching

Swan has taught creative writing workshops all over Europe and recently retired from teaching creative writing as an Associate Professor of Humanities at York University
York University
York University is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is Canada's third-largest university, Ontario's second-largest graduate school, and Canada's leading interdisciplinary university....

 to focus on her books. She currently mentors creative writing students for the University of Toronto
University of Toronto
The University of Toronto is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, situated on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution of higher learning in Upper Canada...

 and the University of Guelph and teaches in the Correspondence Program at Humber College
Humber College
Humber College Institute of Technology & Advanced Learning is a polytechnic college in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Humber offers more than 150 programs including: bachelor’s degree, diploma, certificate, post-graduate certificate and apprenticeship programs, across 40 fields of study. Humber serves...

.

In 1999-2000, she was awarded the Millennial Robarts Chair in Canadian Studies. As chair, she hosted the successful Millennial Wisdom Symposium in Toronto featuring artists and social scientists debating the ways the past is recreated in popular culture and what wisdom the past has to offer as we move into the new century. The symposium was inspired by her research into her book about Casanova.

Politics

She was chair of the Writers' Union of Canada
Writers' Union of Canada
The Writers' Union of Canada , founded in 1973, describes itself as supporting "the country's authors by advocating for their rights, freedoms, and economic well-being." Its members are professional writers who must have published at least one book through a commercial publisher.The Union addresses...

 (2007–2008) and brought in a new benefits deal for Canadian writers. She is also a member of Community Air
Community Air
Community Air is a non-profit resident association in the city of Toronto, Canada that seeks to have the Toronto Island Airport) shut down and its lands converted to park land. The association is concerned about noise, pollution and safety aspects of the airport's operation...

, a group of Toronto citizens opposed to the expansion of the Island Airport.

Selected bibliography

  • Unfit For Paradise
  • The Biggest Modern Woman in the World (1983)
  • The Last of the Golden Girls (1989)
  • The Wives of Bath
    The Wives of Bath
    The Wives of Bath is a novel by Susan Swan, inspired by her own childhood experiences at Havergal College in Toronto, Canada.-Plot introduction:...

    (1993)
  • Stupid Boys Are Good To Relax With (1996)
  • What Casanova Told Me (2004)
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