About

SUSAN MAXWELL's writing career began in splendid style with a school story penned while sick and confined to bed as a child: the author, growing weary of the increasingly unmanageable cast of characters, brought their literary lives to a dramatic end in a conflagration that reduced the school and a number of its inmates to ashes. Recognition by the publishing world had, alas, to wait until adulthood, in the form of short stories and poetry in a number magazines and anthologies.

In 2014 Little Island Books published the novel Good Red Herring for the Young Adult market, though as with most of Maxwell's work, it does not fit entirely comfortably into generic or age-related categories. Further, independently published, books followed this debut—A Wild Goose Hunt, a sequel to Good Red Herring, and And the Wildness, set in the same fictional 'Hibernia Altera' universe; the short story collection Fluctuation in Disorder; and the novel Hollowmen, both of the latter slipstream works aimed at an adult rather than a universal readership. 

Apart from writing fiction, Maxwell has served on juries for the British Fantasy Awards; given a paper on archives as Gothic spaces (putting a PhD in Archival Science to good literary use!); and reviews regularly for Inis, the magazine of Children’s Books Ireland. Literary influences come mostly from speculative and modernist fiction, the author being particularly fond of Flann O'Brien, Calvino, Beckett, and Woolf. 

When not writing, or painting, or being an archivist, the author can be found in the vegetable patch, listening to music, reading books, watching old detective series, or catching up on sleep.

Bibliothèque des Refusés: publishing as an independent author

Jean Rhys exhorted writers to “keep feeding the lake” of literature, which needed both the great rivers and “the mere trickles, like Jean Rhys.” The literature of an age is not only what is great, or good—or at least valued, or lionized—in that age. It includes what is not very good at all, and that which, even if great, does not fit its time, and is disregarded, pushed to the margins. 

It is in these margins that small publishers often find gems overlooked elsewhere; independent publishing presents a further, author-driven, opportunity, and both paths offer resistance to the kind of political philistinism that hollows out and devalues any form of endeavour that does not get its primary value from commercial exchange. 

Many authors turn to self-publishing if they cannot get a publisher to take them on. But margins—including what Philip K. Dick called ‘the trash stratum’—are, ecologically and creatively, where interesting things can happen. Maxwell has turned to independent publishing not faute de mieux, but to echo the gesture of the 1863 Salon des Refusés in presenting her explorations of the margins directly to the public.

 

A more expansive overview is given in the introductory post on this blog.