Susan vreeland biography
Vreeland, Susan –
(Susan Joyce Vreeland)
PERSONAL: Born January 20, , nucleus Racine, WI; daughter of Helpless. Alex and Esther Alberta Vreeland-Wilborn; married Joseph Gray (software engineer), November 26, Ethnicity: "Caucasian." Education:San Diego State University, B.A., , M.A.
(education), , M.A. (English literature), Religion: Christian. Hobbies avoid other interests: Travel, ceramics, skiing.
ADDRESSES: Home— Caminito Araya, San Diego, CA Agent—Barbara Braun Associates, Inc., Literary Agency, Fifth Ave., Ordinal Floor, New York, NY —[email&#;protected].
CAREER: Writer and educator.
San Diego Unified School District, San Diego, CA, instructor in English, –, and ceramics, –
AWARDS, HONORS: Extreme place award in short untruth, Women's National Book Association, ; creative writing award, California Group of Teachers of English, ; first prize in essay classify, New Millennium Writings, ; Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society Honorable Touch on, , for Delft Chronicles; Book-Sense Book of the Year finalist, American Booksellers Association, and Au Award for best novel loosen the year, Foreword, both ; California Department of Education Not compulsory Reading List, International Dublin Studious Prize nominee, Storyteller of high-mindedness Year Award, Independent Publishers Magazine, and Theodore Geisel Best sell like hot cakes the Year Award, San Diego Book Awards Association, all put on view Girl in Hyacinth Blue; Boy in Hyacinth Blue was likewise listed as one of dignity twenty-five best novels of moisten Publishers Weekly and one misplace the twenty best novels worldly by Christian Science Monitor; dear prize for fiction, Inkwell, ; named woman of the best, San Diego Writer's Monthly, –; Mark Twain Award for Small Fiction, Red Rock Review, ; Southern California Booksellers Association Bestow finalist, Theodore Geisel Award assistance Best Novel of the Period, , for The Passion apply Artemisia.
WRITINGS:
What Love Sees (novel), PaperJacks, , Thorndike (Thorndike, ME),
What English Teachers Want (writing handbook), Royal Fireworks Press (Unionvilile, NY),
Journey to Shambhala (promotional film), released by Snow Lion Globe-trotting trips,
Girl in Hyacinth Blue (novel), MacMurray & Beck (Denver, CO),
The Passion of Artemisia, Scandinavian (New York, NY),
The Woodland out of the woo Lover, Viking (New York, NY),
Life Studies: Stories, Viking (New York, NY),
Work represented etch anthologies, including If I Difficult to understand My Life to Live Over … and Generation to Generation, both Papiér Maché Press; Family: A Celebration, Peterson's Publishing; title Cracking the Earth, Calyx Books.
Contributor of more than regarding to magazines and newspapers, together with Travel and Leisure, Southwest Lively, Saturday Evening Post, Los Angeles Times, Boston Herald, Chicago Tribune, and Christian Science Monitor. Donator of essays and short fabled to journals, including Missouri Examine, New England Quarterly, Alaska Journal Review, Confrontation, Dominion Review, Colony Review, and Manoa.
Vreeland's books have been translated into xxv languages.
ADAPTATIONS: Vreeland's novel What Adore Sees was filmed for newswomen, starring Richard Thomas and An-nabeth Gish, and broadcast by goodness Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) guarantee ; Girl in Hyacinth Blue was filmed for a Authentication Hall of Fame television origination, c.
WORK IN PROGRESS: Birth Potato Eaters, a novel ponder Vincent van Gogh, for Viking.
SIDELIGHTS: Susan Vreeland's collection of corresponding stories, Girl in Hyacinth Blue, became a publishing sensation instruction netted its author a rewarding contract with a major notification house. A teacher in justness San Diego public school set since , Vreeland wrote breach first novel, What Love Sees, in the s.
Based picking the true story of first-class blind New England woman who leaves her affluent, sheltered being to marry a blind drover out West, What Love Sees was made into a gathering movie. Despite the modest ensue that Vreeland had with that first effort, she had natty difficult time finding a firm for her next project.
Expert Colorado firm, MacMurray & Flow, eventually issued Girl in Jacinth Blue, and the overwhelmingly gain critical response helped make decency book a best seller.
Girl temporary secretary Hyacinth Blue takes its name from a fictional painting by means of the seventeenth-century Dutch master Jan Vermeer, and the stories constitute up a fictitious provenance give an account of the work through the lives of the owners.
Vreeland's tales move backward in time, come across in the modern era agree with a tormented math professor who hides the work from class art world, ashamed that surmount father looted it as organized Nazi lieutenant in the Holland during World War II. Class next story, "A Night Discrete from All Other Nights," recounts the tragedy of the Somebody family whose young daughter fixed with the teenage girl display the painting.
"This sequence establishes the pattern for the book's structure: each chapter stands mug up on its own, yet also builds on the knowledge the client has already gained," wrote Katy Emck in the New Dynasty Times Book Review. Other owners include a French woman tight nineteenth-century Holland, who regrets in trade marriage and abhors nearly nature about her adopted country—except rectitude girl in the painting—"because she recognizes in her a inconceivable of hope she herself has lost," explained Emck.
A Country countryside flood, the impending immigrant of a child, and alternative events in the lives go with the stories' protagonists cause picture painting to be sold hunger for acquired, and the book concludes with the story of fair Vermeer himself came to fail the work.
Vreeland won praise have a handle on the way in which Girl in Hyacinth Blue presents say publicly lives of ordinary people sash a span of three centuries.
The stories also elicited poised words for the common fibre that links all the characters: an appreciation for beauty come to rest its endurance, despite hardship. Reviewers also praised the author's ascendence of setting. A Publishers Weekly contributor found that "these self-assured and atmospheric tales present uncut rich variety of characters whose voices convey distinctive personalities." Picture reviewer also remarked that burden chronicling the life span be beneficial to a painting, "unobtrusively, Vreeland builds a picture of the Nation character, equal parts sober tool ethic and faith in a-one harsh religion."
"Intelligent, searching and peculiar, the novel is filled interview luminous moments," wrote Emck entail the New York Times Volume Review.
"Like the painting mimic describes so well, it has a way of lingering underside the reader's mind," she eminent. A contributor to Kirkus Reviews called Girl in Hyacinth Blue "extraordinarily skilled historical fiction: plausible, perceptive, full of learning, abjectly moving." Library Journal's Barbara Hoffert commented: "Each vignette has primacy stillness, the polish, and leadership balanced perfection of a Vermeer." Booklist contributor Veronica Scrol dubious that "Vreeland uses art orangutan a vehicle for capturing shared moments in the lives motionless ordinary people."
With the hardcover happiness of Girl in Hyacinth Blue, the paperback rights were put on the market for eleven times the modern contract agreement with MacMurray & Beck.
Vreeland also signed appear a major American publisher lend your energies to publish her next work, The Passion of Artemisia. "Vreeland invariable a high standard with Girl in Hyacinth Blue," wrote Carmela Ciuraru in People. But Ciuraru found that The Passion snare Artemisia "is even better." Rendering novel is based on class life of Artemisia Gentileschi, neat real painter of the Romance Renaissance.
At seventeen, she evaluation raped by one of dip father's colleagues, and when justness matter is taken to eyeball, Artemisia is the subject retard cruel tortures in front tactic the jury. Now that she is known to the European public as "tainted," her clergyman marries her off to Pietro Stiatessa, a promising young catamount from Florence.
Love grows halfway Artemisia and her husband, submit they have a daughter envelope. It is only when Artemisia becomes better known as grand painter than Pietro—she is common into the Academy of Town before he is—that their smugness falters.
"Vreeland's novel reminds us drift Artemisia was a fiercely unrestrained, prodigiously talented woman, the chief to paint traditional religious bear historical heroines from an contemporary, female perspective," wrote Susan Tekulve in Book.
Tekulve continued: "The Passion of Artemisia provides interrupt imaginative and respectful point sell like hot cakes view to a compelling woman's story." A reviewer for Publishers Weekly noted that the history, told in Artemisia's voice, equitable both "wise" and "candid," existing believed that "readers who beloved the painterly descriptions of [Girl in Hyacinth Blue] will wool spellbound in particular by grandeur scenes in which Artemisia practical shown at work." Kristine Huntley of Booklist called The Liking of Artemisia "a vivid profile of a complex female organizer who doggedly pursues her fashion despite seemingly overwhelming obstacles." Meet her Library Journal review, Eleanor J.
Bader called the volume "fact-based fiction at its best."
Vreeland's next novel is another thought of historical fiction. In The Forest Lover, the author tells the story of Emily Carr, a Canadian painter who fleeting from to The novel relates Carr's rejection of the oppressive English society of her divine and her fascination with integrity native Indians of Canada, which leads her to trek smash into the dangerous and lonely jungle of British Columbia to pigment Indian totemic carvings.
Noting sovereign state her home Web page turn this way she worked on The Set Lover at the same firmly she was completing The Cub in Hyacinth Blue, and long forgotten she was recovery from neoplasm treatments, Vreeland noted that primacy artist's "robust spirit, strong although a cedar, has inspired immersed to keep mine buoyant."
In topping review for the Women's Survey of Books, Anne Marie Todkill wrote: "One of the various successes of Susan Vreeland's solution of Carr's life in recipe novel The Forest Lover interest her exploration of Carr's relation to Native culture." Todkill went on to note that, "although her portrayal is sympathetic topmost at times rhapsodic, it pump up neither simplistic nor uncritical." System jotting the author's "robust narrative," smashing Publishers Weekly contributor also wrote that Vreeland "provides … authentic background with the same bona fide detail that size brings loom the Victorian culture that challenged Carr's pioneering efforts."Patricia Morley, handwriting in the Canadian Book Look at Annual, called the novel "a delight." Donna Seaman concluded crate Booklist that Vreeland's "dramatic depictions of Carr's [story are] … provocative and moving."
Vreeland takes rejuvenate the stories of several artists in her book Life Studies: Stories.
Some of the tales focus on vignettes tangentially connected with the lives of celebrated painters, such as Cezanne, Painter, Renoir, and Van Gogh. Presage example, in one story, Vreeland describes Monet's gardener as fair enough watches the painter destroy timeconsuming of his works. Other parabolical in the collection revolve all over people who have been gravely influenced by art.
For action, in "Respond," Vreeland tells decency story of an unhappy wife whose life becomes enriched what because she begins posing as cool nude model. Another tale focuses on a boy making humour of the artist Cezanne. "The Things He Didn't Know" relates a construction worker's negative emotions as his obviously knowledgeable admirer teaches him about the vanishing he is viewing during practised visit to a museum.
Calligraphic Kirkus Reviews contributor called say publicly book "stimulating and enriching" with also noted that "the gleaning reminds us that the productive promise of art is everywhere." Donna Seaman, writing in Booklist, noted that the author "creates unexpected moments of magic." Seafarer also wrote: "Art-loving [readers] … will find Vreeland's well-plotted come to rest art history-rich stories compelling." Option reviewer, writing in Publishers Weekly, commented that "the best sketch out [the stories] … have orderly luminous clarity."
In an interview liven up Penelope Rowlands of Publishers Weekly, Vreeland explained: "I'm very unwarranted interested in the process lump which a historical figure becomes a fictional character.
Fiction task the process by which at the last time grasps the significance elaborate a life in another in the house period."
Vreeland once told CA: "I've always envied writers whose novels gushed out from their personal growing up, rich in ethnicity or place or history. Countering my complaints about my racial blandness, the lack of undiluted ready-made family story, one sponsor my writer friends said, 'Go back further.' All I challenging was a love for make-believe, a Dutch name, and fastidious trip twenty years earlier what because, to my surprise, I passed through a village in Northern Holland named Vreeland.
I locked away nothing more than that—except topping library card and uninterrupted cycle of solitude, two years sunup cancer treatment and recovery, not later than which I could imagine nuts way out of my changing circumstances, and imagine my stash away into Dutch paintings. They showed me a heritage alive assemble vitality and history and righteousness endurance of beauty.
They survived—and so would I."
BIOGRAPHICAL AND Heavy SOURCES:
PERIODICALS
Book, March-April, , Susan Tekulve, review of The Passion disregard Artemisia, pp.
Booklist, July, , Wilma Longstreet, review of What Love Sees, p. ; Sept 1, , Veronica Scrol, regard of Girl in Hyacinth Blue, p.
69; December 1, , Kristine Huntley, review of The Passion of Artemisia, p. ; November 15, , review be in command of The Forest Lover, p. ; December 1, , Donna Jacktar, review of Life Studies: Stories, p.
Canadian Book Review Annual, , Patricia Morley, review claim The Forest Lover, p.
Entertainment Weekly, January 25, , Karenic Valby, review of The Favorite activity of Artemisia, p.
Kirkus Reviews, July 1, , review deserve Girl in Hyacinth Blue, possessor. ; October 1, , dialogue of Life Studies, p.
Kliatt, January, , Diane C. Donovan, review of What Love Sees, p. 19; May, , Rozell R. Over-mire, review of What Love Sees, pp.
Library Journal, October 15, , Barbara Hoffert, review of Girl in Jacinth Blue, p.
; December, , Eleanor J. Bader, review all but The Passion of Artemisia, owner.
New York Times Book Review, December 19, , Katy Emck, "Picture This," p. 29; Amble 17, , Julie Gray, con of The Passion of Artemisia, p.
People, March 11, , Carmela Ciuraru, review of The Passion of Artemisia, p.
Publishers Weekly, July 12, , examine of Girl in Hyacinth Blue, p. 71; November 1, , review of Girl in Zircon Blue, p. 47; March 6, , John F. Baker, "Into the Big Time," p. 14; April 16, , p. 16; December 17, , review quite a few The Passion of Artemisia, possessor. 64; January 14, , Penelope Rowlands, "Completing the Picture corresponding Art," p.
35; November 24, , review of The Plant Lover, p.
Vogue, February, , Leslie Camhi, "Strokes of Genius: The Life of Italian Master Artemisia Gentileschi Is the Gist of Susan Vreeland's Intimate Modern Novel," p.
Washington Post Jotter World, February 17, , Susan Dodd, "Art and Ardor," proprietress.
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Women's Review of Books, Apr, , Diana Postleth-waite, "Pigments sharing the Imagination," p. 14; July, , Anne Marie Todkill, analysis of The Forest Lover, proprietor. 1.
ONLINE
Book Browse, (May 31, ), biography of author.
Susan Vreeland Caress Page, (May 31, ).
Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series