Susi Lovell

Susi Lovell’s short stories have appeared in The New Quarterly, Grain, The Fiddlehead, carte blanche, Stand Magazine and other literary journals, as well as in the anthologies Everything Is So Political and Salut King Kong. She has an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Lesley University, MA, and an M.A. in Contemporary Dance from the Université du Québec à Montréal. She recently submitted her first collection of short stories to publishers and is now working on an environmental mystery novel.

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At the Y, I waited for the yoga instructor to arrive. I sat down on my mat, reached for my toes, then pulled in my knees, rolled over, stood up, sat down again.

“I think I might have done something stupid,” I said to the person on the mat next to mine. I’d just handed in my notice as a dance journalist. All of a sudden it seemed that the crowded performance schedules, tight newspaper deadlines and antipathy to metaphors – which had been my reasons for stopping – were a small price to pay for doing what I now realized I loved: writing.

“The main thing,” said the woman beside me. “Is that you keep on writing. Why don’t you come to my writing group? Every second Tuesday.” She mentioned a coffee place not far from where I lived.

A writing group? I hadn’t known such a thing existed.

“What do people in the group write about?” I asked as we hung up our mats at the end of the class.

“We write stories.” She beamed at me.

“Stories?” I said, and laughed. “I don’t write stories.”

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