HONEY AND FINE MADNESS explores with breathtaking clarity and insight the inherent challenges that women face when they explore the boundaries of love, marriage, and motherhood in modern society. Susan Lowden's sensual poetry speaks with an edgy and honest voice filled with rage, grief, and despair that struggles to resolve the ambivalence that exists between living a creative life and the world of domestic concerns.
About the Author: All throughout my teens and early twenties, I pursued a career in the visual and performing arts. I dropped out of college at the end of my sophomore year (I hated the school, hated the dreary weather and had unwisely fallen in love with an older man, an actor, of all things, who I followed to New York City). I worked in many different aspects in the film and television industry. I cut my teeth as an assistant film and sound editor at "Big Blue Marble," an award winning children's television show that garnered 13 Emmys. From there I moved into a variety of jobs behind the camera- wardrobe mistress, props assistant, and costume designer for movies of the week and after school specials. I also ended up doing art direction for industrials, one of which won a Clio for art direction ( if memory serves it was for Hostess). I was nineteen at that point in my life. At the same time, I was also working as an actress, because, hey, I hate to be bored. Given my desire to find a variety of outlets for my creative streak, I collaborated with a few other like-minded individuals. We wrote and produced a series one act stage plays which were showcased at Theatre Night at Folk City in downtown Greenwich Village. In my spare time, I did off-off Broadway, commercials, soaps, TV and film gigs to help pay the rent. And I waited tables because, not only did I not like to be bored, I was fond of eating and paying my rent in a timely fashion. My thirties found me fleeing New York and the industry. Fed up with how compromised I had allowed myself to become in order to succeed as an actress, I went back to writing in earnest. I was hit with a deep, driving need to get back out in the world and get a life. I hit the road with a (much older, again) boyfriend, traveling the country doing house painting and the like to put food in our mouths and a roof over our heads. In short, I married him, stopped writing, had two kids, divorced him, found that I had a latent talent for healing and energy work that kicked me onto a whole new path that rotor-rootered my soul and straightened out some of the kinks in my heart. I opened up my massage and energy field therapy practice, got incredibly busy, continued to write in what little spare time I had. I met an incredible guy whom I eventually married. Early on in our relationship, he secretly bought me a laptop. When he handed it to me all he said was, "You have to write." I cried. Of course. And I wrote. Of course.