about fast suzy

It was a bluish gray cast-iron Royal “Magic Margin” manual from the 1940s with glass keys.  I fell in love with it and all the potential it represented to my traumatized, misunderstood, lonely little heart.

In the mid ’80s, I created a newspaper with one paying subscriber — my resource center teacher, who traded a nickel for each issue, carefully typed on both sides of one sheet of thin typing paper, with riveting exposes such as my absolute ballbuster on the outbreak of swimmer’s itch at Lake Minnebelle.

I tried to start a zine in the early ’90s called Union. It was dedicated to pen pals and mail art and letter writing. But as a sheltered teenager trying to get it off the ground, I was unprepared for and overwhelmed by the landslide of mail I suddenly got to my home address from prisoners all over the US — the 1990 version of going viral — and my little pen pal zine was over before it began.

I’ve lived an eclectic life. I’m a revolutionary in my own way. I am full of stories and ideas and crochet patterns and art and recipes and music, and I write about living in poverty and being autistic and surviving trauma and being okay with being all alone in the world. 

This site is the publication I’ve always wanted to make, a gift and honor to that traumatized child who had a subscriber count of 1, and to the introverted know-it-all misanthropic unemployable creative weirdo I have become, with a heart for the marginalized and a gigantic boner for justice, and to anyone who reads to find someone who experiences life as they do, and to anyone who reads to learn about people who are different from themselves.

Everything here is written or created from my own brain, not by AI.

Below is a photo of my current typewriter, a Smith Corona Coronet Automatic 12.  Her full name/title is Mabel from the Pool, and I am enamored with her faux wood paneling, the throaty hum and reassuring vibration of her machinery, and the heady perfume of her ink ribbons.

As always, thank you for reading my thoughts.