Eos Online Launch Convention

Photo of Susan R. Matthews Susan R. Matthews
To call Susan Matthews eclectic would be an understatement. She reads Chinese history and Icelandic saga literature ("in translation, of course!"). She likes runes, aromatherapy, and the German band Popul Vuh.
PRISONER OF CONSCIENCE by Susan R. Matthews "I brew the beer I drink and ferment apple juice with honey into 'cyser' for Maggie [her significant other]." Just recently, she's been researching the O.K. Corral and the Navaho wars. As if that isn't enough, she's started modeling at fashion shows and "has a whale of a time getting all dolled up to strut my stuff on stage."

This diversity of skills and interests reflects a childhood traversing the globe. Susan Matthews was born in an Army barracks in Fort Benning, Georgia, the fourth of six children. Her father was on special detail in Washington, DC, and couldn't get away. He told his superiors that his wife was due and he had to get back to base, and they told him "Hey, you've got other children, haven't you?"

"I grew up in an elite army environment," Mathews recalls. "Daddy was a Bird Colonel in the Airborne Infantry. Later in his career he became involved in Special Forces and so the worldview I was raised in was an old fashioned elite military community with specific expectations of how officers behave and what responsibility meant." As an Army brat, Matthews learned to adjust quickly to all kinds of environments, to make personal contact quickly and make new friends every two years. "That increases your social skills," she laughs. "And being exposed to sometimes radically different ways of life stretches a person's brain at an early age, and gives you an immediate experience of the range of human suffering and potential. And, perhaps more important, six years of my childhood were spent without television. Our only forms of entertainment were reading and putting on plays we'd made up."

Then the family moved from Georgia to Leavenworth, Kentucky, to Heidelberg, Germany. "We were in Heidelberg when the Berlin Wall went up," she recalls. "We went for a lot of Sunday drives as a family. Only much later did I find out that those Sunday outings were Mom and Dad going over evacuation routes. I learned to speak kindergarten German before I could read or write in English. I still remember snatches of nursery rhymes in German."

From Germany they moved to Idaho, to North Carolina, and to New Delhi, India. Susan started writing in New Delhi, and it was at that time the conflict central to Andrej Koscuisko -- the Inquisitor hero of Prisoner of Conscience and four other novels -- began to fascinate her. "The character himself went through some evolution over the years, naturally, but some things about him have never changed."

Matthews' father retired to Washington State when she was 13, and Susan was the first in her family to graduate from the same high school she'd started in. "It's probably unnecessary to say that I was kind of a weird kid," she confesses. "I was reclusive, arrogant, and very much focused on what interested me to the exclusion of anything else. I still am pretty much that way, though I've gotten better at faking social skills." In junior high school she started reading Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, and was a Dark Shadows fan. She read related material -- Bram Stoker's Dracula, the Legge translation of the I Ching. "In high school I tripped over Byronic heroes (The Sea Wolf, to begin) and fell hard."

Between high school and college Matthews decided she was going to be a Presbyterian minister, still a bit unusual for a woman at that time. In the Presbyterian church a minister needs an undergraduate degree followed by a graduate degree in divinity; hoping to finance all that education, she joined Army ROTC for the GI Bill benefits. Matthews spent two years on active duty at the 15th Combat Support Hospital in Fort Belvoir, Virginia, where she served as operations and security officer as well as chemical officer, specializing in treatment under conditions of nuclear, biological, and radiological warfare.

By the time Matthews finished active duty she realized she didn't have the temperament to be a minister. "I came home to Seattle and emptied trash for a few years, working as a janitor; it gave me plenty of time by myself to think -- and write. I'd met Maggie when I came home from the Army and with her support and encouragement I wrote my first Koscuisko novel (The Inquisitor's Cup), now fifth in the series. That was 1980. That draft looks pretty primitive to me now but it was a start, and I never stopped. Over the intervening years, 1980 till now, I went from Dependable Building Maintenance to the Veterans Administration to Boeing Defense and Space Company, but I kept on writing. I had more or less given up on selling, though."

Then came Prisoner Of Conscience. To produce this work, Matthews researched the camp system in Nazi Germany and drew an important plot element from new findings about conditions at Auschwitz. Meanwhile, she returned to school ("on my company's tuition payment program, bless it") to take a graduate degree in business and accounting. Six months before completing the program, she was finally offered a contract for two Koscuisko novels -- An Exchange of Hostages (published in 1997) and Prisoner Of Conscience -- and an option on a third from Avon Books.

It's clear that Susan Matthews, writer, MBA, peripatetic world-traveler and beer brewer, has just begun the journey. The next book in the Koscuisko series -- the working title is His Excellency Regrets -- will be coming from Avon soon.

Avon Eos: Life Begins Here



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