About Susan Gabriel
Susan Gabriel grew up in the archetypal American South, playing in the shade of mimosa trees and catching lightning bugs as the heat waned on long summer evenings. She lived on banana popsicles and when not in school, spent most days exploring the woods around her home or on her bicycle from morning until night.
In high school Susan began to focus on the arts. She wrote stories to amuse her friends and became an accomplished flutist. In college she studied music at the University of Tennessee, married a jazz saxophone player and started a family. After her divorce, she raised her two daughters, then one and three, completed an education degree and began working with at-risk kids in the elementary schools. During this time she was also a professional musician and went to graduate school at night. As a musician, Susan played many venues in Charleston, South Carolina, including Piccolo Spoleto, numerous events for the Charleston Historical Society, as well as one job playing for a party on a 300 foot sail boat while situated below in the hold. She still hasn’t quite gotten her sea legs back.
Susan completed a degree in counseling, in part to understand the wide array of characters in her Appalachian gene pool, and became a licensed professional counselor, as well as a marriage & family therapist. She was the founder of the Women’s Center in Charleston, South Carolina, which still provides services to women twenty years after its inception. While running her counseling practice in Charleston, Susan also wrote professional articles for various publications and book reviews for the Charleston Courier newspaper.
In her 30s, Susan began to experience a spiritual awakening and studied the writings of the monk, Thomas Merton, as well as 12th century mystics and the works of C.G. Jung. She attended and led groups at the Journey into Wholeness Conference in the North Carolina Mountains.
After running her successful counseling practice for ten years, Susan answered the long-time call to writing and moved with her daughters to Asheville, North Carolina where she also did dream work with a Jungian analyst and began to write poetry and fiction as well as paint with acrylics. Susan simplified her life and took part-time jobs in order to focus the main portion of her day on writing. These part-time jobs included running copies, cutting out and cooking gourmet dog biscuits, cashiering at a home-improvement mega store, as well as being a typist, personal assistant and freelance editor for author and Jungian analyst, Bud Harris.
With her daughters launched into the world, Susan was ready for a new adventure
and lived for several years in Colorado, where she explored the wild mysticism
of the Rocky Mountain landscape and the archetypal American West. She now makes
her home in the mountains of North Carolina.
Susan enjoys reading (of course), attending Broadway plays, traveling to Tuscany, wandering in the woods near her home (some things never change), visiting with her grown daughters, and providing entertainment for her two dogs and three cats.