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Susan Arnout Smith (born October 31, 1948 in Anchorage, Alaska), is a novelist, television scriptwriter, award winning playwright and essayist.
Early Life
She was the second eldest of five children born to Ernest and Florence Weschenfelder. Her parents moved with their two children, Nancy and Susan, to Naknek, Alaska, where they operated a boarding house for sawmill employees. Wanting to give his family a different life, Smith’s dad began working in the aerospace industry and the family moved from Naknek back to Anchorage, Alaska, to Falls Church, Virginia, to Redondo Beach, California, to Denver, Colorado, to Bergen Park, Colorado, near Evergreen, during the first eleven years of her life. In Bergen Park, the family lived initially with no running water or electricity in a Quonset hut. Her parents built a basement by hand and moved the Quonset hut onto the basement, later replacing the metal structure with a second story. Smith’s work, although it crosses many genres, deals primarily with the theme of redemption: coming back from a dark place into light, trying to find a way home. During her senior year of high school in Evergreen, she wrote a weekly column for the Evergreen Canyon Courier. She also was chosen for Girl’s State, where she became a Girl’s Nation alternate, and was inducted into both the National Honor Society and the Spanish National Honor Society.
Writing career
Smith graduated in 1970 from the University of Colorado, Boulder, with a degree in journalism. She helped pay for school by working as a courthouse newspaper reporter for the Longmont Daily Times-Call. After graduating, she worked in Denver for a film and advertising company and then moved to Alaska, where she worked in television at KFAR in Fairbanks. Eager to pay off college loans, she left the station and took a job on the trans-Alaska pipeline where she worked for Bechtel and Company as a recreation director showing films and repairing pool stick cues. After the pipeline, she moved to Anchorage, where she anchored the nightly news on television for KENI-TV (now called KTUU). She also produced and wrote a weekly news program. The first program, one on teenage pregnancy in Anchorage, won a national award given by the Odyssey Institute in New York. She later anchored a news program at KIMO-TV.
Her first novel, The Frozen Lady, was published in hardback by Arbor House in 1982, and in paperback by Zebra Books in 1983. An historical novel dealing with the birth of Alaska, it traced the intertwining lives of an Eskimo man and a white woman.
She has also written articles for magazines, including New Woman and McCall’s.
Her first play, BEAST, won the 1990 Stanley Drama Award and the 1991 Albert and Mildred Panowski/Shiras Institute playwriting award, where Dr. James Panowski called it “easily the best play writing award winner we’ve selected since the contest began back in 1974.” It was while in Michigan during the production of BEAST that Smith learned that her first essay, “From the Heart”, done as a surprise anniversary present for her husband, Fred, had been accepted to air on National Public Radio. This began a ten-year career at NPR, writing essays for Weekend Edition-Sunday. BEAST’s first professional production was Tampa Players, in 1993. A second play, Killing Mother, was produced in 1992.
That was the same year her teleplay, Different, was accepted at the National Playwrights Conference, Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, CN. Different was later a finalist for a Pen West, a nominee for a Hollywood Access award, and was produced by Lifetime Television, (Lynn Redgrave and Annabeth Gish).
Smith has written three other teleplays, all of which have been produced and have aired: Dying to be Perfect: the Ellen Hart Pena Story (ABC, Crystal Bernard, Esai Morales); Another Woman’s Husband, (Lifetime Television, Lisa Rinna, Gail O’Grady); and Love Lessons, (CBS, Patty Duke).
Her first thriller, The Timer Game, was published in 2008 in the U.S. by St. Martin’s Minotaur, and in the UK by Harper Perennial. It has been translated into several languages and is available in twelve countries. Along with co-creator and director Kai Soremekun, in 2007 she produced a series of twenty-two webisodes—dramas about a minute in length—that introduce The Timer Game five years before the book opens. The last webisode ends in a cliff-hanger that’s paid off in the novel. Her second thriller in the series, Out at Night, dealing with the issue of terrorism and genetically modified crops, will be published in the US in March, 2009 by St. Martin’s Minotaur and in the UK in May, 2009 by Harper Perennial. Smith is at work on the next Grace Descanso thriller.
Personal life
In addition to Nancy, Smith has two other sisters, Neva and Bonnie, and a brother, Eugene, who died at age thirty-six in Alaska, killed by a calving glacier. Her father has also died. She currently lives in southern California with her husband, Alfred Smith. They have a daughter, Martha.
Works
- The Frozen Lady, 1982
- BEAST, 1992
- Killing Mother, 1993
- Dying to be Perfect: the Ellen Hart Pena Story, 1996
- Different, 1999
- Another Woman’s Husband, 1999
- Love Lessons, 2000
- Essays, National Public Radio, Weekend Edition-Sunday, 1991-2001
- The Timer Game, 2008
- Out at Night, 2009