Susan Dean
Susan is a writer, teacher and public speaker with a wide variety of experiences that have taken her across Canada and abroad. She began her career as an environmental educator where she not only taught students and adults about nature but also wrote and edited numerous articles, nature interpretive brochures, trail signage and audio-visual texts. She also spent many years as an elementary classroom teacher and a literacy specialist, where she mentored teachers in the art of teaching, reading and writing.
Writing has always been a part of Susan’s journey, from composing a poem about a canoe trip, a letter with a memoir or an engaging fictional story, to a persuasive newsletter article, script for a presentation or a precise and positive report. Seeing the ‘big picture’, getting to the heart of the subject and understanding how to creatively get an idea across the page is her forté. Everything begins with words and how we twist, braid and intertwine them together, to appeal to the reader and take us from one place to another.
Susan is presently working as freelance editor and writer for the members of Aster Group Environmental Services Cooperative and working on a collection of her own short stories.
She was a finalist twice for the Writers Federation of New Brunswick Writing Competition, in 2011 for her adult short story ‘In Amplexus’, and in 1997 for her children’s story ‘Sky Dancer’.
Titles of More Recent Published Works:
- ‘Working Memory-Learning to Read, Learning to Write, Learning to Learn’- self published article for teachers of Anglophone East School District, Moncton, NB
- ‘What’s New at the Guild’-membership newsletters for the Fundy Guild Inc., Fundy National Park
- ‘Oral Language, Something to Talk About’- Achieve Magazine, Anglophone East School District, Moncton, NB
- ‘Orienteering Rocks’- North American Orienteering Magazine
- ‘Nature Interpretive Trail Signage’- Mapleton and Centennial Park, Moncton, NB
- ‘By the Sea- A Guide to the Coastal Ecosystems of Atlantic Canada’- Fisheries and Oceans Canada