Susan Calder

The guests have departed, the decorations put away. Time to implement those pesky New Year’s Resolutions. Mine are the standard ones: lose weight, get fit and work on that novel. These resolutions aren’t so much new as a return to my life as it was before my slide into holiday mode, about a month ago. [...]

Here’s a feel-good blogging story for the Holidays. In August, I wrote a blog post about Charlotte Bronte’s umbrella owned by my aunt in New Brunswick. Aunt Edith has been trying for years to get the umbrella to the Bronte museum in Haworth, West Yorkshire, UK. Her efforts have been stalled due to the umbrella [...]

My fellow Touchwood author, Kay Stewart, invited me to participate in this blog tag. Check out Kay’s answers to the intriguing and sometimes challenging interview questions. Here’s what I have to say about my work-in-progress. What is your working title of your book? Ten Days in Summer Where did the idea come from for the [...]

Fans of Sherlock Holmes know that the fictional detective lived at 221b Baker Street, London, UK. In October, Will and I took the tube to the famous street and were greeted by a statue of the detective, erected by the Sherlock Holmes Society – our first clue that we’d got off at the right stop. [...]

In his famous play, William Shakespeare portrayed Britain’s King Richard lll  as the ultimate villain. During Richard’s Machiavellian rise to power and short reign, he orders the murder of his older brother, two nephews and eight other people standing in his way. Even for Shakespeare, that’s a large body count. Shakespeare’s portrait of Richard lll [...]

Will and I are both fans of writer, Daphne duMaurier. Her novel Rebecca is one of my all-time favourite books. I recently read it for the third time and, over the the years, I’ve seen several T.V. and movie versions. Even though I knew what was going to happen, the story gripped me to the [...]

Does Gilbert and Sullivan qualify as part of my literary tour of England? The operettas were written and published. I didn’t, by the way, go to Britain for the purpose of visiting the literary-related sites I’ve been blogging about this fall. It’s just that, in the U.K. you can hardly walk without tripping over a [...]

Everyone wants a piece of Arthur. In the Middle Ages, when Glastonbury Abbey faced financial ruin, the monks came up with a clever scheme. They “discovered” the bones of King Arthur and  Lady Guenevere. This attracted public interest and, more importantly, money that saved the abbey. Today, tourists at Glastonbury Abbey can view the burial [...]

Tintern Abbey is a major tourist attraction in southeast Wales. Will and I saw directional signs for it on the highway while driving to Wales from Britain. Tour buses visit. The abbey is a ruin, so I didn’t how much there’d be to see when we went. But, I wanted to go. At university, I’d [...]

In Wales, we stayed near Hay-on-Wye Hay-on-Wye (pop. approx. 1,500). Sometimes called “town of books”, Hay-on-Wye has over 30 second-hand bookstores and hosts an annual international literary festival. We were in southern Wales to hike and only made it into Hay twice, both times toward the end of the day after most of the bookstores [...]