Vreeland, Susan 1946–

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Vreeland, Susan 1946–

(Susan Joyce Vreeland)

PERSONAL: Born January 20, 1946, in Racine, WI; daughter of W. Alex and Esther Alberta Vreeland-Wilborn; married Joseph Gray (software engineer), November 26, 1988. Ethnicity: "Caucasian." Education: San Diego State University, B.A., 1968, M.A. (education), 1971, M.A. (English literature), 1979. Religion: Christian. Hobbies and other interests: Travel, ceramics, skiing.

ADDRESSES: Home—6246 Caminito Araya, San Diego, CA 92122. Agent—Barbara Braun Associates, Inc., Literary Agency, 104 Fifth Ave., 7th Floor, New York, NY 10011. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Writer and educator. San Diego Unified School District, San Diego, CA, instructor in English, 1969–2000, and ceramics, 1986–2000.

AWARDS, HONORS: First place award in short fiction, Women's National Book Association, 1991; creative writing award, California Association of Teachers of English, 1996; first prize in essay category, New Millennium Writings, 1996; Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society Honorable Mention, 1998, for Delft Chronicles; Book-Sense Book of the Year finalist, American Booksellers Association, and Gold Award for best novel of the year, Foreword, both 1999; California Department of Education Recommended Reading List, International Dublin Literary Prize nominee, Storyteller of the Year Award, Independent Publishers Magazine, and Theodore Geisel Best of the Year Award, San Diego Book Awards Association, all for Girl in Hyacinth Blue; Girl in Hyacinth Blue was also listed as one of the twenty-five best novels of 1999 by Publishers Weekly and one of the twenty best novels of 1999 by Christian Science Monitor; grand prize for fiction, Inkwell, 1999; named woman of the year, San Diego Writer's Monthly, 1999–2000; Mark Twain Award for Short Fiction, Red Rock Review, 2000; Southern California Booksellers Association Award finalist, Theodore Geisel Award for Best Novel of the Year, 2002, for The Passion of Artemisia.

WRITINGS:

What Love Sees (novel), PaperJacks, 1988, Thorndike (Thorndike, ME), 1996.

What English Teachers Want (writing handbook), Royal Fireworks Press (Unionvilile, NY), 1995.

Journey to Shambhala (promotional film), released by Snow Lion Expeditions, 1995.

Girl in Hyacinth Blue (novel), MacMurray & Beck (Denver, CO), 1999.

The Passion of Artemisia, Viking (New York, NY), 2002.

The Forest Lover, Viking (New York, NY), 2004.

Life Studies: Stories, Viking (New York, NY), 2005.

Work represented in anthologies, including If I Had My Life to Live Over … and Generation to Generation, both Papiér Maché Press; Family: A Celebration, Peterson's Publishing; and Cracking the Earth, Calyx Books. Contributor of more than 250 articles to magazines and newspapers, including Travel and Leisure, Southwest Art, Saturday Evening Post, Los Angeles Times, Boston Herald, Chicago Tribune, and Christian Science Monitor. Contributor of essays and short stories to journals, including Missouri Review, New England Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, Confrontation, Dominion Review, Connecticut Review, and Manoa. Vreeland's books have been translated into twenty-five languages.

ADAPTATIONS: Vreeland's novel What Love Sees was filmed for television, starring Richard Thomas and An-nabeth Gish, and broadcast by the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) in 1996; Girl in Hyacinth Blue was filmed for a Hallmark Hall of Fame television production, c. 2003.

WORK IN PROGRESS: The Potato Eaters, a novel about Vincent van Gogh, for Viking.

SIDELIGHTS: Susan Vreeland's 1999 collection of interrelated stories, Girl in Hyacinth Blue, became a publishing sensation and netted its author a lucrative contract with a major publishing house. A teacher in the San Diego public school system since 1969, Vreeland wrote her first novel, What Love Sees, in the 1980s. Based on the true story of a blind New England woman who leaves her affluent, sheltered life to marry a blind rancher out West, What Love Sees was made into a television movie. Despite the modest success that Vreeland had with this first effort, she had a difficult time finding a publisher for her next project. A Colorado firm, MacMurray & Beck, eventually issued Girl in Hyacinth Blue, and the overwhelmingly positive critical response helped make the book a best seller.

Girl in Hyacinth Blue takes its title from a fictional painting by the seventeenth-century Dutch master Jan Vermeer, and the stories build up a fictitious provenance of the work through the lives of the owners. Vreeland's tales move backward in time, beginning in the modern era with a tormented math professor who hides the work from the art world, ashamed that his father looted it as a Nazi lieutenant in the Netherlands during World War II. The next story, "A Night Different from All Other Nights," recounts the tragedy of the Jewish family whose young daughter identified with the teenage girl in the painting. "This sequence establishes the pattern for the book's structure: each chapter stands on its own, yet also builds on the knowledge the reader has already gained," wrote Katy Emck in the New York Times Book Review. Other owners include a French woman in nineteenth-century Holland, who regrets her marriage and abhors nearly everything about her adopted country—except the girl in the painting—"because she recognizes in her a sense of hope she herself has lost," explained Emck. A Dutch countryside flood, the impending arrival of a child, and other events in the lives of the stories' protagonists cause the painting to be sold or acquired, and the book concludes with the story of how Vermeer himself came to create the work.

Vreeland won praise for the way in which Girl in Hyacinth Blue presents the lives of ordinary people across a span of three centuries. The stories also elicited positive words for the common thread that links all the characters: an appreciation for beauty and its endurance, despite hardship. Reviewers also praised the author's mastery of setting. A Publishers Weekly contributor found that "these poised and atmospheric tales present a rich variety of characters whose voices convey distinctive personalities." The reviewer also remarked that in chronicling the life span of a painting, "unobtrusively, Vreeland builds a picture of the Dutch character, equal parts sober work ethic and faith in a harsh religion."

"Intelligent, searching and unusual, the novel is filled with luminous moments," wrote Emck in the New York Times Book Review. "Like the painting it describes so well, it has a way of lingering in the reader's mind," she noted. A contributor to Kirkus Reviews called Girl in Hyacinth Blue "extraordinarily skilled historical fiction: deft, perceptive, full of learning, deeply moving." Library Journal's Barbara Hoffert commented: "Each vignette has the stillness, the polish, and the balanced perfection of a Vermeer." Booklist contributor Veronica Scrol asserted that "Vreeland uses art as a vehicle for capturing special moments in the lives of ordinary people."

With the hardcover success of Girl in Hyacinth Blue, the paperback rights were sold for eleven times the original contract agreement with MacMurray & Beck. Vreeland also signed with a major American publisher to publish her next work, The Passion of Artemisia. "Vreeland set a high standard with Girl in Hyacinth Blue," wrote Carmela Ciuraru in People. But Ciuraru found that The Passion of Artemisia "is even better." The novel is based on the life of Artemisia Gentileschi, a real painter of the Italian Renaissance. At seventeen, she is raped by one of her father's colleagues, and when the matter is taken to court, Artemisia is the subject of cruel tortures in front of the jury. Now that she is known to the Roman public as "tainted," her father marries her off to Pietro Stiatessa, a promising young painter from Florence. Love grows between Artemisia and her husband, and they have a daughter together. It is only when Artemisia becomes better known as a painter than Pietro—she is admitted into the Academy of Florence before he is—that their relationship falters.

"Vreeland's novel reminds us that Artemisia was a fiercely independent, prodigiously talented woman, the first to paint traditional religious and historical heroines from an original, female perspective," wrote Susan Tekulve in Book. Tekulve continued: "The Passion of Artemisia provides an imaginative and respectful point of view to a compelling woman's story." A reviewer for Publishers Weekly noted that the narration, told in Artemisia's voice, is both "wise" and "candid," and believed that "readers who loved the painterly descriptions of [Girl in Hyacinth Blue] will be spellbound in particular by the scenes in which Artemisia is shown at work." Kristine Huntley of Booklist called The Passion of Artemisia "a vivid portrait of a complex female artist who doggedly pursues her passion despite seemingly overwhelming obstacles." In her Library Journal review, Eleanor J. Bader called the book "fact-based fiction at its best."

Vreeland's next novel is another work of historical fiction. In The Forest Lover, the author tells the story of Emily Carr, a Canadian painter who lived from 1871 to 1945. The novel relates Carr's rejection of the stuffy English society of her father and her fascination with the native Indians of Canada, which leads her to trek into the dangerous and lonely wilderness of British Columbia to paint Indian totemic carvings. Noting on her home Web page that she worked on The Forest Lover at the same time she was completing The Girl in Hyacinth Blue, and while she was recovery from cancer treatments, Vreeland noted that the artist's "robust spirit, strong as a cedar, has inspired me to keep mine buoyant."

In a review for the Women's Review of Books, Anne Marie Todkill wrote: "One of the many successes of Susan Vreeland's interpretation of Carr's life in her novel The Forest Lover is her exploration of Carr's relationship to Native culture." Todkill went on to note that, "although her portrayal is sympathetic and at times rhapsodic, it is neither simplistic nor uncritical." Noting the author's "robust narrative," a Publishers Weekly contributor also wrote that Vreeland "provides … historical background with the same authoritative detail that size brings to the Victorian culture that challenged Carr's pioneering efforts."Patricia Morley, writing in the Canadian Book Review Annual, called the novel "a delight." Donna Seaman concluded in Booklist that Vreeland's "dramatic depictions of Carr's [story are] … provocative and moving."

Vreeland takes on the stories of several artists in her book Life Studies: Stories. Some of the tales focus on vignettes tangentially associated with the lives of famous painters, such as Cezanne, Monet, Renoir, and Van Gogh. For example, in one story, Vreeland describes Monet's gardener as he watches the painter destroy some of his works. Other stories in the collection revolve around people who have been greatly influenced by art. For example, in "Respond," Vreeland tells the story of an unhappy homemaker whose life becomes enriched when she begins posing as a nude model. Another tale focuses on a boy making fun of the artist Cezanne. "The Things He Didn't Know" relates a construction worker's negative feelings as his obviously knowledgeable girlfriend teaches him about the art he is viewing during a visit to a museum. A Kirkus Reviews contributor called the book "stimulating and enriching" and also noted that "the collection reminds us that the bountiful promise of art is everywhere." Donna Seaman, writing in Booklist, noted that the author "creates unexpected moments of magic." Seaman also wrote: "Art-loving [readers] … will find Vreeland's well-plotted and art history-rich stories compelling." Another reviewer, writing in Publishers Weekly, commented that "the best of [the stories] … have a luminous clarity."

In an interview with Penelope Rowlands of Publishers Weekly, Vreeland explained: "I'm very much interested in the process by which a historical figure becomes a fictional character. Fiction is the process by which our time grasps the significance of a life in another time period."

Vreeland once told CA: "I've always envied writers whose novels gushed out from their own growing up, rich in ethnicity or place or history. Countering my complaints about my ethnic blandness, the lack of a ready-made family story, one of my writer friends said, 'Go back further.' All I had was a love for art, a Dutch name, and a trip twenty years earlier when, to my surprise, I passed through a village in North Holland named Vreeland. I had nothing more than that—except a library card and uninterrupted days of solitude, two years of cancer treatment and recovery, during which I could imagine my way out of my uncertain circumstances, and imagine my way into Dutch paintings. They showed me a heritage alive with vitality and history and the endurance of beauty. They survived—and so would I."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Book, March-April, 2002, Susan Tekulve, review of The Passion of Artemisia, pp. 69-70.

Booklist, July, 1997, Wilma Longstreet, review of What Love Sees, p. 1830; September 1, 1999, Veronica Scrol, review of Girl in Hyacinth Blue, p. 69; December 1, 2001, Kristine Huntley, review of The Passion of Artemisia, p. 607; November 15, 2003, review of The Forest Lover, p. 582; December 1, 2004, Donna Seaman, review of Life Studies: Stories, p. 638.

Canadian Book Review Annual, 2004, Patricia Morley, review of The Forest Lover, p. 202.

Entertainment Weekly, January 25, 2002, Karen Valby, review of The Passion of Artemisia, p. 98.

Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 1999, review of Girl in Hyacinth Blue, p. 998; October 1, 2004, review of Life Studies, p. 938.

Kliatt, January, 1989, Diane C. Donovan, review of What Love Sees, p. 19; May, 1997, Rozell R. Over-mire, review of What Love Sees, pp. 48-49.

Library Journal, October 15, 1999, Barbara Hoffert, review of Girl in Hyacinth Blue, p. 103; December, 2001, Eleanor J. Bader, review of The Passion of Artemisia, p. 177.

New York Times Book Review, December 19, 1999, Katy Emck, "Picture This," p. 29; March 17, 2002, Julie Gray, review of The Passion of Artemisia, p. 25.

People, March 11, 2002, Carmela Ciuraru, review of The Passion of Artemisia, p. 49.

Publishers Weekly, July 12, 1999, review of Girl in Hyacinth Blue, p. 71; November 1, 1999, review of Girl in Hyacinth Blue, p. 47; March 6, 2000, John F. Baker, "Into the Big Time," p. 14; April 16, 2001, p. 16; December 17, 2001, review of The Passion of Artemisia, p. 64; January 14, 2002, Penelope Rowlands, "Completing the Picture with Art," p. 35; November 24, 2003, review of The Forest Lover, p. 39.

Vogue, February, 2002, Leslie Camhi, "Strokes of Genius: The Life of Italian Artist Artemisia Gentileschi Is the Subject of Susan Vreeland's Intimate New Novel," p. 168.

Washington Post Book World, February 17, 2002, Susan Dodd, "Art and Ardor," p. T6.

Women's Review of Books, April, 2002, Diana Postleth-waite, "Pigments of the Imagination," p. 14; July, 2004, Anne Marie Todkill, review of The Forest Lover, p. 1.