Susan Sanford Blades has a BA in Psychology and Women’s Studies from the University of Alberta. She has been with The Malahat Review since the Summer of 2008 and has held various positions, depending on who’s going and coming and going again at the office. She currently serves as The Malahat’s Circulation and Marketing Manager and moonlights as Editorial Assistant for an academic journal, Theory & Psychology.

Her favourite short story is “Paul’s Case” by Willa Cather and her favourite novels are A Candle to Light the Sun by Patricia Blondal and The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir. (And she can’t not mention The Catcher in the Rye, Margaret Laurence’s The Fire-Dwellers, Emile Zola’s Nana, and Elizabeth Hay’s A Student of Weather.) As a diligent employee, she reads in all three of The Malahat’s genres: the short fiction of Craig Boyko, Deborah Willis, Breece D’J Pancake, Zsuzsi Gartner, Annie Proulx, and Alice Munro; Jeramy Dodds’ and Bronwen Wallace’s poetry; and in nonfiction, she’s now reading Selected Letters of Margaret Laurence and Adele Wiseman (up next: A Writer’s Life: The Margaret Laurence Lectures). She also thoroughly enjoys every issue of Brain, Child; The New Quarterly; and (of course) The Malahat Review.

Photo credit: Will Johnson