Susan Kelleher

Susan L Metzger, MS, MBA, MFA, has a history rich in psychology, having witnessed her father's attempt on her mother's life when Susan was eleven and having suffered through tensions between her parents all through her college years, dropping out of Iowa State University twice in order to deal with them. It was no wonder that she gravitated to psychology and sociology courses as an undergrad and ultimately earned a masters degree in Counseling Psychology. She even married a psychologist, her first husband Thomas S. Ryan, a prominent marriage counselor in Chicago.

When she was working for a large community mental health center in South Bend, Indiana in the mid 1980's, she worked with Jungian Analyst Tom Kapacinskas and ironed out many issues surrounding her troubled upbringing. While in South Bend, she found herself taking the leadership role for the parents whose children were molested in their daycare center just over the border in Michigan. Her husband, Tom Ryan, was at that time a specialist in child sexual abuse treatment in Chicago and consulted with the therapists who were interviewing the child victims. At this same time, she was accepted into the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at Western Michigan University and used the drama of the daycare case to create her first novel, Two Boys. The novel won high praise from her instructors and was snatched up by a top literary agent in London, who failed to place it with a publisher. In the mid-1990's, there was an over-abundance of child abuse stories coming out, so the novel sat on Susan's shelf for 20 years until recently.

In the meantime, she wrote The Spirit Dogs Trilogy, the first of which is an illustrated short story aimed at people whose dogs have died. It won a Silver Medal from the Independent Publishers Book Awards for gift books. The second in the trilogy, a novel, won the Moms Choice Books Awards for Young Adult Fiction. The third book was released in early 2013. These are under her pen name Susan Kelleher because she was in a second marriage to a Dr. Kelleher when the first book was published. She describes that 4-month marriage as "her crash course in alcoholism," but by the time she was able to get out of it, she realized she was stuck with the name Kelleher for these books. "I do like the K," she says but still has some regret about the association.

Her fifth book , Beringei: A Modern Fairy Tale, is based on the gender dysphoria experienced by many transgender individuals. It is set in a fantasy about a woman bus driver at a major Colorado ski resort who is visited by a strange light that offers her one wish, but before she is able to formulate a wish, she is, in a flash, transformed into a male mountain gorilla. She soon learns that the ski resort has brought in a dozen trained gorillas to help install a new ski lift, and the story centers around her frantic attempt to integrate with these other gorillas in order to discover why she experienced this sudden transformation. Keep in mind that the sub-title is "A Modern Fairy Tale"! It centers around the psychological issues involved in changing gender, all inspired by her close friendships with five male-to-female transgender women.

She has three other novels in progress and works on them while teaching Freshman Composition and Literature for a college in northern Colorado. Watch for a novel entitled Jolene about a black woman ex-slave in the late 1860's who has healing powers and another entitled Bertie and Pip about a young girl growing up in the 1950s with a paranoid, neurotic mother.

She is an avid road bicyclist as well as an intermediate-level violist and greatly enjoys playing classical music in a string quartet and a large orchestra. She lives with Rocky the Flat-Coated Retriever and Emily the cat.