About Suzanne

Suzanne, a native Oregonian, began seeing things at an early age that other people did not. When what she saw upset the people around her, she was shamed into silence, and she tried desperately to be the ordinary girl everyone wanted her to be. There had been others before her. Both of her great-grandmothers carried the same quiet ability, a family secret no one cared to speak about. But her ability was persistent, and it would not be silenced.

The door opened in her early twenties, with a book called The Boston Strangler, in which Peter Hurkos, a Dutch psychic, held the shoes of missing women and saw pictures. Half curious and half daring herself, Suzanne began holding her friends' rings and car keys. The pictures came to her as well, as if they had only been waiting to be seen.

In the autumn of 1989, an old friend from school, then working with search and rescue, asked for her help in finding a missing boy. She had never worked a case before, and she was reluctant but willing. Since that time, she has counseled the families of missing persons, always without charge, and that work remains close to her heart. Still, the moments she treasures most are the quieter ones, sitting across from a single person and helping them see their own life a little more clearly.

Her own path was anything but straight. By her own telling, her first forty years were tumultuous, spent trying to perceive the world in a normal way and to be invisible. Her seeing was simply different, and in time she stopped fighting it. She set that journey down on paper, first as a journal for her grandchildren, and it grew into her award-winning memoir, You Know Your Way Home, which has since been adapted into a screenplay.

For eight years, on the first Monday of every month, Portland listeners kept the phone lines lit for Suzanne on 105.1 The Buzz. She has spoken in libraries and bookshops, to writers' circles, and on KOIN's Studio 6, and she has never lost her practical and straightforward way of saying what she sees.

The best advice anyone ever gave her was two words long: trust yourself. In one way or another, that is what she has spent her life helping others learn to do.

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