SUSAN HARLAN

WRITER/ENGLISH PROFESSOR

WINSTON-SALEM, NC

OBJECTS. PLACES. MEMORIES. FUNNY THINGS.

SUSAN HARLAN

WRITER/ENGLISH PROFESSOR

WINSTON-SALEM, NC

OBJECTS. PLACES. MEMORIES. FUNNY THINGS.

Featured
Searching for Souvenirs at Dollywood
Souvenirs are, in many ways, generic, particularly the mass-produced variety you buy at a theme park, as opposed to a seashell you might bring home from a trip to the beach. But, like Dolly herself, souvenirs can embody contradictions. If they are seemingly impersonal, they can also be personal. They can be material memories. There is something talismanic about them. And something ineffable, as if they might have powers that language does not. Once you’re home, a souvenir might be the only thing that remains from your trip, a reminder of the irrecoverable. Souvenirs try to transform an experience into an object.
Racked National
Objects
Featured
Going Through Blanche DuBois’s Luggage
There is no piece of luggage quite like Blanche DuBois’s trunk in A Streetcar Named Desire. This object contains the life, or the life traces, of one of Tennessee Williams’s most enduring characters. Actors love Blanche for the same reason that they love Hamlet: she is an actor, and she understands what actors understand—that artifice is not the opposite of truth but a means of achieving it.
The Paris Review
Objects
Meditations on My Front Porch
My front porch is my favorite room in my house. I suppose it’s not really a room.
Columbia College Today
Objects
The dish store that is my home away from home
y most recent trip to Replacements, Ltd. was last December 31. I didn’t intend to go on New Year’s Eve, but I don’t like New Year’s Eve—the mandated reflection on your life, the unreasonable expectations for fun—so it’s possible that on this most unpleasa
Curbed National
Objects
Suitcase
On an ugly suitcase.
Queen Mob's Tea House
Objects
Old Bags
Penguin Travellers tapestry suitcase (soft-sided and small); brown mock-leather Samsonite suitcase, with monogram J.A.B. Samsonite Saturn tapestry shoulder bag in cream, pink, and brown; two Coach Stewardess bags – dark brown and tan, both scuffed. Susan Harlan’s writing has appeared in venues including The Guardian US, The Paris Review Daily, The Toast, Roads & Kingdoms, The Common, The Morning News, Curbed, Queen Mob’s Tea House, Avidly, The Hairpin, Public Books, and The Awl.
The Brooklyn Quarterly
Objects
Miniature Blue Ridge Parkway Sign
I’m always looking over the key rings at gas stations because I collect souvenirs. I also collect fridge magnets and snow globes. I never met a gift shop I didn’t like. I have as many souvenirs as keys on my key ring, and most of them make me think of distant places, but my miniature Blue Ridge Parkway sign makes me think of home.
McSweeney's Quarterly
Objects
Some Lessons from Object Lessons
Christopher Schaberg, Anna Leahy, and Susan Harlan in conversation. The Object Lessons book is a particular kind of book: short and not properly academic, smart but accessible and lithe. What’s the draw for taking on this sort of more-than-essay, less-than-long-book? For the writer, how are the constraints of a short book frustrating or liberating, or both?
Essay Daily
Objects
The Iron-On Labels
In the late eighties, when I was twelve, I went to a camp called Walking G Ranch. My sisters went, too. It was in the mountains of California, in Taylorsville, but now I have to look that up on a map because when you’re a kid you never know where you are. It was a working ranch, and we all got up early in the morning to take care of the animals – milk the cows and feed the pigs their slop – and sometimes at night, my friend Anne and I slept in the hayloft.
The Common
Objects
The Grande Dame Who Collects History in One of New York's Oldest Homes
A woman with a cemetery. And a lot of chalkware Snow Whites.
Jezebel: Pictorial
Objects
Monsieur Zierold's guide to Paris: a snapshot of the city in the 1950s
(Reprinted from Public Books.)
The Guardian
Objects
In Praise of the Book Tower
“I don’t think book towers would work for me,” wrote one reader. “I would go completely bonkers with the books stacked everywhere,” said another. Bonkers, I thought. I have driven this woman mad. I was reading the comments section of the “House Tour” of my North Carolina home on the design site Apartment Therapy.
Literary Hub
Objects
Paris in Paintings
When I was in Paris recently, I wondered what would happen if I just never went home. Most people wonder this in Paris. It is not novel. When I graduated from college, I was all set to move there and start an internship at The International Herald Tribune.
The Toast
Objects
Notes Concerning the Objects That Are On My Front Porch
It was a careful process, and sometimes I put things out there and thought about it for an hour, or a day, and then brought them back inside and stuffed them in a closet or a drawer.Sometimes they were not right; they seemed to push back against the universe. But then other things were right, and they knew that they should be out there on the porch, in the night air, and they tucked themselves into this world and stayed there.
The Bitter Southerner
Objects
Monsieur Zierold’s Guide to Paris
The typed index card in Fielding’s 1956-57 Travel Guide to Europe smells old, and its edges are yellowed. It is a note, to someone. It is part of Paris on a card. The book’s former owner must have forgotten that it was there, or inherited the book and never knew that it was there, or remembered one day that it was there and missed it.
Public Books
Objects

About

SUSAN HARLAN

Teaching

Writing

Susan Harlan is a writer based in Winston-Salem, NC, who is particularly interested in the relationship between place, memory, and objects. Her essays have appeared in publications including The Guardian US, The Paris Review Daily, Guernica, Roads & Kingdoms, The Morning News, The Awl, Curbed, Racked, Atlas Obscura, The Common, The Toast, Nowhere, Literary Hub, The Bitter Southerner, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, The Brooklyn Quarterly, Avidly, and Public Books. She also writes about feminist issues for venues such as Jezebel, DAME, Skirt!, The Hairpin, Queen Mob's Tea House, The Belladonna, and The South Carolina Review. She holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from New York University and an M.A. in English Renaissance theater history from King’s College London and teaches English at Wake Forest University. Her book Luggage was published in the Bloomsbury series Object Lessons in March 2018. Her book Decorating a Room of One's Own, a satirical mash-up of home design reportage and literary homes based on her column for The Toast, was published by Abrams in October 2018.

Representation: Mariah Stovall, Trellis Literary Management

Photo credit Sarah Torretta Klock.