Susan Huehn presents THE WIDOW’S GUIDE TO BECOMING A HANDYMAN

Content Bookstore is delighted to welcome Susan Huehn for a reading from her new book THE WIDOW’S GUIDE TO BECOMING A HANDYMAN. Join us on Thursday, February 15th in-store at 7 pm for a lively reading and conversation.

THE WIDOW’S GUIDE TO BECOMING A HANDYMAN is part grief memoir, part immigrant story, and part how-to-guide. This is a story of premature death and emotional wreckage that uses the narrator’s old house as its foundation. Grief is as palpable as a hammer hitting a nail and doesn’t come at all the way a reader might expect as the narrator methodically cares for her quirky old farmhouse’s many needs following her husband’s sudden death: a leaky roof, rotten windows, mold and frozen pumps and pipes. The narrator repeatedly tries and fails to order grief into a linear process with five distinct stages, but instead finds grief to be as disorganized and messy as the garage and sheds full of tools left by her deceased husband.

Susan Huehn was born in a sleepy German town in south-central Minnesota at the confluence of the Minnesota and Cottonwood rivers. The town was home to her immigrant parents and where she was raised speaking German. A love of German culture was embedded into her at a cellular level. At a music festival in her hometown, she met a German singer. After a transatlantic relationship (before email, Facebook, and WhatsApp!) she moved to Germany, where she lived for three years. They married during those three years and she returned with her non-English-speaking husband to live in Northfield, Minnesota, on a small hobby farm.

She studied nursing at St. Olaf College and is currently chair of the nursing department. After completing her PhD in Education she ventured from academic writing to creative writing, knowing she had a story that needed to be told.

In her spare time, Susan loves to cook good food for those she loves, garden, and sew aprons. She still lives on the hobby farm with her beloved yellow lab, Josie.