WRITING
In addition to writing for Sotheby’s, the Guggenheim Museum, and numerous individual artists, I have written on art, architecture, and garden design for many national publications. I published Clouds of Old Naples, which features my text and photographs, in 2016. Additionally, I am the author of two artist monographs, one on sculptor Elyn Zimmerman and another, Richard Segalman: Black & White: Muses, Magic & Monotypes, published by The Artist Book Foundation in North Adams, Massachusetts. On 24 November 2025 my award winning novel Ensoulment was published by Serving House Books. I earned my M.A. in English Literature and Creative Writing from Stanford University.
ENSOULMENT
WINNER OF THE 2025 THOMAS E. KENNEDY NOVEL AWARD
By Susan Forrest Castle
248 Pages, 2025
Literature | Novel
ISBN: Paperback: 9781947175952 / Hardcover: 9781947175891
To order, please go to bookshop.org, barnesandnoble.com or order through Amazon.
Swimming in a secluded lake near her Georgia home, 40-something waitress Phoebe is startled by a figure watching her from the shore. When she exits the water, nearly blind without her glasses, the stranger wrestles her to the stony ground and assaults her.
Hundreds of miles north, family man and successful attorney George Paxton pauses in the midst of mowing his lawn to stretch out on the grass. Staring up into the vast blue sky he sees a dirigible float by overhead––a sight so inexplicably stirring, George vows to ply the skies in such a craft himself––consequences be damned.
Ensoulment follows Phoebe as she juggles low paid work and an unforeseen pregnancy, and George as his obsession with airships compels him to abandon his marriage and lucrative career. Each shed the lives they have known to embrace the souls they were born to be, drawing toward each other in the process––in spirit and, ultimately, in fact, when George, aloft in his dirigible, is brought down to earth—and into Phoebe’s world—by a raging storm.
Clouds of Old Naples
Softcover | 114 Pages | 100 Color Photographs
Photographs & Text by Susan Forrest Castle
To order, please use the CONTACT page or preview here.
It would be easy to find quotations to sit alongside every photograph I include here, but I have no desire to do that. The clouds themselves are poetry enough: loud exhalations, scribbles on the margin, quiet epithets, emotional sonnets, thoughtful or thoughtless comments, possible lyrics, remembered songs. I do not look for things in the clouds–faces, flowers, factories, fruit–I simply look at the clouds. And I take their picture.
Richard Segalman: Black & White – Muses, Magic & Monotypes
By Susan Forrest Castle
Foreword by Philip Eliasoph, PhD. Introduction by Anthony Kirk.
Hardcover | 176 pages | 97 color plates
The Artist Book Foundation, publisher
To order, please go to The Artist Book Foundation website or order through Amazon.
For many, the name Richard Segalman conjures up a vision of light-infused paintings of women gathered on a beach, gazing out the window of a New York City brownstone, or dressed in costumes from another era. But just as Edgar Degas, approaching his 60th year, surprised gallery goers with an exhibition not of ballerinas or racehorses, but of highly atmospheric monotype landscapes, so too does Segalman surprise us with this exceptional collection of monotypes he began to produce in 1993, at nearly 60.
Elyn Zimmerman: Sculpture
Susan Forrest Castle: Author/Editor
Foreword by Tom Moran
Essays by Charles F. Stuckey, Marc Treib, and John Beardsley
The Artist Book Foundation, publisher
To order, please go to Amazon.