Brother Mockingbird. (June 7, 2022)

Paperback. Signed.

The title essay in this collection, “Pilgrim Interrupted,” is set on the island of Patmos, Greece, during one of Susan’s pilgrimages with her husband, Father Basil Cushman, an Orthodox priest. Pilgrimages. Orthodoxy. Icons. Monasteries. It’s all in here. But so are stories about mental health, caregiving, death, family, and writing, including a section on “place,” a key element in Southern literature. And how is Susan’s pilgrimage “interrupted”? By life itself.

Pilgrim Interrupted is a collection of 35 essays, 3 poems, and 5 excerpts from Susan’s novels and short stories. Coming of age during the turbulent 1960s in Jackson, Mississippi; marrying young and adopting three children; leaving the Presbyterian Church of her childhood for the Eastern Orthodox Christian faith in 1987; Susan finally began to chronicle her journey in the early 2000s. Pilgrim Interrupted is her eighth book.

Susan Cushman is a native of Jackson, Mississippi, and has lived in Memphis since 1988. She started her blog, “Pen and Palette,” in 2007, and curated sixty of those posts for her first published book, a memoir, Tangles and Plaques: A Mother and Daughter Face Alzheimer’s (2017). She published seven books in her late sixties, including her second novel John and Mary Margaret (2019), which is set against the backdrop of fifty years of civil right history in Mississippi and Memphis. Pilgrim Interrupted (2022), a spiritual/personal memoir, is Susan’s eighth book. Susan and her husband of fifty-two years, Bill, who is a physician (aka Dr. William Cushman) and an Orthodox priest (aka Father Basil Cushman), are converts from the Presbyterian Church to the Orthodox Church. They have three grown “children,” and four granddaughters.