With a thousand members throughout the province, the Federation of BC Writers is one of the most active and vigorous writers' organizations in the country. The Fed Anthology, edited by Susan Musgrave on the occasion of the group's 25th anniversary, is a colourful bazaar of previously unpublished fiction and poetry by nearly 50 of those members. Like the Fed itself, the book includes both authors whose names are instantly familiar to all readers of Can Lit and others who are emerging only now to take their place as the next generation. The country has learned to turn to British Columbia when taking the pulse of Canadian writing. The Fed Anthology is a lively part of the process. The anthology features work by Tom Wayman, Sandy Shreve, Len Dufour, Steven Mills, Peggy Herring, Loranne Brown, Linda Rogers, Jim Christy, Kate Braid, Lorna Crozier, Caroline Woodward, Ursula Vaira, Patrick Lane, Luanne Armstrong and many others.

Praise for The Fed Anthology:

" ... accomplished stories and poems about serious issues: unhappy marriages, divorce, infidelity, illness, miscarriages, parenthood, old age, absence, loss, violence, abuse. Musgrave has chosen carefully from the Federation's 1000 members and produced a collection (marking the group's 25th anniversary) consistent in tone and featuring works similar in theme. While serious, these previously unpublished works are also refreshingly current, fresh as a centenarian's vomit." (Canadian Literature)

"An anthology (the word comes from the Greek anthos and means 'a gathering of flowers') is an excellent place to start when you want to acquaint yourself with new voices and different writing styles. The Fed Anthology, a first for the Fed, offers readers a taste of everything, a chance to smell not only the roses and the night-flowering jasmine but the skunk cabbage and the stinkweed as well (to extend the 'gathering of flowers' metaphor, which I am not quite sure I am capable of doing). More plainly put, you'll find writing here that is painfully beautiful and beautiful writing that reeks of painful truths." (Susan Musgrave, from the foreword)

Susan Musgrave has been labelled everything from eco-feminist to anti-feminist, from stand-up comedian to poet of doom and gloom, from social and political commentator to wild sea-witch of Canada's northwest coast. Her career as a social misfit began when she was kicked out of kindergarten class for laughing, and sent to the library to contemplate her heinous crime while seated on the “Thinking Chair”. She understood, then, that books and thinking must be considered dangerous, and they became her favourite forms of escape. Not long afterwards she dropped out of kindergarten for good. In Grade 8 she won her first poetry competition, with a poem about Jackie Kennedy visiting her husband's grave by moonlight in rhyming couplets. Her prize was a copy of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. At 14, Susan Musgrave dropped out of high school and ran away from home to gain life experience. She got as far as the railway tracks in Ladysmith, on Vancouver Island, where she wrote poetry about cigarettes drowning in cold cups of coffee, and on the eternal shortness of existence. Next we have the missing years (months, actually). Committed to the local psychiatric ward, assigned to Room 0, she met most of the University of Victoria's English Department. While she was plotting her eventual escape from the mental hospital, the poet Robin Skelton came to visit her. “You're not mad,” he said, after reading her poetry, “you're a poet.” She and an older professor escaped together, and spent the next years living in Berkeley, California. Her first book of poetry was published when she was 19. Of Songs of the Sea Witch, her grandfather said, “Even Shakespeare had to write a lot of rubbish to begin with.” In 1969 she received a short term Canada Council Grant of $1500 and spent the next two years living on the remote west coast of Ireland. In 1972 she returned to Canada, to the Queen Charlotte Islands, and in 1975 married a criminal lawyer, Jeffrey Green, at St. Albans Cathedral in England. The marriage lasted four years. During the trial of five Americans and 23 Colombians accused of attempting to smuggle 30 tonnes of marijuana into Canada (her husband was one of five defence lawyers) she fell in love (from across the courtroom) with one of the accused smugglers, Paul Oscar Nelson. When he was acquitted she left with him for Mexico. They lived for two years in Colombia and Panama, until the birth of their daughter, Charlotte, in 1982. While Susan was Writer-in-Residence at the University of Waterloo, 1983-85, Paul Nelson was sentenced to four years in prison in California on a previous smuggling charge. While in prison he gave his life to the Lord, and Susan and Paul were divorced shortly afterwards. Around the same time, 1983, Susan received a manuscript from a convicted bank-robber, Stephen Reid, serving a twenty-year sentence at Millhaven Penitentiary, in Ontario. She read the manuscript, fell in love with the protagonist, and married the author on October 12, 1986, while he was still in prison. His novel, Jackrabbit Parole was released the same year. On June 1, 1987, Stephen Reid was granted full parole, and the couple moved into a seaside cottage on Vancouver Island, with a 190 foot Douglas fir tree growing through the middle of it. In 1989 their daughter Sophie was born; in 1997 Stephen burned his warrant and Susan burned her mortgage papers in a party attended by a diverse group of family, friends and writers including a Supreme Court judge and two paroled members of the Squamish Five. During their thirteen year marriage Stephen battled heroin and cocaine addiction. In 1997, the couple began building a house on the Queen Charlotte Islands, and their lives were the subject of a CBC Life and Times documentary, The Poet and the Bandit, which aired in January 1999. On June 9, 1999, after a two year clean-and-dry period that had ended roughly around the time the documentary aired, Stephen was arrested for bank robbery in Victoria, following a shootout and car chase through Beacon Hill Park. He was sentenced to eighteen years in prison on December 22, 1999. Musgrave has published over 21 fiction, poetry, children's, and non-fiction books.

Susan Musgrave's profile page