Hello, my name is Suzanne Ward

I am a survivor. I am a writer, and a story teller. I collect folktales and folklore.

I was born a child of eight siblings, four girls and four boys. My parents were very hard workers, as my Dad was a machinist and my Mother worked in various textile trades, usually for low pay. I was born number seven. I was the youngest till my sister was born when I was seven, after my Mom had several miscarriages. She was forty-three at the time, and in the early sixes that was considered a very dangerous pregnancy. She did fine, my youngest sister weighed ten pounds+.

I was born and raised on a dirt farm, as it is referred to in the hills of northern Georgia. That meant we had a milk cow for our milk, and chickens and hogs for meat and eggs.

My Dad raised coon dogs, and bred and trained them.

The front porch of our house was a gathering place for the whole neighborhood. It had chairs of every description- rockers, ladder backed, cane-bottomed, some in disrepair, some with ragged upholstery, but most important was the swings on each end where we children gathered.

We listened to tales of farming, share-cropping, coon hunting, trapping, fish tales, etc.

In the kitchen the women gathered, and there we heard all the things women discuss only among themselves.

I remember many of those tales, and write about them. I also visited quite frequently with my great aunt Polly Edwards, who was in her nineties during my visits. I owe a great deal of my knowledge of early life in Georgia to her, and want to give her credit for teaching me many things I would have learned no other place. This is for you, Aunt Polly, I still wish you were alive today to tell me more.

I got pregnant young, at age seventeen, and married ASAP. The marriage lasted eleven years, and was a bad choice on my part to begin with. But I do have a beautiful daughter from that marriage, Candy, and a grandson named Darby to boot. I later re-marriaged, and have remained in this wonderful relationship for twenty one years. I have a second daughter named Caitlin and a son named John.

I have moved and traveled a great deal these last twenty one years, and have gathered more tales everywhere I go. But I always remember my roots in the hills and valleys of north Georgia.