Writer and Arts Therapist/Lecturer, France/UK
Susanna Crossman is an Anglo-French fiction writer and essayist whose work has appeared in The Paris Review, 3:AM Magazine and the MAI Journal, among others. She also works internationally with hospitals and organisations as a clinical arts therapist and lecturer. She is the author of the novel L’Île sombre or ‘Dark Island’ (2021), and her work is included in Garden Among Fires: A Lockdown Anthology (2020), edited by Marina Benjamin. Her latest book is Home Is Where We Start: Growing Up in the Fallout of the Utopian Dream (Fig Tree, forthcoming in August 2024).
essay
Public health
It’s dirty work
In caring for and bearing with human suffering, hospital staff perform extreme emotional labour. Is there a better way?
Susanna Crossman
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Subcultures
The utopian machine
For children like me, growing up in an utopian community, life was a bewildering chaos of freedom and indoctrination
Susanna Crossman
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Psychiatry and psychotherapy
The play cure
In a clinical setting, playful activities are not distractions; they take patients deep into trauma – and out the other side
Susanna Crossman