With her feet firmly rooted on the plains of Nebraska, Suzanne Ohlmann launches the reader into flight over miles and decades of migration: from an apple-pie childhood in America's Fourth of July City to the dirt floors of a cowshed in rural India, we zigzag across time and geography to see the world through Ohlmann's eyes and to discover with her the pain she'd been avoiding through her boomerang travels away from her native home. 

Through incarnations as a musician, arts manager, and registered nurse, Ohlmann finally lands in Texas, buys a house, and gets a dog. But her house is haunted, and so is she. In the dark solitude of Ohlmann's basement the vision of a dead child presents her with a harrowing choice: she can go home to Nebraska and seek the truth of her biological past, or, like the boy, surrender to the depths of her own darkness. With honesty, compassion, and a sense of humor, Ohlmann recounts her tenacious search into the shadows of her life.

 

“No one could live or write with more care, flair and verve than Ohlmann does.

A story of deepest affections - for people, unfolding histories, the delicious textures of Nebraska, everything that makes LIFE! come utterly alive:

I'm in love with this book.”

— Naomi Shihab Nye, Young People’s Poet Laureate, Poetry Foundation.

Photo Credit Michael Nye, 2020.

About Suzanne

Suzanne Ohlmann is a writer and registered nurse who lives in Nebraska and San Antonio, Texas. She and her husband, a firefighter, share their home with a community of dogs, cats, the occasional opossum, and their son. She works with rural heart failure patients who would otherwise not have access to advanced health care, and who love to remind her that they'd rather be frying frog legs or fixing fence line than listening to her advice.

FAQs

  • Check the calendar! Suzanne will be in a different state each month reading at an independent book store.

  • Good question! Drafting is sluggish but existent. Check back for more updates!

  • Willa Cather, Edwidge Danticat, David Sedaris, Naomi Nye, Ted Kooser, Marlon James, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, Marge Saiser poetry, Vonnegut, The Letters of Kurt Vonnegut, Jeanette Winterson, Ocean Vuong, Mary Oliver, Stanley Kunitz, Wendell Berry, Junot Diaz.

  • Ideally the top number, or systolic, would be lower than 120, and the bottom number, or diastolic, would be 60-70s. Resting heart rate in the 60-70s as well.

  • Only for people who are afraid of poop and their own butt. We all have poop and we all know our bottom sides, so we all should protect those basic aspects of existence by getting a diagnostic colonoscopy starting at age 50 and every ten years after, or as recommended by your PCP based on family history. You won’t remember anything!

  • Discipline

  • Coronary artery disease is the pathological development of a substance called “plaque” in the muscular pipes called arteries, that give the muscle of your heart its supply of oxygenated blood. The plaque builds up over time and hardens, decreasing blood flow to the muscle. It can also break off and form a clot which can become a blockage, causing ischemia (decreased blood flow) or worse, an infarction (an area of actual tissue death due to lack of oxygen).

  • Yes.

  • Sort of. She studied Conjunto music with the great maestro Bene Medina and hasn’t had the heart to sell her button accordion.

  • Veins are made out of connective tissue and function at low pressures in order to return circulating blood without oxygen, or “deoxygenated blood” back to the heart. Arteries are made out of smooth muscle and operate at higher pressures because they transport blood with oxygen molecules within it, “oxygenated blood,” to all the vital organs and tissues of the body.

  • Suzanne works as a Heart Failure nurse. She’s part of a cardiology practice that sees thousands of patients. Her special group of patients have been diagnosed with “heart failure,” a blanket term that describes a heart that isn’t able to efficiently pump blood out into the body and, for that reason, there tends to be a build up of extra fluid in her patients’ bodies, most often reported in their legs and feet, their abdomens, and their lungs, causing shortness of breath and fatigue. Failure doesn’t feel like a very fair term, especially to a writer, but it’s been in the medical lexicon for a long time and thus, will take an even longer time to change. Her cardiologist boss likes to say, instead, “your heart is failing to work properly.”

  • Yes. But in Miralax and the generic equivalent, the polyethylene glycol comes into your system orally and is not absorbed at all. It goes through the stomach into the intestines and does its job, and well — pulls water into the gut to make the bowels move and push that stubborn constipation out the proverbial door!

 

Upcoming events.

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