Amy Chu and the Reader
Amy Chu 8:30 a.m., Sept. 15
Sue Garson
In Sue Garson's early life in NYC she was surrounded by walls of books, art, and the fiery sounds of heated political dialogue. With those influences as muse, she won essay contests, joined the staff of her high school newspaper, and had letters published in The Village Voice.
Along with her young family, she migrated to San Diego in 1972. Within a few years she was writing features and reviews on a steady basis for various local publications. Included were the Reader, La Jolla Light, Union-Tribune, and the Los Angles Times, as well as nationally in The Humanist and Present Tense. Some of her work was reprinted.
Her adventuresome spirit led her to explore six continents where she stumbled upon stories in the former USSR during the Chernobyl explosion. She was an accidental tourist in Tunis during the first Arab League Conference, and she marched along with the Madres in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. She interviewed such notables as author Elie Wiesel, philosopher/comic Mort Sahl, film director Paul Mazursky, and Argentina's foreign minister, Hector Timerman.
She currently harvests organic fruit and vegetables in her San Diego garden, cooks spicy curries, and is the nontraditional matriarch of a four-generation family.
Articles by Sue Garson
Sue Garson and the Reader
Murderer next door, Chabad, Oakwood Apartments, Russian yuppie, nomadic street kids
How Garson came to write for the Reader: When I stumbled into a small piano bar in Bankers Hill called the Caliph, a steady stream of after-hours nocturnal characters drew me to them as they ...
Stories hidden inside the San Diego Reader
Ventura Place, rock art, Brenda Starr, Vietnamese poets
Editor: The following feature stories appeared in the interior pages of the Reader in the 1970s and 1980s and have just been converted to digital form. Meditations while riding San Diego Transit “Yes, these people ...
Reader writers: the story I wanted to write... but didn't
“Maybe an animal story”
Sandy and a girlfriend had gone into a liquor store, robbed the clerk, They locked the clerk in a walk-in cooler. Sandy started feeling bad about the guy. She went back and let him out.
Brilliant St. Augustine and USD grad kills mother in Pacific Beach
The blood upon his hands
The following audition material won a stand-up comic/philosopher a paid gig at the Green Peak Restaurant and Comedy Club in East Dorset, Vermont, last September: • Revelation! God is androgynous — but chauvinistic! • Here’s ...
The vile and violent life of San Diego's street kids
Wasted
She always sleeps with her clothes on. Today she wakes up in jeans, a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt that covers layers of T-shirts, three finger rings, and six earrings. She doesn’t remember ever having had a ...
The Portuguese fishing families of Point Loma
Tunaville times
San Diego’s tuna fleet then numbered 200 and accounted for eighty percent of the world’s catch. Nearly half the vessels were owned by Portuguese dynasties that had been living in Point Loma for several generations.
With the courtroom crowd watching the Cara Knott murder case
Life is a trial
By the time the defense rested its case on February 8, the mood in the hallway had become more intimate. People exchanged business cards and passed out breath mints, and raffle tickets were sold for the Cara Knott Foundation
Welcome to the mentally ill on Elm Street
Central Manor – the worst is when people check out
Last March 16, Marshall could no longer tolerate sharing a dingy nine-by-eleven-foot room with someone who talked nonstop about the CIA and who woke him intermittently during the night searching for bullet holes. “Living with ...
The parking lot at Rosecrans, Taylor, and Pacific Highway is perfect for long-haul drivers
Truck stop story
Hey, Foxy Jaws, where’s a flop stop? We be makin’ three tracks in the sand an' we gotta get offa the licorice stick.” When a dozen CBers tell Daddy Longlegs where to park, No Show’s ...
