Hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday season! Here’s some new listening to help usher in the New Year. For today’s post, I’m delighted to welcome my friend and colleague Susan Ingram. Susan is a fellow Baltimore writer; she and I studied together in the Johns Hopkins MA program in fiction, and she is a short-story writer, novelist, and memoirist.

“The Coaster,” her story featured in this post, is a beautiful short piece about the passage of time and the challenges of letting go of the past. Susan writes, “This story came to me with one line and an image. I woke up one morning with the line ‘Animals weren’t allowed on the coaster,’ and the image of a little dog’s face clear in my mind.” Out of this, she created a piece about “the parallel melancholy feelings of how the end of summer felt as a kid, when it was time to go back to school, and the feelings as I age of that carefree/discovery/exciting time of life being gone.

I’ve paired “The Coaster” with two movements of Maurice Ravel’s Ma Mere L’Oye, Mother Goose Suite, which folks who’ve followed this blog know is one of my favorite pieces (and inspired my novel To Love A Stranger). I’ve used the first movement, “Sleeping Beauty’s Pavane,” and the third, “Laideronnette, Empress of the Pagodas.”