These stories refresh us with what is important about the art of fiction writing. They are inspirational in the sense that they give readers reason to keep reading and writers reason to keep writing.

William Ryan
Editor of turnrow

In these deceptively commonplace stories of husbands and wives, parents and children, neighbors and friends, Susan Woodring strips away the veneer of normalcy to show the startling mysteriousness of everyday American life. Springtime on Mars is hard to put down and even harder to forget.

Luke Whisnant
Author of Down in the Flood

Most contemporary short fiction is thin and weak like bad soup, and it leaves you starving. Then here comes Susan Woodring, with this great feast of a book! She tears the roof off of traditional domestic fiction and shows us everything that lives inside the walls of those proper houses. If there’s a better book of short stories published this year, I’ll eat it for breakfast and be glad of the chance to do so.

Pickney Benedict
Author of Dogs of God and The Wrecking Yard: Stories

The stories in Susan Woodring’s debut collection Springtime on Mars are full of wit and charm and establish Woodring as a writer full of great promise. One to watch.

Ellisa Schappell
Author of Use Me

In Susan Woodring’s smart, funny, touching debut novel, we are transported into a world of complex family dynamics replete with sometimes harrowing crises. A real pleasure to read.

Fred Leebron
Author of In the Middle of All This

It’s a rare achievement for a storyteller to take us so completely into the mind and heart of a character that we begin to believe we have become that person. But that’s what Susan Woodring has done in The Traveling Disease. We cry, laugh, hurt, and triumph with 9-year-old Pamela as she searches for the people she has lost and tries to figure out who she is and who she might be. It’s a fine book by a talented and wise author.

Robert Inman
Author of Dairy Queen Days and Captain Saturday

In The Traveling Disease, Susan Woodring gives us an utterly convincing portrait of a young girl’s search for a safe harbor amidst a world of constant disruption. Woodring is a talented writer and this novel is an impressive debut.

Ron Rash
Author of Serena