Welcome to my new blog!

Hello all and welcome to my new blog! I had no idea how hard a first blog post would be, or maybe I did and that’s why I have waited so long to finally start. I didn’t know if I’d have anything important to say, and I’m still not sure, but I’ll let you, my reader, be the judge now.

My name is Suzanne Ferreira Dixon, and I was raised bi-culturally by a Portuguese immigrant family in suburban Massachusetts. I’ve been writing since grade school, when I started my first fable on a print writing worksheet, and just kept going. When my father spent a month in Portugal taking care of my sick grandfather when I was just 7 years old, I wrote my fist poem. As most daddy’s little girls, my father was my first muse. Five years later, I wrote a poem titled “Care” that ended up getting published in a Christian magazine.

Though I was raised Catholic, I have since backed away from organized religion. As Kurt Vonnegut, my favorite American writer once said, “I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishments after I’m dead.”

I decided to write my first blog, because after many years of writing on the side, and a degree in journalism, I finally finished my first novel, CURSED VINES. I wanted to share my love of writing and my motherland, Portugal, with the world. This first novel explores Portuguese voodoo along with the long history of a once powerful Moorish empire. My dad taught me a lot of what I know about Portuguese history, and my years of research for this book has certainly made him proud.

I’m a traveler at heart. Though I’ve been living in Los Angeles for over 16 years, I get antsy when I haven’t traveled for a while. Of course, Europe is always close to my heart (especially my favorite city on earth, London) and I have traveled there more times than I can count. But the most awe inspiring trip of all was to one of the Great Wonders of the World, Machu Picchu. There is no possibility of visiting there and not realizing how small we are, how we’re mere ants on this magnificent planet, in this ever-expanding universe.