Guest Suzanne Leonard joined the staff of The Dartmouth, but realized the pace of a daily paper didn’t give her time to spend with the stories or the words she was writing. A work-study job at the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine gave her a taste of a different pace that suited her better. A double English and psychology major, she found the perfect internship, working as an assistant at Psychology Today and left college convinced she would work in magazine publishing. Landing at Fitness magazine, she didn’t end up feeling comfortable with either the content or the paycheck. She took advice from her professor father that she might want to consider graduate school, applied, and found herself—and her people—in a master’s program in Wisconsin. Realizing she was better suited to write about magazines than for them, she pursued her PhD in literature and worked across a variety of media, ultimately concentrating in gender, media, and popular culture.

When she realized that the winds of popular opinion were blowing in ideas about what constituted “appropriate” curricula for schools across the country and particularly her middle-class town in Massachusetts, she realized that she her knowledge of critical race and gender theory needed to be applied to the debate and she ran for an open seat on the school committee in her town.

In this episode, find out from Suzanne how moving from doing what you know to casting a critical eye toward it can sometimes make more impact…on Roads Taken with Leslie Jennings Rowley.

About This Episode’s Guest

Suzanne Leonard is Professor of English and the Director of the Graduate Program in Gender and Cultural Studies at Simmons University. She is on the board of Console-ing Passions, an organization devoted to the study of Television, Video, Audio, New Media, and Feminism. Her recent books include Wife, Inc.: The Business of Marriage in the Twenty-First Century (2018); and the edited volume Imagining We in the Age of I: Romance and Social Bonding in Contemporary Culture(2021). She is an elected member of the Winthrop School Committee in Winthrop, Massachusetts, where she lives with her husband and daughter.

Mentioned in this Episode

Suzanne wrote a piece, "Knowing the Dead," for the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine about her work-study job prepping class secretaries to write obituaries. Read the piece from the DAM archives.

Executive Producer/Host: Leslie Jennings Rowley

Music: Brian Burrows

Find more episodes at https://roadstakenshow.com

Email the show at RoadsTakenShow@gmail.com

Find more episodes at https://roadstakenshow.com

Executive Producer/Host: Leslie Jennings Rowley

Music: Brian Burrows

Email the show at RoadsTakenShow@gmail.com

Pacing Yourself: Suzanne Leonard on finding the right outlets and spending time where it matters

Roads Taken