Susan Juby had an unusual beginning to her university education. After a failed attempt at fashion school and a successful journey to sobriety—which you can read all about in Susan’s memoir, Nice Recovery—she attended the University of Toronto. While there, Susan took a program consisting of one English class. The Pre-University Program (later the Academic Bridging Program) was designed for students who didn’t receive the best grades in high school and was meant to help them begin their university education. If a student did well in this English class, they would be allowed to attend U of T part-time, and if they did very well, they would be allowed to attend full-time.

“I had cleaned myself up,” Susan said, “and I took this class, and I thought it was the greatest thing that had ever happened to me.” In the class, Susan encountered the instructor—a friendly, retired U of T professor who was invested in the success of his students.

“He completely inspired me. I thought he was just fantastic,” Susan said. “I made some insane craft mistakes with my writing, and he was so entertained by them without ever making me feel like a jerk. There was something about the way he was in the classroom. I really liked him because it would not have been very hard for an instructor to come into an environment like that and make everyone feel kind of terrible.”

Having done well in the English class, Susan began an English degree as a full-time student at U of T. After a few years of studying there, she transferred to the University of British Columbia to be closer to her family.

At UBC, Susan worked for the weekly student newspaper. She did culture reporting on music and movies and was preparing to step into the role of Arts Editor near the end of her degree.

“I was all set to do that,” Susan said, “and then the previous group of editors wrote a bunch of comedic profiles of the student government. They were very inflammatory, and the student government was up in arms, and they ended up shutting down [the newspaper] for the year I was supposed to be the Arts Editor.”

With that door closed, Susan turned to other facets of publishing. She applied for a typesetting internship at Hartley & Marks Publishers in Kitsilano and was hired.

“I was a hopeless, hopeless, hopeless typesetter,” Susan said. “That’s where you lay out books, and I was not good at it, just horrendous at it.” Despite her lackluster typesetting skills, and even more lackluster pay, Susan continued to work there as she finished her degree. Over the course of seven years, she worked her way up to the position of Managing Editor. While working there, Susan learned a valuable set of skills, such as time management, how to manage all sorts of personalities, and how to be an editor as she worked to acquire and move books through the production process.

During those years, Susan had also begun to write. She published her first book, Alice, I Think, in 2000 and turned her focus to something that had been lurking in the back of her mind for some time. “My dream [was] to write, to teach creative writing, and to teach publishing. So, with that in mind, I got [my] first book published, and it was published around the same time I started my master’s degree—’cause to teach you need a master’s degree, and I knew I wanted to teach.” Susan earned her master’s degree at Simon Fraser University, and it was there that her dream cemented itself.

“During my master’s degree, we had a professor who was unable to come [to class]. She was unable to come and just didn’t say anything, and we needed someone to present on what the material was for the day. And so, [someone] said, ‘Susan, you should do it.’ So, I got up in front of my master’s group and I took us through the material. I’m probably getting the details of this wrong, but afterwards a lot of my colleagues—my peers in the class—said, ‘That was so great. You should really teach.’ That’s when it really snapped into focus. I thought, Yes, that’s right, [teaching is] what I want to do and I’m going to do whatever I need to do because I really enjoy it.”

Susan graduated from SFU, and in 2002 she and her husband moved from Vancouver to Nanaimo. She began taking any kind of teaching job she could find—mainly sessional adjunct work—and taught night classes at UBC and at UVic for several years. To do so meant enduring a difficult schedule. Teaching at UVic meant driving the Malahat highway late at night, and teaching at UBC was even trickier.

“. . . it meant going over to UBC [from Vancouver Island] on a Wednesday during the day, teach the night class, stay overnight at my friend’s couch, and then come back at the five-thirty in the morning ferry. I’d get home at ten or eleven so I could look after the dogs so my husband could go to the mainland. It was just brutal. It was really tiring.”

In addition to Susan’s difficult schedule, she was faced with the task of learning how to be a good teacher. No one had ever sat Susan down and explained how she should teach a university course. She learned by experience and by asking other instructors questions. Things like what does your outline look like? What makes a good lecture/workshop balance? How do you deal with students who talk too much or don’t talk enough?

“Things come up and then you learn to deal with them,” Susan said. “But at first you don’t know how to deal with them, so you ask other instructors—what do you do in this situation?” Susan did all of this in the hopes of becoming an effective teacher who could provide the best learning experience possible.

With determination, Susan filled her resume with her teaching experience and set her sights on VIU. Back when Susan and her husband lived in Vancouver, they often came to Vancouver Island to visit her dad, Bill Juby, who worked in the English Department at VIU.

“I knew he was teaching at VIU, and I got to visit the campus. I met some of his colleagues, and they weren’t in the creative writing department, but they all seemed really lovely. So that kind of put [VIU] in my mind.”

While her and her dad’s paths as professors never did cross – with him retiring well before Susan started working at VIU—if it wasn’t for his connection to the university, she likely wouldn’t have considered teaching there as an option. At first, Susan didn’t have much luck applying to the Nanaimo campus, but when a last-minute opportunity to teach at VIU’s Cowichan campus presented itself, she took it.

“I, you know, somehow ended up being able to teach that one class,” Susan said, “and once you’ve taught a class, you’re more likely to get another class.” From there, Susan was able to acquire more work teaching at the Nanaimo campus and has taught there since 2009.

One of the notable strengths Susan brought to her classrooms was her skills as an editor—learned through her time working as a Managing Editor and through her experiences being edited. These skills allowed her to respect and help cultivate each student’s voice..

“That’s an important thing to bring to creative writing and something I try to convey to students,” Susan said. “It’s that our job as workshop colleagues is not to rewrite people’s material and override their voices. It’s to figure out what are [they] trying to do and what’s the best way to get there. And to allow the writer to be in charge of that.”

For the past fifteen years, Susan has worked as a creative writing professor at VIU, helping to guide a new generation of writers to the start of their careers.

“It’s a really big deal to me at VIU to work with the same students for years,” Susan said.

“That’s something I feel is very core to the VIU experience, and that’s part of why I wanted to stay at VIU when I had opportunities to go to other universities.”

Having experienced many types of teachers in her education journey—both those who cared and those who did not—she sought to be a professor who cared.

“In my mind,” Susan said, “you either care about the students, or you don’t. Students can feel when somebody’s invested in them. It doesn’t mean you’re getting up in their personal business, but it does mean—are you having a good class?”

Education made the difference for Susan in her younger years. It helped her move from a difficult and hopeless period of her life into feeling like a competent person. It led her down the road to become a published author—something she never imagined could happen.

“The process of watching other young and not-so-young people find their voice and find their way feels very affirming and very supportive to a very deep part of myself.”

Susan’s journey from university student to professor was anything but linear. It was a circuitous path marked with U-turns, roadblocks, and flat tires that ultimately got her to where she dreamed of going. 

“If it’s a grind, that’s fine,” Susan said. “Things have a way of sorting themselves out if you don’t give up.”