Kings Park Writer Transforms Past into Prose

For a while, it seemed very little was going right for Suzanne Wells.

Amid the challenges of a divorce and single motherhood, losing a home and living on welfare, and recovering from a heroin addiction, she found herself returning in the summer of 2008 with her three children to live with her parents in the Kings Park home in which she'd been raised. She tells stories of a night in a family shelter, kind neighbors who bought shoes for her children, relying on donations of food and gift cards to make it through Christmas.

But at least one thing has gone right since. Wells, who has spent the last two years turning her painful past into a memoir, won an American Idol-style competition called earlier this month at the Book Revue in Huntington.

At Pitchapalooza, contestants chosen at random from among more than 100 in attendance had one minute to pitch their ideas to a panel which included author David Henry Sterry, literary agents Arielle Eckstut and James Levine, and It Books vice president Mauro DiPreta. The event, which has been around for a decade in various venues across the country, even attracted the attention of the New York Times.

"I'm totally intrigued," Eckstut told Wells, who will now have the chance to present her book proposal to a literary agent.

She left Pitchapalooza with hope.

"When I came home from Pitchapalooza and I kissed [my children] goodnight, I said, 'I won a chance for my book, for my writing, a chance for us,'" Wells said.

She describes her memoir, One Wing – The Book, using popular literary references: "It's Eat, Pray, Love meets One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest with guitar and vocals." In it, she discusses her journey from her mid-1990s struggle with heroin addiction, which landed her in the hospital in a coma from which she said no one expected her to wake up, to later become a housewife, mother and yoga teacher in suburban Ohio before returning to Long Island as a single parent.

Wells said she turned to music, writing, and ayurveda – a medical methodology which originated in India that uses food, herbs and lifestyle changes to heal – to get her and her children through the difficulties, many of which they still face every day.

"I was writing every day through tears and singing in my car to make it through this process of the shifting of the family shape and the place of poverty we fell into," she said. "It's been financially challenging, incredibly so, in ways that really shook me."

Wells hosts a weekly online radio show, "Harmonic Earth: Life as Art," and hopes to one day publish not only One Wing but also a book of her poetry. She teaches yoga at Simplicity Yoga in Kings Park, where owner Rosanne Sihler, a former English teacher, is also helping her perfect her book proposal.

"The writing is so enjoyable, it feels like you're having a conversation with a friend," Sihler said. "I feel like our culture is really ready for this kind of book. It speaks to you on so many levels."

Ashley Milligan contributed to this story.