I started Exquisite Now because I didn’t know how rich life could be in each of its moments. I needed proof. I’m a novelist, a multiple-award-winning journalist, a devoted gardener, a bird lover, a dual-citizen traveler, and someone who loves trees, both vertical and horizontal.
My novel The Booker Rebellion is coming from Sibylline Press in November 2026. The Booker siblings — fifteen-year-old Belinda, twelve-year-old Jack and six-year-old Emmy — discover a corpse in the forest near their remote western Oregon home and are on their own as they uncover a secret militia caching weapons in the woods, lose their aunt, and find themselves the target of a deputy who’d rather they disappear.
My first novel, The Tabernacle Bar (Signature Books,1998), may not answer the big existential questions, but it does know what happens when Jessie Cannon turns to the angel Moroni for help making her small-town bar in Utah a success.
During those in-between years I was reporting for The Register-Guard in Eugene on a general assignment beat (think rivers and trees and salmon and otters, presidential candidates, senators and governors, but more importantly the fascinating people that make Lane County a unique place); writing two additional novels, one in final polish right now, one that roamed the corridors of the Big Five publishers in New York City but never hit escape velocity.
Here’s a thing about me few people know: I did a couple of years at the Anchorage Daily News (back before newspapers were online) writing an advice column titled Wanda’s Love Elixir. Yes, really. Different times.
Feel free to share your exquisite nows. The comment boxes are always open.
Recent journalism:
https://yachatsnews.com/experts-warn-about-seals-sea-lions-on-beaches/
Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now 
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