From X: The Erotic Tresury “Valentine’s Day in Jail” Biography: In the fall of 1984, at the beginning of her second year as Writer-in-Residence at the University of Waterloo, Susan Musgrave received a manuscript from a convicted bank robber. Musgrave read the manuscript and fell in love with the novel’s protagonist. She began to correspond with the book’s author, Stephen Reid, a member Canada’s notorious Stopwatch Gang, who had served ten years of a twenty year sentence for a gold heist in Ottawa. The correspondence touched off a romance, a best-selling novel, Jackrabbit Parole, and eventually a maximum security wedding: three camera crews, including one from The Fifth Estate, filmed the couple saying “I do” and Musgrave was commissioned by Vancouver Magazine to cover her own three-day honeymoon in a cottage on the prison grounds. Stephen was released on full parole in June of 19 87. “That person seems like an ancestor of mine,” Reid said, recently, of his days in the Stopwatch Gang. After her prison marriage, Musgrave acquired a new persona, “the bankrobber’s wife”. When, in 1998, the CBC made a documentary about their lives, she decided to have fun with both their personas, even orchestrating a photo-shoot where they posed as Bonnie & Clyde, imitating a famous shot of the two outlaws, where Bonnie holds her partner-in-crime hostage at the end of a gun. Did you graduate high school? Nope. Rose up (no dropping out for me) and was checked into a mental hospital instead, by my parents. I escaped and ran away with my lover (20 years older than me - a university prof from Berkeley - I was 15) to live in Berkeley and after an aborted suicide attempt was put in a home for wayward girls in San Francisco. I escaped from there, also. I have never been found. When I was in Grade 8 I hooked up with this boy I liked, started skipping school to make out, write poetry and listen to him play “The Times They Are A’Changing” on his guitar in a field of itchy grass - until my school principal called me to his office. He said if I continued down this slippery slope there would be only one career opportunity left open to me in the future: I would end up working as a prostitute. Even then, I knew this wasn’t in the cards for me. I didn’t want a job where you had to work with other people. What other occupations do you hold, or have you held, besides being a writer? If you mean like nurse or fireman, then none. If you mean Hair Magnet inventor, patent pending. Or Girdles Toilet Seats with Sanitary Strips on volunteer basis,many. What comes to mind when you consider your ancestors? Border retrievers on the English-Scottish border. Our family is descended from the Musgraves who moved to Ireland in 1732 where one received a knighthood for his Memoir of the Irish Rebellion. The most recent ancestor I've learned about is a "skeleton" on my mother's paternal side. I am related to Mary Blandy, the last woman executed in England (presumably for witchcraft.) I had actually used her name in a short series of poems I wrote, all from the points-of-views of 18th century witches, called Becky Swan's Book. Any interesting felonies or misdemeanors you'd like to mention? One unpaid parking ticket from Parry Sound, Ontario, in 1995. I leave the bigger stuff to my partners. (My second husband was a marijuana smuggler from Washington. He brought a boat up to Canada with 30 tons of pot on board - this was in 1980 before B.C. Bud - and the boat broke down, and, and...I met him through his defense lawyer, my first husband.) My husband just got out of prison in January (he reoffended in 1999 - after getting addicted again to coke and heroin - and got 18 years. So our sex life is still/or had been up until January, mostly under the table.
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