An Evening in Conversation with Susan Forrest Castle

We are thrilled to welcome Susan Forrest Castle for a special author talk at Books on Third!

Susan Forrest Castle is a writer, painter, and photographer who was a senior writer at Sotheby's and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. She is the author of Richard Segalman: Black and White | Muses, Magic & Monotypes. Her artwork has been exhibited in several U.S. cities, as well as in Ireland and Venice, Italy, where she has been an artist-in-residence at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica di Venezia and Venezia Contemporanea. She lives in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, and the United States.

About the Book: Ensoulment
Winner of the 2025 Thomas E. Kennedy Novel Award, Ensoulment explores the moment at which a human being gains a soul.

Swimming in a secluded lake near her Georgia home, forty-something waitress Phoebe is startled by a figure watching her from the shore. When she exits the water—nearly blind without her glasses—the stranger wrestles her to the stony ground and assaults her.

Hundreds of miles north, family man and successful attorney George Paxton pauses while mowing his lawn to stretch out on the grass. Gazing into the vast blue sky, he sees a dirigible floating overhead. The sight stirs him so deeply that he vows to pilot such a craft himself—consequences be damned.

Ensoulment follows Phoebe as she juggles low-paid work and an unforeseen pregnancy, and George as his obsession with airships compels him to abandon his marriage and lucrative career. Each sheds the life they have known to embrace the soul they were born to be, drawing toward each other in the process—in spirit and, ultimately, in fact—when George, aloft in his dirigible, is brought down to earth and into Phoebe’s world by a raging storm.

Susan will talk about:
The inspiration behind Ensoulment
Her writing journey
Art, identity, and transformation
The intersection of visual art and fiction
And more!

📅 Date: Wednesday, March 18th
🕠 Time: 5:00-7:00pm
🎟 Admission: Free
📍 Location: Books on Third – 1300 3rd St S Unit 201, Naples, FL 34102

Books will be available for purchase at the event.

Join us for an engaging evening of conversation about art, storytelling, rebirth, and the mysterious forces that shape our lives.

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