Susan Code McDougall
2496 Bathurst 2nd Concession RR 7
Perth, Ontario K7H 3C9
(613) 267–2595 (t/f)
scode@ripnet.com
Susan Code is a freelance writer and editor and a college instructor who has also enjoyed working as, among other things, an historical interpreter and an assistant to a federal cabinet minister.
She is the author of A Matter of Honour and Other Tales of Early Perth (1996) and co-author of Inside the Tent—45 Years on Parliament Hill (1998), with Tom Van Dusen. Both are published by General Store Publishing House, Renfrew, Ontario. She wrote the text for Visiting the Spirits—Exploring the Hidden Heritage of the Little Bonnechere River (2001), an interactive CD, and Land of the Spirits (2006), a virtual museum of the Bonnechere. Both were produced by Friends of Bonnechere Park.
A Matter of Honour is a collection of a dozen true stories recounting some of the more fascinating events of Perth’s early days. Duels, hangings, and everyday shenanigans punctuate the pages of this entertaining history. Inside the Tent is an amusing, thoughtful, and personal chronicle of Tom Van Dusen, whose career as a reporter and political aide gave him an insider’s view of the major political events of the last half of the twentieth century.
She has edited several local histories, including Draw Up A Chair—A Treasury of Renfrew County Storytelling (2001); numerous military histories, including Ubique! (2003), a history of the Canadian Military Engineers; and several fiction titles, including all four novels in the popular Lost Villages Mystery Series (2002–09), by Maggie Wheeler, as well as Run of the Town (2006), by Terrence Rundle West, which won the 2007 Northern Lit Award. All are published by General Store Publishing House, for whom Susan serves as a senior editor. She served as editor of Rideau Reflections (1988–91), an annual tourist magazine published by the Friends of the Rideau, and assisted with the historical research for Dividing the Waters: A Preliminary Overview of Water Management on the Rideau 1832–1972 (Parks Canada 1985), for Professors B. Osborne and D. Swainson of Queen’s University.
Susan has considerable experience in the field of business communications, having spent several years as a writer for an Ottawa Valley public relations firm and as a correspondence and briefings editor for the federal minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food and the president of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. She served more than three years as constituency assistant in the federal riding of Lanark–Carleton.
She appears regularly on radio and television and speaks to groups about the history of Perth and the Rideau Corridor. She has conducted guided tours of Perth and area for more than twenty-five years.
Since the late 1990s, Susan has taught at the Perth Campus of Algonquin College; courses have included business English, short-story writing, the history of Canadian architecture, and the history of social welfare development. She has also taught minute-taking and business writing workshops through various training providers in Ottawa.
She holds an honours degree in history from Queen’s University at Kingston.