The Moonpainters

by Suzanne Burns

Come ride through California and Oregon with two sixteen-year-olds, Maggie Malone and Julia Chandler, as they come of age on the open road. Maggie is struggling for independence from a father who insists she give up her dream of becoming an artist to work in a bank. Julia is struggling with an eating disorder. When they meet two older boys traveling cross-country in a vintage van, the adventure of a lifetime ensues. What will happen to these best friends on their odyssey for self-discovery and self-acceptance, and will they ultimately survive their journey?

202 pages, Paperback

First published March 19, 2004

About the author

I am an author from Central Oregon. After focusing on poetry for several years, which culminated in the publication of two full-length collections, Blight (Archer Books) and The Flesh Procession (Bleak House Books) I am now working on fiction. Future Tense Books released a two-story flipbook this year called Double Header. In June of 2009, Dzanc Books published my short story collection, Misfits and Other Heroes.


Advanced Praise for Misfits and Other Heroes:


"This is no ordinary collection. In Misfits and Other Heroes Burns writes of disproportion, excess, reinvention, and lack as a means of magnifying outward physical irregularities to better reveal the inner irregularities of her characters. Burns is unafraid to explore the dark territory of human heart where love and hate are twins for desire and dread. The many brilliant moments of character, language, and startling observations indicate Burns is a keen observer of the wretched and wonderful human creature. In Burns' capable hands the grotesque becomes achingly familiar: the misfits she writes about are us."
—Gina Oschner, author of People I Wanted to Be

"Suzanne Burns's "heroes" in Misfits and Other Heroes may at first seem just the other side of real, but in their obsessions with food and love and their stories' perfectly odd specificity, they're as real and credible as Americans can be, whether they're a tiny husband carried around in a bird cage by his wife or a woman who prefers to eat glass rather than dumplings or a couple attached to a dollhouse. Who would have thought that Oregon's misfits could be as deluded and cruel as Flannery O'Connor's Southerners and even more bizarre?"
—Tom Whalen, author of Dolls

"Misfits and Other Heroes shows what happens when relationships get downright weird between adorably flawed and familiar characters. Take a good, long look into Burns' funhouse mirror and find yourself anew."
—Trevor Dodge, author of Everyone I Know Lives on Roads

Adventures in the material world, enigmas of food, flesh, the fate of
names, Suzanne Burns's words remark their downfall, know gravity. Not her lightest ploy but feels its weight, not even this now but suffers time. Writing sentences love to death, but if these fictions be believed, Burns will have it no other way.
--R. M. Berry

Misfits [what an understatement!] and Other Heroes [ditto!] brings out the squarest of society's pegs and their tragic, funny, and ultimately moving attempts to find each other and carve out some space among the roundest of society's holes. They are as matched as America's tiniest man and the woman who understands his need to be kept in a birdcage, or as mismatched as sweet-toothed men who long for anorexic women. They are magicians and firefighters, chefs and the other characters able to "contemplate eternity over an empty pie plate." Burns writes that "the world remembers giants" but her stories recall to us the misfit in everyone: a very humane, if not out and out heroic, work of fiction. --Steve Tomasula