Since 2020, Story Playscapes has established itself as a groundbreaking, luxury literary house that celebrates the raw lyrical voice and wild narrative edge of Susan L. Marshall’s internationally acclaimed, best-selling publications. Renowned for her home grown, cross-disciplinary approach to authorship, boutique publishing, digital and business communications and global literacy education, Susan has become a highly regarded Founder, Auteur Philosopher and Creative Architect. Susan holds total directorial command over the brand’s aesthetic presence, collaborating closely with Ryan Marshall on book design and digital art work, while personally engineering the fluid structural layout of every digital page of our website. Her work has culminated in a global footprint, reaching readers in more than 210 countries and territories worldwide.

Susan’s passion for nature, outdoor physics and thermodynamics began in childhood, where she credits her autonomous growth to her deep attunement to the “heightened energies of nature.” Her immersion in her myriad of lifeworlds, fondly termed her “playscapes,” ultimately led to her founding the House in 2020. This unique, instinctual connection with natural forces, along with her grounded Melbourne City life, resulted in her signature, coined technique, Fragmentique, which she developed to fuel her love for nature, life footprints and experiences, energetic currents and light fractures directly into the written word to flesh out the presence of the Romantic Spirit.

A Metaphysical Impressionist at heart, Susan views her entire body of work as a living series of continuous artistic growth. It is precisely her Artisan Speculative Craft practice of Fragmentique and her ability to investigate the mysteries of life experience through fragments of nature, city, energies and light, via its two sophisticated methods: Heightened Energy and Metaphysical Noir et Blanc, that elevate her publications into the realms of pure, uncompromised luxury. Susan prepares her discovered fragments, uniquely reconstructing them, rather than leaving them into historical fragmentation interpretation. Every publication is curatorial in its arrangement and is therefore unique and collectible. For her dedicated global readership, it has been an absolute treat to witness this intricate high art in action over time, watching Susan’s work outdoors as she runs through nature tracks, interacts with flora and buildings and gathers the deep kinetic frequencies of natural phenomena, such as bird flight or waves of the sea. It is Susan’s unique lyrical voice that initially connected with readers, showing how she could transform such fragments into exquisitely spiritual and lived moments through poetry and narrative.

Over time, when working on her debut novel: Makeshift Girl The Secret Heritage Trail, Susan used her Speculative Craft to capture the mysteries of her raw, physical fragments in a stunning publication titled: The Playscapes Portfolio of Makeshift Girl, which shared breathtaking photos of her En Plein Air interactions with the Heightened Energies of nature and light, along with quotes from the upcoming publication. It resonated deeply with an audience of over 100,000 readers who were first captivated by the technical proof of concept. The overwhelming reader connection to the character of Adira Cazon sparked a global demand that birthed an elite legacy series: the official republication of the work into ‘An Adira Cazon Literary Mystery’, celebrated by the acclaimed paperback edition, Book One: Adira and the Dark Horse. Following this, Bare Spirit emerged as a pure, unfiltered expression of Metaphysical Poetry in the illuminating Romanticist shade, instantly capturing the public imagination to become an Amazon Bestseller and a highly regarded Popular Psychology Publication.

Susan’s work on Metaphysical Noir et Blanc, saw her growth into autonomous artistry. Fuelled by her initial independent wanders through the streets of Melbourne, she became intrigued by the ways that the interplaying natures of shadows and darkness added depth to life experiences. Light, dark and shadow were of great aid to Susan when entrusted with her Nanna’s mandate to share the forgotten history of the collective voice of war survivors of Gozo with others. Her initial work on Indigo’s Haven, a play for young adults, involved her researching fractures of light, including Sir Isaac Newton’s theories of fractured light and light prisms, in order to flesh out the beginnings of war survival. Unhappy with its final publication, Susan continued to refine the work, fleshing out the depths of hope and the Romantic Spirit, forming her initial approaches to the Metaphysical Noir et Blanc method.

Susan formed a deep appreciation for a way to see lived experience through her Fragmentique technique. When journeying through France, Susan continued to work on her Metaphysical Noir et Blanc method. The Luberon Villages provided a highly romantic and inspiring stimuli of wild energies in nature and light. Her visits to historic villages such as Lourmarin, L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, and Roussillon resulted in her eventual development of Fleur of Yesterday as the premier play of her Theatre Playscapes series, which carried a dedication to the precious life of the natural carnation wildflower, alongside further extensive research into the foundational psychological theories of Sigmund Freud, Abraham Maslow, and Jean Piaget. Her first essay, Theatre Playscapes: A New Theatrical Style, which accompanied the dramatic literature, proved a groundbreaking new style to nurture the autonomy and wellbeing of the young adult, offering a profoundly positive take on individualism within a contemporary globalised society. Afterwards, she ensured that Indigo’s Haven was republished into All the Hope We Carry, accompanied by the essay Theatre Playscapes of Hope, which was released as the second publication in the Theatre Playscapes series.

Susan’s work with light in France, lingered with her upon her return to Melbourne. It was when she worked on Wild Soul: Contemporary Classical Winter Poetry, stepping back out into Melbourne’s stark winter landscape and drawing through the deep memories and connections of her time in Florence, that she further refined the Romanticist light. Through this intense, hands-on seasonal communion, she expanded her work beyond Heightened Energy to fully experiment with the active, physical interplay of light, shadow, and darkness. Using her Romantic Academia literary discipline, she classified such spiritual light fragments into three distinct artistic shades: Light (Romanticist), Shadow (Dark Romanticist), and Gothic (Shadow). Her work permanently cemented Metaphysical Noir et Blanc as a verified, proprietary method of her House. The proceeding release of Wild Soul: Contemporary Classical Winter Poetry, triggered an international retail expansion across multiple countries, exploding onto the charts as an Amazon Bestseller and Hot New Release, capturing #1 on Amazon Australia and #8 on Amazon US.

After such immense critical success, Susan continued to work away at developing the larger architecture of soul and form combinations, realising it was her distinct Metaphysical philosophy, later termed: Soulful Formalism. It is the distinct philosophy of an exciting new subgenre: Metaphysical Minimalism, which sees Susan use her highly refined strategies, for example, her unique Conscious Shifting Form Contours narrative voice and Raw Mystery Noir Velocity plot engine, to create and pioneer pure Contemporary Metaphysical Literature.

Susan’s work esteems the once forgotten genre into the world of luxury and life experience immersion. Her elevation of Romantic Academia to her literary discipline ensures that her work is informed by techniques from diverse cultures from centuries ago, including Aristotle, the 17th century Metaphysical Poets and Japanese Metaphysical Philosophy.
Susan’s ability to translate such deep knowledge into her own original works is admired globally, resulting in immense success, including her latest work as author and debut illustrator of Princess Zyra’s Lost Storm: An Australian Childhood Myth, which achieved monumental retail success and critical acclaim across global platforms. Also highly successful, was the elevation of the precious Adira and the Dark Horse to the premiere book in the luxurious hardbound, Dawn and Dusk Deluxe Edition of our new Romantic Spirit Collection, which instantly captured the international luxury market, selling premium editions to a discerning global collective.

Story Playscapes’ global outreach and humanitarian initiatives are executed through dedicated digital environments. Short writing études are shared with a global readership through the long-standing My Story Meadow: Soulful Literary Salon, a space where numerous international best-selling poems and stories have generated their beginnings. Complementing these active workshops is the Romantic Spirit Alight Readers’ Garden, a digital sanctuary celebrating Susan’s elevated vision of Romantic Academia as a formal literary discipline through quotes from her official professional publications. Inspired by global healing gardens, this space invites readers to immerse themselves in the energetic flow of textual fragments for personal restoration. Within this environment, The Soul’s Harvest: The Pomarium of Romantic Academia showcases the 15 formal areas of scholarly study that directly inform the house’s highly original, luxury publications.

July 2026, sees Susan step into her role as auteur-philosopher, transitioning her My Story Meadow: Soulful Literary Salon into the space where she continues to nurture global literacy education with her readership, with a special focus on the Soulful Formalist school of thought. Open to private readership and educational settings, Susan’s main purpose is to help readers be able to form a common, colloquial language to use Metaphysical expression to describe everyday life experiences.