When Susan Juby walks into Bean Around the World, a steamy downtown Victoria coffee shop, on a rainy afternoon shortly after Christmas, she looks every inch a hip, urban, successful writer with two bestsellers under her belt and a third novel about to be published. Dressed in black from her cap to her boots, she orders a coffee and several pounds of beans before sitting down. By all appearances, this is her milieu.

When we start to talk, however, that urban persona starts to crumble. Juby speaks with a laconic boldness that’s wry but free of cynicism. It’s a voice I remember well from my own smalltown past, but one that is rarely heard in downtown indie coffee shops.

“So,” I ask as she sips from her coffee. “Are you city or country?”

She smiles. “I’m uncomfortably between the two,” she answers after thinking for a moment. “Why else would I drive two hours for a cup of coffee?”

That tension, that sense of being “uncomfortably between,” is at the heart of Juby’s work. And it seems to have struck a chord with readers: the 35-year-old B.C. author is one of the rising stars of Canadian young-adult writing. Her first two novels – Alice, I Think and Miss Smithers – centre on the misadventures of 15-year-old iconoclast Alice MacLeod, who delights in her outsider status in Smithers, B.C. (the town where Juby grew up). With an unrelenting sense of her own worth and an at times cringe-inducing naiveté, Alice is a fresh character in Canadian YA writing, and her adventures will continue in a third book, Alice MacLeod, Realist at Last, set for publication in April.

So far, Alice has no shortage of admirers. Juby’s first two books have drawn rapturous reviews and are bestsellers in Canada, with a devoted following among both teens and adults. “Susan’s books have been buoyed by word-of-mouth recommendations from teens, booksellers, and reviewers,” says Felicia Quon, HarperCollins Canada’s marketing director for children’s books. To promote the upcoming novel, the author will tour the West Coast, will visit Winnipeg and Edmonton, and in June is scheduled to appear at ALOUD, a festival for young readers at Toronto’s Harbourfront. Besides doing readings and bookstore events, Juby will also visit high schools to host creative writing workshops, and Quon plans to build on the author’s online presence to tie in with teen-themed websites for advertising and promotions. (The author’s site, susanjuby.com, features a frequently updated web journal as well as a bio and promotional information.)

Despite her recent success, Juby is now living in smalltown B.C. again after stints in Toronto and Vancouver. Growing up, though, all she wanted was out. “I had this tortured relationship with my hometown as a teenager,” she says. “I couldn’t wait to leave. When you grow up in a small town, everybody knows your name. You’re under a microscope, all the time. Every relationship, every action, is magnified. I got to Toronto and I thought, ‘Anonymity! Thank God!’ I made such a mess of where I came from.”

Now, though, Juby thinks her rural roots gave her a valuable perspective – “a sense of being ‘out of it’ that has yet to leave me. I think that’s one of the gifts of smalltown life.” Living near Nanaimo with her husband, she has also reconsidered her earlier antipathy to smalltown life. “I look at my brothers who still live in Smithers, and that’s not a hard life. There’s a lot of support there. When things start to go sideways, there are people there to help. I just don’t see my choice [in leaving] as being superior; there are some real benefits to living where you come from.”

Born and raised in Smithers, Juby left the small logging and mining community as soon as she was able, heading to fashion design school in Toronto at age 19. “I had to drop out after I blew most of my student loan on a series of unfortunate outfits and soirées at the Brunswick House [a student pub],” she says. “I was very young.” Juby then took a series of wage-slave jobs (including working at bars and restaurants, managing a record store, and housekeeping at a fly-fishing camp in northern B.C.) before beginning a degree in English literature at the University of Toronto. She eventually finished the degree five years later at the University of British Columbia.

After that, Juby put in seven years at Vancouver’s Hartley & Marks Publishers, during which she moved from intern to managing editor. The job left her with a healthy respect for the business. “I’m grateful to be on the writing rather than on the publishing side,” she says. “It’s an incredibly difficult industry to succeed in. A lot of very talented, very bright people aren’t making much of a living.”

It was also during her term at Hartley & Marks that Juby rediscovered an early passion: writing. “I wrote a lot as a kid. I mean, a lot. Until I was about 12 or 13 and set it aside for a life of crime. Drinking and smoking and hanging out at bush parties.” But while working in Vancouver, she used her daily commute to her advantage. “I tricked myself into writing by getting on the Granville Street bus without a book to read. That forced me to write something. The alternative was to be alone with my thoughts, a most unpleasant option.”

Alice MacLeod was born during those long commutes. “It was one of those ideas that just comes to you: Adrian Mole meets a girl from Smithers. That’s it. I was living with a musician at the time, and he always had artistic problems, so there were all of these books on creativity around. I read The Artist’s Way and learned about the ‘morning pages.’” Artist’s Way author Julia Cameron recommends three pages of longhand stream-of-consciousness writing daily, intended to free the writer from the reflexive self-criticism that hampers the creative process. “I decided to do them but, missing the point entirely, used them as the beginning of a novel.”

Those morning pages became Alice, I Think. The story of 15-year-old Alice MacLeod, home-schooled child of hippie parents in Smithers, a consummate outsider delighting in her status as a social pariah, the book takes the form of a series of journal entries, à la Adrian Mole. It also echoes Sue Townsend’s balance of humour with drama, with an insight into the naïve hubris of adolescence.

Juby began shopping the manuscript while still at Hartley & Marks. “I sent samples out to a lot of agents and received a lot of rejections. Then I sent samples out to a bunch of local publishers and received more rejections. One finally suggested I’d written a young adult novel.”

The notion came as a surprise. “I wrote the book for my 50-year-old godfather, so hearing that it was actually better suited for teenage girls was a bit of a shock. It made sense, though. It was always supposed to appeal at a couple of levels.” Still, she says, “a lot of editors felt the manuscript was too raw for their children’s/YA list. I was finally signed by Thistledown and I will be forever grateful to them for that.”

According to Allan Forrie, publisher of Saskatoon’s Thistledown Press, the house’s 2000 edition of Alice, I Think (copies of which are highly prized in the collector’s market) sold through its first print run in less than a year. The book also made the shortlist for the Amazon/Books in Canada First Novel Award. “While not our best-selling YA title because of its short stay with us, it was certainly our quickest out of the warehouse,” says Forrie. “We had anticipated longevity with this novel, but that ended with the rights sale.”

That rights sale was to HarperCollins Canada, after the First Novel nomination raised Juby’s profile at an opportune time. After finishing her second novel, Miss Smithers, she hooked up with Hilary McMahon at Westwood Creative Artists, who auctioned the manuscript in New York City. In a six-figure deal, HarperCollins U.S. bought world rights to Miss Smithers and a third book, and picked up world rights excluding Canada for Alice, I Think, which they reissued in 2003. Rights have also sold to Australia and Finland, and a U.K. edition of Alice, I Think was published in January. Harper Canada purchased separate Canadian rights for the first book from Thistledown.

Ruth Katcher, executive editor at HarperCollins Children’s Books and Juby’s American editor, admits that so far, “sales have been a little quieter in the U.S. than in Canada – not surprisingly, as she’s not a native here.” But Katcher argues that Juby’s south-of-the-border star is rising: “We’re very pleased; she’s been well reviewed, and we think she’s building.” In a development that would likely please Alice MacLeod, Katcher praises the outsider nature of Juby’s writing. “Chick-lit is still an incredibly hot genre,” she says. “Susan has an interesting position in this market as she’s in many ways the anti-chick-lit voice on our list.”

Already, Juby’s American deal has made her something of an oddity in Canada: a writer who lives solely from her writing. After the publication of Alice, she had left Hartley & Marks to pursue a master of publishing degree at Simon Fraser University. “I thought that I would be able to teach creative writing part-time and publishing part-time, and write in what time was left over,” she says. As it turns out, though, the side-jobs have proven unnecessary. “The issue is usually money, and it’s like I won the lottery. I’m able to write full-time, and I make a good living writing.”

For Juby, full-time begins at six each morning. Gesturing at the bag of freshly ground beans in front of her, she says, “I get up, I make the coffee and I head immediately to the desk.” A good day of writing is two to four hours, longer if she’s revising.

The calm confidence of Juby’s career and working life is a marked contrast to the ongoing chaos and confusion of her character. In fact, Alice MacLeod, Realist at Last, which continues the theme of social ostracism and adds a suggestion of sexual victimization, is decidedly darker than its predecessors. “People couldn’t handle it,” says Juby of the manuscript’s early readers. “They were so attached to the character that they couldn’t bear what was happening to her.” She pauses for a moment before clarifying. “I mean, it didn’t turn into The Accused or anything, but that’s what teenage sexuality is; it’s dangerous and dark.”

Burgeoning sexuality is a recurring concern in Juby’s books; she says she’s committed to moving beyond the clichés and easy platitudes of most coming-of-age fiction. “I can already hear the outcry,” she says with a smile. “TV often does a better job of depicting adolescent sexuality realistically. Because so often it’s just terrible. It’s not that terrific at all; there’s all this awkwardness and confusion. And there’s danger. There’s a real danger to it. If I were to look back on my past, and my friends when we were moving in that direction, so many of them had experiences that were so much worse than what Alice goes through in this book. So much worse.”

Just how much of Alice is Juby? “Alice is my version of an idealized teen,” says the author. “In a big way, the book came out of a sense of loss, a sense of what a sheep I had been as a teenager. I remember, at age 13, deciding that I was going to fit in no matter what.” She sighs, thinking perhaps of a dozen years of writer’s block that began at the same time. “Alice is who I might have been if I hadn’t been so intent on fitting in at all costs.”

With three Alice books written, Juby is now moving away from her trademark heroine. “I am a little worried about being too closely identified with her,” she says. “I think that happens to writers who do series.” So her current project – a novel in progress about two young dressage riders – introduces both new characters and a new world. “Dressage is a form of English riding that looks a bit like dancing on horseback,” explains Juby. “Think Lipizzaner stallions, but less so. It attracts perfectionists and people with a high tolerance for repetition. At the higher levels, it’s also very beautiful to watch.”

The “dressage novel” also features a friendship between a gay teenage boy and his best friend, a girl. “The book is a coming-out/coming-of-age comedy about money, horses, and romance. And embarrassing parents, of course,” says Juby. It will maintain her trademark blend of humour and pathos – a blend that’s confused some readers. “There are a lot of people who just don’t get it. They have a problem with the idea that there’s humour and there are difficult things in the same book, as if it should either be funny or a problem book.” She shakes her head. “And never the twain and all that.”

One area Juby isn’t looking to move into is adult fiction, although she recognizes a certain marginalized quality to YA writing. “The term YA can feel a bit dismissive,” she says. “I think there’s a bit of a perception out there that people write YA because they can’t write adult fiction, rather than it being an absolute calling, which I think it is for most of us. I keep talking about how I want to write a so-called ‘adult novel,’ but in every story there is some teenager off to the side who starts taking over and soon becomes the most interesting person in the book. At the moment I believe that it is my destiny to write about teenagers.”

One thing about the new novel that won’t be an issue is its setting. While Juby initially considered placing the book in a “fairly anonymous northeastern U.S. setting,” she eventually decided to stick with what she knows. The novel is set in Yellow Point, a rural area near Nanaimo. “I needed the textures, the feel. Even though it’s much less about its setting than the Alice books, it was important to me to get that right.”

Surprisingly, Juby’s U.S. editors have welcomed her use of regional settings. “I was prepared to be told I’d have to change the setting because readers couldn’t handle the thought that these fictional events occurred somewhere they’d never been, but publishing seems to have opened up a bit with regard to setting. Or perhaps editors have more faith in readers. Either way, I’ve never been asked to de-Smithers-ize my books.”

And how has response to the books been in Smithers? Readers in the town Juby left behind are among the biggest fans of her work. “People in Smithers at first were really paranoid about the books, about how they would be depicted, how their town would be depicted. But now they’re thrilled.

“Well,” she adds with a twinkle and a smile. “Except for the ones who are offended.”