If it hadn’t been for a groovy, guitar-playing Franciscan nun, Susan Werner, folk singer-songwriter, says she may not be where she is today. Werner says she began playing the guitar because her older brother was taking lessons from a Franciscan nun at a Catholic elementary school near Manchester, Iowa, where she grew up.

“For those that know what Vatican II was about in terms of the reformation of the Catholic Church, in terms of changes in the Catholic Church, Vatican II amended a number of changes,” Werner says. “But one change was that nuns could go ahead and be groovy. I would like to thank Pope John Paul XXIII for my career. If it hadn’t been for Pope John Paul XXIII saying that nuns could play guitars and ditch the habits and groove a little bit, I may not be where I am today.”

Werner went to the University of Iowa because she wanted to be a musician, but her parents wanted her to be in education. She says she made the right choice in the end. After going to graduate school and wanting to pursue a career in opera, she decided she was more of a writer than a diva.

“When I got out of school, I realized there were people who were better than me, people who were just born to do it, people who just loved the big stage, loved the orchestra, loved the costumes – people who were larger than life,” she says. “I wanted attention but not that much attention, or I didn’t want that kind.”

In Werner’s last project, she wrote all of the songs to sound as though they had come out of the 1920s and 1930s. She says playing ragtime forced her to be more disciplined with piano and she practiced many hours with a metronome.

“I loved how I didn’t quite know how to do it and this worked out better than I had foreseen, because in December they’ll broadcast on NPR my guest appearance on ‘Piano Jazz,'” she says. “I practiced like crazy for that. I feel really honored to be asked to be a guest on ‘Piano Jazz’ – it represents something of merit in the world of jazz; it’s almost like an Olympic medal or something.”

Werner, who has performed at the M-Shop every year for the past 7 or 8 years, says she feels the room has such an intimate feeling since the audience sits so close, and in that feeling of closeness she can really get the sense of what her audience is feeling about her music.

“It’s really the suspicion that I have a good song and then trying it out in front of an audience and feeling that it works with people – feeling people look into it like a window or a mirror and they see something that moves them,” she says. “That’s the best reward there is.”

Werner says her ideas for song lyrics are often something overheard at a restaurant or in cafe – words that are said every day that you can make into a song.

“‘Don’t I know you from someplace’ is a song on my record,” she says. “Then you make that into a story – what’s the story? In that case, the story is a husband and wife who are trying to reconnect after having a baby. They’re in the middle of raising a family and it’s almost like they become strangers to each other and they’re trying to reconnect and they capture some of the intense thrill of falling in love for the first time. Sometimes a cliche is a doorway into a one-act play. Often things we wish we could say to others make for great songs.”

Writing lyrics about herself isn’t something Werner focuses on very much anymore, and this, she says, makes the writing more like playwriting. She also says she loves to use her imagination.

“If all we could do was write from our own life experience, I can say the book’s going to be a short one,” she says. “Not an adequate amount of place to play in.”