MARSHALL SWANSON
MAN OF LETTERS, AMERICAN EXPATRIATE, PILGRIM OF THE MIND
Author Marshall Swanson was born in Florida and attended Rollins College and Harvard University.
During this period, he studied international relations with a concentration in the Middle East and North Africa, and spent much of his time leading humanitarian missions in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon to support children and families fleeing Da'eesh.
More recently, Swanson deployed as a war correspondent to Ukraine.
Over the past decade, Swanson served as a staff member in the United States Congress, operated as a political consultant, and the Editor-in-Chief of a Central Florida newspaper for three years.
His most recent writing draws from war, politics, and exile—not in abstraction, but in their lived and human terms in The Strait of Regret.
Swanson has lived in Morocco for nearly three years. He previously resided in Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Guatemala.
COLLECTED WORKS
Marshall Swanson's latest work, Mourning in Morocco, presents a portfolio of three poems and six interwoven stories about American men adrift in North Africa. Each arrives chasing something—love, reinvention, escape from failure, or the hope of becoming someone new. Yet as they wander through Tangier’s winding streets, the Sahara’s desolation, and the fragile tenderness of brief affairs, they find that no distance can deliver them from themselves. Morocco becomes a mirror, forcing each man to confront the desires, regrets, and illusions he tried to outrun.
Written with unflinching fidelity to its setting, each story captures the ache of exile, the vanity of escape, and the reckoning that follows when truth arrives too late. Through the eyes of these expatriates, drawn by illusion and longing, author Marshall Swanson examines the belief that a new country can absolve old wounds or redeem the flaws that bind us to our own nature. These are not tales of romance, though love moves through them, nor are they tidy tragedies. They are stories of hunger and betrayal—of men undone not by Morocco, but by what they carried into it, and by what life there revealed.
The Strait of Regret is a story about the courage required to confront unwelcome truths—about the people one loves, and the world as it is. It poses a merciless question: what becomes of the man who refuses to live by illusion?
Set amid the winding streets and smoke-veiled cafés of Tangier, it follows an American exile, Jack Redmond, a man freighted with past disgraces and abandoned dreams.
In Selma al-Harki, a Moroccan woman divided between desire and duty, he discovers a fragile reprieve—one that cannot outlast the truths they each evade. Their affair flickers with the false light of redemption, yet both are undone by what they conceal.
The Strait of Regret moves through betrayal, exile, and remembrance, asking whether one can live honestly with the weight of failure—or whether some regrets are simply fatal.
Selma must believe in her own virtue; she calls betrayal by another name. People, after all, invent masks to survive. But Jack can no longer pretend. His collapse is not weakness—it is the consequence of truth. Most stories offer absolution as the reward for honesty.
The Strait of Regret offers none. Truth here is not deliverance but exposure—the stripping away of every comforting fiction. It is not merely a tale of self destruction or exile, but rather an elegy for those rare martyrs of truth who cannot live a lie.
The Strait of Regret
Mourning in Morocco
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Pictured: Marshall Swanson, Villa Josephine - Tangier, Morocco.
CONTACT
© 2025 Marshall Swanson.