Author spotlight: Tiffany Morris
Tiffany Morris is an L’nu’skw (Mi’kmaw) writer from Nova Scotia. She is the author of the Indigenous Voices Award- and Shirley Jackson Award-nominated novella Green Fuse Burning (Stelliform Press, 2023) and the Elgin Award-winning horror poetry collection Elegies of Rotting Stars (Nictitating Books, 2022). Her work has appeared in the Indigenous horror anthology Never Whistle At Night, as well as in Nightmare Magazine, Uncanny Magazine, and Apex Magazine, among others.
Dea Toivonen, Outreach & Social Coordinator: Where does your interest in horror writing come from? Do you have any favorite horror writers or inspirations that have shaped your practice?
Tiffany Morris: Oh, too many to name, really! Shirley Jackson has been a lingering influence, as has Leonora Carrington. Every Indigenous writer who has come before me, not just limited to horror—Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm and Louise Erdrich have been big influences. People who deftly merge poetry and abstract imagery like Joe Koch continuously inspire me.
I know you have run workshops that integrate the tarot into creative writing, and it has come to my attention that you are into astrology. I am an astrologer and hobby tarot reader and love to talk about these things, but also find them to be sort of taboo, especially in ‘professional’ fields. I tend to compartmentalize these interests from some of my ‘worldly pursuits.’ First of all, what are your big three (if you don’t mind)? And then how do you integrate the ways of knowing of these systems into your writing practice? I love how symbolically rich both the tarot and astrology are, and no matter what your belief is, I feel like all storytellers can learn a lot from these. Do you have any advice or exercises for writers that are looking to use spiritual or divinatory practices in their writing? And this last part of the question is purely from my curiosity as a fiction writer and astrologer: do you know your characters signs when you are writing them?
I love talking about these things, though I hear you on the way it can really alienate people in professional settings: I try to get a sense of whether someone is open to talking about it when I’m first conversing with them. My big three are Aquarius Sun, Virgo Rising, and Sagittarius Moon. I don’t tend to use astrology too much in my writing practice, though I try to be disciplined about communication and writing during Mercury Retrogrades! My tarot practice is a little different, as I like to really think through archetypes and storytelling with tarot as a tool for ‘thinking through’ story. It can be a really helpful way to write, like trying to figure out character motivations by giving them a tarot reading, creating my own spreads for sorting out my feelings about a project, or something as literal as plot. I don’t always deliberately figure out a character’s sign, but I have some suspicions!
Before publishing your novella, Green Fuse Burning, you put out a collection of poems, Elegies of Rotting Stars, a rich and glimmering collection of poems that speak to the apocalyptic dimensions of the present. I will circle back to ask about this apocalyptic or wasteland world that you portray, but for now, I am curious how your work in poetry informs your fiction? Is there one form that you feel more at home in or find easier when bringing forth your vision? What was it like moving into fiction writing?
My first love is poetry, both reading it and writing it, but I’ve developed a deep love for writing fiction. Writing fiction allows me to be expansive in a way that poetry doesn’t always—though finding ways to incorporate that expansiveness into my poetry practice is going to be an interesting challenge going forward. I personally tend to think in image and emotion, so it’s easier to translate that into poetry—but I also let that tendency show up in my fiction writing. The thing that’s quite special about fiction writing is the opportunity to spend time with a character, to create a person with a whole worldview and mode of being outside of your own that you, nonetheless, still shape. Creating those images and emotional states is almost like an act of translation when going from poetry into fiction: I’m finding commonality of meaning to create meaning.
In Green Fuse Burning, you represent the present as a time that is deeply layered with legacies of colonialism, capitalism, climate collapse, trauma, suffering, and all the busy vectors of life that keep people dissociating from that reality. I really admire your capacity to communicate this messy complexity and your ability to make visceral the feeling of living in this dense present, showing how that is experienced by bodies. In reading your work, I am reminded of the truth—communicated by many Indigenous knowledge keepers—that white, Christian settlers think about the apocalypse as something yet to come but, in an Indigenous world view, the apocalyptic event is colonization and its ongoing outcomes. Do you see the world that you are writing as an apocalyptic one? What do you feel or believe that your role as storyteller stands in relationship to this reality and to these legacies?
This is such a great question and a complex one. Settler colonialism has a very specific view of time—one that is linear, one that is reified in the Marxist sense, where we experience the deep objectification of our bodies in clock-measured, labour-oriented, capitalist measurement time. The concept of apocalypse presents a different relationship to time: we refer to it as “the end times,” and it’s interesting to think of it quite literally. Colonialism has always been an alternate sense of time, divorced from what tends to be Indigenous understandings of being in time, living in a more harmonious sense with the natural unfolding of a day, month, season, etc.—which is built into the Mi’kmaq language, for example. I definitely had all of this in mind while writing Green Fuse Burning: apocalypse, grief, trauma—it all disrupts a sense of time. It also points to the possibilities that exist outside of that: apocalypse need not be a total annihilation, and Indigenous survivance (a term brought forward by Gerald Vizenor) signals that. I work in that tradition, and it’s because of the writers and storytellers who came before me.
Following from that question, I want to ask about hope and the possibility of reconciliation. Horror can be a quite bleak genre that doesn’t avoid the darkness in the world, and I think that makes it powerful at exposing some of the underlying realities of our time. Do you see, within the framework of your writing, a message or a glimmer of some light or some hope? If you are writing an apocalyptic landscape, is it one that you think can be made whole or recovered through right relationships?
Absolutely! I think it’s much worse to live in denial of the grim realities of the past, of the present, and the possibilities lingering in the future. Only by looking these difficult things in the eye can we understand the dangers they represent in the present and how their legacies continue to show up in everyday life. Horror can be hopeful because it is cathartic and it has that element of memento mori. We understand life through story, regardless of genre, and in horror we get the opportunity to turn over the rock of denial and see what crawls and writhes in the mud beneath it.
In Green Fuse Burning, the character Rita is forced into an artist residency in a time of immense grief by Molly (her girlfriend) and is not apparently happy about it. It is coming at a bad time, even though the gesture from Molly is an attempt to “do something nice.” The description of the retreat house’s “quiet cottage” aesthetic—perhaps a cheap version of a white idea of ‘rustic charm’—seems eerie. And the conventional version of success and opportunity in entering this space is, for Rita, something very different, something murkily embedded in colonial ideals and power relations. Were you interested in the way that different things and environments are experienced differently depending on one’s history? Can you talk more about the setting of the book—the way you are using an artist residency in the woods as a site of horror?
I was interested in exploring that element: how an environment is changed depending on your history and relationships to it—or even just having to be there when you weren’t planning to be. Molly having a history in that general region—one so different from Rita’s father’s relationship to the land there—makes that contrast more apparent, as does Rita being unsure how the townspeople feel about her. There’s the complexity of histories on land, along with the landscape and ecology changing with climate change, widespread diseases, and other issues. I wanted the pond in Green Fuse Burning to represent the possibilities of the wetland, how the vibrancy of life can be alienating when you’re deep in grief and mental health crisis and being forced to return to work because you don’t really know what else to do, This kind of harkens back to that idea of time and alienation. It all gets threaded together for Rita because the setting forces her to look at everything she can’t deny.
I really enjoyed the design and graphic language of the book. It features beadwork pieces, which are very cute and contemporary, of a strawberry and a house on fire overlaying photographs of mosses. And each chapter contains a black ink drawing of a different animal in a style resembling traditional Indigenous drawings. Is there something about these artworks, images that are both contemporary and stylized and that integrate Indigenous craft and methods, that reflect some of the ambition of the story or that reflect your approach to art-making? Where did the art in the book come from? Do you also craft and make visual art?
My wonderful editor, Selena Middleton, wanted to incorporate work by Indigenous artists in the book, and I am a huge fan of contemporary Indigenous art. Before becoming a writer, I had intended to become a gallery curator focused on that field specifically. I was thrilled that Mikhaila Stevens was able to provide the beadwork and Kaija Heitland was able to provide the interior illustrations. I was also thrilled to have a cover by Chief Lady Bird! We have multiple Nations and forms represented in these art pieces, which speaks to the plurality of my own approach to art, writing, business, life: I deeply appreciate opportunities to be in community with other artists, especially Indigenous artists, and to show people the variety of what we do. I also make visual art—collage, digital collage and painting, and mixed media painting—but it’s mostly for fun. I do freelance art criticism for the magazine Visual Arts News, so it keeps me in touch with that field without the pressure of creating within it. Haha!
Each chapter of Green Fuse Burning opens with a curator’s descriptions of Rita’s painting that she completed at her residency. Why did you want to open each chapter in this way? I like how it grounds us in the materiality of the artwork and reminds us of the trace left behind by Rita, but I’m curious what this is saying about curation, especially about curating work by Indigenous artists in museums.
I wanted the framing of the curatorial notes to keep Rita’s fate ambiguous—as well as to speak to the relationship all creative people experience between what is created and how it gets described, especially institutionally. The gallery itself is an ostensibly supportive environment, but it’s still using language to describe her work that may not be how Rita herself would describe it, and it comes following a fairly sensational event. There are always systems of which we’re a part, and that process of sharing our pain sometimes involves finding a route to bring it to the public, to community, to a creative ecosystem.
A thread running through your novella is language: how it fails, how it’s lost, and the struggle to recover it. Rita trys to summon from her memory Mi’kmaw words for certain things, and her conversations fail: either she is either ignored or she struggles to say what she really means. Towards the end of the novella, Rita confesses, “Life was like a language I couldn’t speak.” As a writer, using language all the time, do you still see language as something that fails? Do you see your writing as counteracting or pushing against the limits of language?
I have a deep love of language. I always say that in my next life I want to be a linguist, and the process of reclaiming Mi’kmaq has shown me many of the limits of English: Mi’kmaq has such complex constructions and concepts that get built into a single word. That said, I think that language in general fails all the time. I don’t think that any one language—or even all languages—reflect the full spectrum of human experience, which is why I’m so grateful that we have all of the different arts, sports, and spiritualities that expand lingusitic expressions. My favourite books are those that play with what language can do, and I endeavour to work with that in mind.
Do you have any new projects in the works? What is next for you and your writing?
I have a novella coming out this fall from Nictitating Books and a novel in the works! Wela’lin for this great interview, and wela’lioq to all who have read it!
Author spotlight: Tiffany Morris Read More »