Author Spotlights

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 »

Author spotlight: Peter Counter

Peter Counter is a nonfiction author and cultural critic living in Dartmouth. He is the author of Be Scared of Everything: Horror Essays and, most recently, How to Restore a Timeline: On Violence and Memory (House of Anansi), which has been described as “a brilliant, humorous, heartbreaking examination of how certain events break our lives apart, and what we do with the pieces.”

Dea Toivonen, Outreach & Social Coordinator: Your nonfiction integrates a lot of personal anecdote and detail from your own experience, and you weave this together with a lot of cultural artifacts—descriptions of various media and textual or digital encounters. The connections often feel very organic and sometimes feel surprising. Do you tend to know where you are going when you are writing? Or is your process more emergent and spontaneous?

Peter Counter: I start with outlines, and I stay open to discovery, surprise, and play when researching and writing. Both of my books started with detailed outlines of every chapter and essay (plus a few essays that were cut from each book). These included working titles, summaries, and three-to-five supporting ideas from personal experience, pop culture, or science and philosophy. Then, during the drafting process, I allowed myself to deviate from those outlines. After a draft, I would re-outline the essay and then re-draft it based on that new outline. And over and over. It’s a very iterative process of outlining, writing, re-outlining, rewriting, and on and on until I’m confident that I have communicated the idea or emotion that I intended to.

I’m very obsessed with two aspects of writing: I want to communicate complicated emotional ideas to readers, and I want everyone involved to be entertained. The complexity of the ideas require that I frequently look at the big picture and how sections and chapters speak to each other. The entertainment part demands that I have fun when I’m writing. I’m a strong believer that writing can contain the essence of the moment it was written, so if I allow myself to make discoveries and play around while composing, readers will hopefully feel that when they read my words.

What do you think is the role of the critic, and what of the expectation that role often carries to be objective? Do you think of your writing as cultural criticism or as some adjacent genre?

I think of my writing as cultural criticism, which is a tradition that I’m proud to be a part of. My gateway to nonfiction writing when I was a teen was music criticism, and since my twenties, I’ve identified as a culture critic first when it comes to writing.

My definition of criticism—the shared application of critical thinking, context, and analysis to art and culture—might seem counterintuitive. The popular conception of the critic has been corrupted by consumer review culture, which collapses everything into binary “buy” or “don’t buy” categories. But that kind of objective pronouncement always makes me catty. Cultural objects provide anchor points for us to gather around and share subjective viewpoints. After all, art is activated by the personal experience an audience member brings to their viewing. Done well, criticism deepens the experience for the reader, spurring their own self-refection and engagement with culture. And I think that’s essential for a healthy arts ecosystem.

Although you’re writing nonfiction, what you do sometimes seems to bend genres within the form—weaving criticism, personal essay, and memoir. What do you think about these distinctions and classifications, and how do you see yourself fitting into them (or not)?

I’m very flattered when people call my work genre-bending. So: thank you! In the moment of writing, I don’t think much about genre. My focus is on trying to communicate an idea or emotion, and the genre switching comes out naturally. If a point I’m trying to make is best illustrated through a memory, then I write memoir. If an idea I’m trying to communicate is best illustrated through criticism, I write criticism. And if that idea is best explored through speculation, I use fiction—which, in my nonfiction, is accessed through the hypothetical, like the karate tournament with time-travelling Jeb Bush I describe in the essay “Gotta Do It (Kill Baby Hitler)” in How to Restore a Timeline.

The effect I’m aiming for is a heightened conversation with the reader. The best conversations are deep and personal and flip between all sorts of communication modes without apology. When we talk, we don’t constrict ourselves to genre conventions. We just engage and communicate by the easiest means.

How to Restore a Timeline seems like it would have been both difficult and cathartic to write. The title suggests the healing power of writing and criticism to dive into the past and make sense of its happenings. Do you feel like writing this book was a healing process or that through writing it you were able to reckon with something you needed to?

Like many writers, I don’t really understand something until I’ve written about it. And while I’ve lived with PTSD for half of my life, there are some aspects I never gave myself the time to explore until this book. I feel like, with How to Restore a Timeline, I have finally been able to communicate how it feels to be sick with an event. In that way, I know myself better, which is cathartic.

I don’t really believe in healing from trauma, and I think that causes some folks discomfort. With this book, I try to propose a path through post-trauma that honours survivors’ experiences, in which community and family and humility can make our violent world more compassionate. The last thing I wanted to do was alienate a fellow traumatized person by placing an ethical imperative to return to pre-traumatic normalcy. There’s nothing wrong with honouring the negative experiences of the past and acknowledging their echoes. I actually think that’s beautiful. I’m still afflicted by my trauma in severe ways, but the love and understanding I have found in my community has made that less of a dangerous prospect.

While your work has often maintained a ‘memoirish’ tone, How to Restore a Timeline seems like it was particularly vulnerable to write. What was the most difficult part of the process of writing this book?

I have a rule about my own personal writing: if it’s not vulnerable, it’s probably not very authentic. The most difficult part of writing How to Restore a Timeline was coming to terms with the parts I couldn’t include—because, while they might have met my vulnerability requirements, I couldn’t quite find a way to express their core ideas in a compelling way. That level of editing is really painful. But I’ve been writing long enough to know that some ideas just need more time to develop or a different framework in which to thrive. This book is better without the cut chapters, and those ideas will find a way into the world eventually.

Your chapters in this book are often quite short, feeling like flashes of memory or fragments coming back to you. Was this an intentional choice or just the shape the writing took?

This was an intentional choice, but—and how convenient is this—I naturally seem to write essays between 1200 and 4000 words. The idea was always to have a non-linear memoir composed of flashes, and when it came to writing it, that was the easiest part. Which I suppose makes sense. Memoir is an invitation to see how an author thinks. I think in short essays about watching TV and listening to music.

What is your daily writing practice and process?

When I’m in the drafting phase of a book, I have a pretty routine daily writing practice. I wake up early and write, edit, or rewrite as much as I can before I start work. In order to facilitate this, I write in batches of four essays or chapters at a time. This way, if I wake up and don’t feel excited about one topic, I can just pick whatever seems the most fun that morning.

Outside of the drafting phase, things are a little more nebulous. My practice is still daily, but it’s not just typing or scribbling. Sometimes it’s reading, sometimes it’s research, sometimes it’s outlining or composing a pitch. This is all under the umbrella of writing for me, but because it rarely results in being able to look back at a word count, it can be fraught with self-doubt and anxiety. The most crucial moments for me as a writer are moments of self-forgiveness, when I’m feeling guilty about prioritizing these less tangible but crucial aspects of writing.

Having lived in bigger cities, do you find moving to Nova Scotia has shaped your writing practice? How do you find the writing community here?

Moving to Nova Scotia in 2016 was very positive. Earlier that year, I’d been rejected from a creative writing MFA program I was excited about, and I decided I was just going to write a manuscript anyway, out of spite. My partner was accepted to NSCAD that September, and when we moved, I had access to this city’s rich interdisciplinary artistic community. That—plus the time and space and affordability that Halifax offered at the time—was indispensable. I wrote that manuscript in like three months! I definitely credit moving here as a major catalyst for my maturing as an author.

Obviously, the Halifax of 2016 is long gone. The affordability crisis has squeezed out many important arts community members. It also means that the freedom from the hustle that I found in 2016 is no longer a reality for anyone who has to work for a living. It’s not easy to live here. And when it’s not easy to live, it’s not easy to create. That said, the community that remains here is excellent and welcoming and supportive. Nova Scotia is full of creative people—not just writers. And the culture they have fostered is one of collaboration and cooperation rather than competition.

Who are some writers that influence and inform your work? Who are you reading now?

My main influences as an author are Chuck Klosterman, Carmen Maria Machado, Alicia Elliott, and George Orwell. And because I am self-conscious about not having formal creative writing education, I am constantly reading and rereading books on craft. My favourite of these is Writing Tools by Roy Peter Clark, which I revisit probably once every two years.

Right now I’m reading Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland, Kaoru Takamura’s Lady Joker, and The Divine Comedy. For nonfiction, I’m reading Alexandra West’s horror essay collection Gore-Geous.

Are you working on anything at the moment?

Yes, right now I am finishing the outline phase on two books. One is a nonfiction book about Hell and technology. The other is a Catholic horror novel about rock music and nostalgia. Hopefully I’ll have more to share about these soon.

Author spotlight: Peter Counter Read More »

Author spotlight: Elliott Gish

Elliott Gish is a writer of speculative fiction and librarian living and working in Halifax. Her stories can be found in publications like The New Quarterly, Grain Magazine, Vastarien, The Baltimore Review, Dark Matter Magazine, and Wigleaf. Her debut novel, Grey Dog, came out in April of 2024 with ECW Press.

Dea Toivonen, Program Officer (Arts Education): Grey Dog is a work of speculative historical horror set at the turn of the 19th century into the 20th. What about this period compelled you to write about it?

Elliott Gish: The Victorian era is a period that has always spoken to me. On the most basic level, that is because so much of the literature I loved when I was growing up either came from or was set in that era. Authors like Louisa May Alcott, L.M. Montgomery, Charles Dickens, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Lewis Carroll sank their claws into my developing brain. Due to that early imprinting, I still find myself drawn to stories that include hoop skirts, buggies, and bonnets.

I also find that liminal space between one era and the next to be extremely interesting, especially as it pertains to social change. The time in which my protagonist, Ada, lives is one of tremendous upheaval. You’ve got class reforms, the emergence of socialism and anarchism, increased educational opportunities for women and the emergence of the “New Woman” as an icon of female independence. Things are changing, but older ideas about how people—particularly women—should behave still hold tremendous power. That creates an internal conflict that is really fun to explore!

What was the initial inspiration or seed of the story, and how long was that germinating before it became Grey Dog?

The very first seed of inspiration for Grey Dog was planted back when I was eleven and attended a historical summer camp in a “living museum” in New Brunswick called Kings Landing. I spent a week learning how to hook rugs, milk cows, and square dance, and had the time of my life. (I was a very cool eleven-year-old, obviously.) That experience made such an impression on me that, when I began to write the book, I used the Kings Landing layout as a blueprint for the town of Lowry Bridge. Actual buildings from the museum appear in the book multiple times, including the one-room schoolhouse.

Another seed was planted when I read Mary Rubio’s biography of L.M. Montgomery in my late twenties. Montgomery had been one of my favourite authors for years at that point, but I knew very little about her life outside of her work. I was fascinated to discover how unhappy she was—and how starkly her rather grim personal life contrasted with her fiction. Revisiting her books in the wake of that biography, I saw flashes of misery everywhere, even in her sunniest novels. I wanted to pay homage to Montgomery’s heroines and that darkness beneath the surface of her work. I wanted to create a character who bore many of the hallmarks of a Montgomery protagonist—a love of books and nature, a “genteel” and ladylike occupation, a penchant for journaling—and let her howl.

The novel is told through the diary entries of the main character, Ada Byrd, written in an honest and confessional tone. What about the epistolary form made you chose to write in this way? Did you consider writing in a different way, or was this form part of the conception of the story?

The book was a diary from the very beginning. The first little bit of narration that appeared in my brain was entirely in Ada’s voice, and I knew that it would be important for me to keep the audience anchored in that viewpoint. Throughout the book, Ada is not sure if what she is seeing and feeling is real. I wanted readers to be unsure about that, as well. What better way to do that than to stay in her mind the whole time?

There is also much to be said for the historical significance of the diary format as women’s literature. Women were restricted in so many ways during this period in history, their voices silenced in the public sphere, but it was considered appropriate for women to keep diaries. They were recording their thoughts and feelings, even as those thoughts and feelings were devalued by the world at large. You might not be able to talk back to your husband, or your father, but you could write down what you wanted to say to them. Writing in a diary was a radical act dressed up as feminine propriety. This ordinary, socially sanctioned activity becomes a vehicle of transformation for Ada. She is not an honest person in her day-to-day life, but she is able to tell the truth in her diary. And that truth ultimately frees her.

I love to read accounts and stories about ‘women on the edge’ especially as they relate to contemporary feminist struggle and understanding the experiences of the marginally gendered in a patriarchal society. I am wondering why you gravitated to writing a character like Ada that both suffers from societal pressures on women, and in turn continues to project and enforce those expectations on some the young girls that she teaches? Do you think that there something about the feminist perspective of Grey Dog that resonates with contemporary gender politics?

One of the worst things about oppression is how often we are made to be complicit in it. Just about every woman has, at some point in her life, chafed against restrictive and reductive gender roles. Just about every woman has, at another point in her life, expected other women to toe the line. We are none of us completely innocent of reinforcing patriarchy, just as we are none of us exempt from being victimized by it.

In Ada’s case, she has tried her whole life to conform to gendered expectations, even though they do not come naturally to her. She sees proper female behaviour as something that must be learned, considering it her responsibility as a schoolteacher to teach her female students how to be “young ladies.” When her experiences in Lowry Bridge erode her ability to conform to acceptable modes of femininity, she is able to let go of that need to project gendered expectations onto other women and girls. I think that this is a very common experience for women: when we feel freer in ourselves and more comfortable with defying gender norms, we are less likely to try and police the behaviour of other women when it does not fall within accepted parameters of feminine behaviour.

A theme that runs throughout the Grey Dog is the difference between appearance and reality. Ada is often ‘translating’ the true meaning of sentiments disguised by social niceties, and much of her existence in Lowry Bridge involves her concealing her past and her desires. This made me really think about what the horror of the novel actually is—is it the eldritch forces lurking out of the village, or is it the village itself or a social order that surveys and represses people’s (and specifically women’s) instinct and behaviours? Can you say more about how you were thinking about this dichotomy of appearances and reality in Grey Dog?

I wanted the reader to question Ada’s reality throughout the novel—not only whether what she sees and feels is really happening, but also where the true source of evil lies. The thing in the woods is a force of nature, divorced from good and evil as we understand it. It even becomes a source of liberation for Ada as the novel progresses. But Ada’s disciplinarian father, her sister’s abusive husband, the closed minds in Lowry Bridge, Ada’s own self-loathing and repression? Those, I would argue, are abundantly evil. Lowry Bridge appears at first to be a sweet town full of quaint, folksy people, and the woods around it a frightening and dangerous place, but small towns can harbour the worst villains, and the deep, dark woods can be a source of joy and beauty.

What were some of your biggest influences and inspirations for Grey Dog?

L.M. Montgomery was Grey Dog’s primary influence and inspiration. I was really trying to capture that golden, sunny feeling that pervades many of Montgomery’s books, from Anne of Green Gables onwards, and slowly pervert it over the course of the novel. The setting and tropes of Grey Dog are familiar to anyone who has read Montgomery’s work. You have your idealistic schoolteacher, your idyllic natural setting, your small-town gossips and precocious children. And then, as you go on, you have your eldritch abominations and malformed deer fetuses!

Another author whose work influenced me tremendously was Sarah Waters. I have been a fan of hers since high school and have tremendous respect for how she uses historical settings, making the reader look at them in a whole new way. She does this particularly well in The Little Stranger, which is both a horror novel and a story about the decline of the landed gentry after World War II. Every time I reread that book, I am delighted by how deftly she weaves together history and horror, the supernatural and the mundane. I wanted to do something very similar with Grey Dog.

And, of course, I would be amiss if I didn’t mention Shirley Jackson as an influence on this book and all my other work as well. She was an absolute powerhouse, and lives rent-free in my head at all times.

What was your biggest challenge in completing the novel?

I would say that the biggest challenge with this book, as with all long-form projects, was knowing when to stop! There comes a point in the writing process when all the changes you make start to feel lateral, as though you are just moving things around for the sake of moving things around. At that point, I was very glad that the final decision to stop writing was taken out of my hands by my wonderful editor, Jen Sookfong Lee. At a certain point, making further changes was no longer an option, and thank goodness for that, because otherwise I’d probably still be tinkering with the manuscript!

It was also challenging to always remain inside of Ada’s head. I like to play with different narrators and points of view in my work when I can, and that was not an option for Grey Dog. I had to come up with other ways of including other characters’ stories and opinions. That is why there are so many scenes of other characters telling stories, writing letters, or relaying gossip—it was a way to include other people’s points of view while remaining entirely within Ada’s.

What was you research process like in putting this book together? Did your research take you to any surprising or unexpected places?

Most of the research I did involved natural history, particularly from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. I did not need to do too much research into the period in general because I already had that historical interest in the Victorian era, but I am very much an indoor cat and went into this book knowing very little about the natural world. Through various online archives, I was able to access some works of natural history that would have been publicly available at the time, which was very edifying.

The books of a self-taught Scottish naturalist named Eliza Brightwen were an especially wonderful resource. Her books were hugely popular because she made natural history accessible to ordinary people, writing about the creatures and plants she saw in her own backyard. Her work is referenced in Grey Dog, and Ada reads aloud from one of her books, Inmates of my House and Garden.

The most unexpected place I ended up was a weird corner of YouTube devoted to videos of deer giving birth. That really messed up my algorithm for a while.

Do you feel like you want to keep working in the genre of speculative horror, or branch out in other directions? Do you have anything new in the works now?

I definitely want to keep including speculative elements in my work, with an emphasis on the weird and unsettling. That is where I feel most at home, and what feels most natural to write!

I am currently working on three full-length projects as potential follow-ups to Grey Dog. The first is a historical magic realist novel set in 1961 called Ruby and Jude. The second is another nature-based horror novel, this time with a focus on the ocean, called A Wilderness of Salt. The third is a horror-fantasy inspired jointly by the Parker-Hulme murder and Enid Blyton’s boarding school novels, tentatively named The Book of Hideous Splendours.

I am also compiling a collection of short stories, mostly speculative. Its working title is Girls and Dead Things because I realized, after looking at all the stories I wanted to include, that girls and dead things are the bulk of what I write about!

Author spotlight: Elliott Gish Read More »

Author spotlight: Anna Quon

Anna Quon is the current Poet Laureate of Halifax Regional Municipality. She is a Mad and mixed-race poet and novelist, and she facilitates writing workshops, particularly for the mental health community. She is the author of three novels and one published collection of poetry, as well as many self-published poetry zines.

This conversation was conducted by video chat in K’jipuktuk, on June 6, 2024, at 10:45 AM, on the day of a new moon.

Dea Toivonen, Program Officer (Arts Education): First of all, big congratulations on your appointment in your role as Poet Laureate of Halifax Regional Municipality! I would love for you to talk about what that role means to you—and for readers who aren’t familiar with what a “Poet Laureate” is, would you perhaps shed some light on the position?

Anna Quon: Well, I am still working that out myself, but on the municipality’s website, it says that the poet laureateship and youth poet laureateship programs “aim to celebrate and elevate the literary arts through the written and spoken word. Poet Laureates are nominated and selected to advocate for poetry, language and the arts by attending events across the municipality, and beyond to promote and attract people to the literary world, and as an ambassador for Halifax and its residents.” So, that is what the city says, and I hope to do that—but I also like the idea of bringing poetry to parts of the city that we normally might not associate with poetry and also to bring poetry back from those parts so we can hear what people have to say. That sounds pretty simple but to figure out how to do that might be a little more complicated. I haven’t gotten to it yet: I have, so far, been responding to invitations from community groups and from the municipality itself for events that I will write poems for or perform poems at. So far, I have been reacting to what is brought to me more than going out and making something new that I envision for this role—but that will come.

I think you have already started to imply the beliefs that will guide your time in this role, but could you speak more to the foundational beliefs and philosophies that guide you in your poetics and your activism?

First, I will say that I don’t see myself as an activist. I was part of a panel called “The Accidental Activist” for Halifax’s Access Awareness Week, but I really struggle with the idea of being one. I see activists as doing a lot of hard work, as being the people who go out and organize, sometimes sit out in the rain for days on end protesting something—that kind of thing. And I don’t do those things or even go to demonstrations much anymore. But I am a member of the Bahá’í faith, which is an optimistic and hopefully, eventually, unifying world religion. I am also very fond of the social determinants of health, things like having enough income, housing, and food, not being socially isolated, having good health care and education—things that make a good life for people. I am also interested in social justice and in equitable access to what people need to lead a good life. When I say ‘a good life,’ I mean one where they can feel good, contribute to the world, and do it without too much anxiety about bombs dropping on them or losing their paycheck and their housing. Security of some measure.

I find the Bahá’í faith’s world-embracing scale and its optimism compelling because I think we need hope-fueled communities that have some idea of what they moving towards. So my next question, perhaps related, is about the role in society of the poet. I think that the fact that there are poet laureateships, that institutions and municipalities have these positions, says something about the poet’s importance in the social framework, and I am wondering if you have some thoughts about what that role is.

I think there are a lot of different kinds of poets, and I am not sure that I would want to be prescriptive about what poets should do. I write poetry about a lot of different things: sometimes it’s about the drudgery of housework, sometimes about basic income guarantee or the revolution [chuckles], or it could be about spring, or flowers. I write about a lot of different things, and the Poet Laureateship—as I have been told a number of times by my contact at the city—should be a role that I make align with my passions. I think the kind of poet that I am is an observer and a thinker and a feeler, so I am more interested in seeing the world clearly than I am in bringing some agenda to my poetry. I want to be more of a seer who is committed to bringing that into language than I do someone with an agenda, though I don’t always succeed. We all sometimes have ideas in our heads that we want to run with instead of responding to the world in a thoughtful way.

I think that is a beautiful ambition, that commitment to seeing with clear eyes and to being an archivist of the present.

It is archiving the present, it is true, but it is also seeing some essential things about being human and about the world we live in and, hopefully, transcending the present. That’s my hope. I am a hopeful poet, but I don’t always succeed in doing what I hope to do.

My next question is about the particular social issues or initiatives that you are involved with. What will you use your laureateship to bring more energy and awareness to?

As I said before, I am not an activist, but I really value what those people that I would call activists do. I am not really sure how the world works, actually, in terms of what makes the biggest differences in it. Mostly I attend to things related to inequity. The housing crisis that we are in and the crisis of homelessness that is ongoing are very compelling problems for me. We see these all around us, and I really feel that the government has failed in this area.

I am going to speak at the Basic Income Guarantee Nova Scotia symposium in September, and sometimes I am very hopeful that that is one of the answers—that everyone having a basic income to rise above the poverty level would do a lot of good. But I can’t say for sure that I am sold on any practical solution as the answer. I have also been influenced a lot by the Canadian Mental Health Association and ideas around making the world better for people with mental health challenges, things like the social determinants of health and changing attitudes towards people who are different.

I consider myself Mad: I see the world differently from a lot of other people and have had experiences that shape that way of seeing. The world out there regards me differently because I have had those experiences, but it often gets me wrong—what I am about and what people with similar experiences are about—which makes me believe that stigma and prejudice and discrimination of all kinds are something to be eradicated, which takes constant education. I am hoping that my poetry can do a little of that. That it can help people see that how they see me is not who I am, how I see myself, or what I can bring to the world. Helping to reduce prejudice and discrimination, including ones that I hold myself—we all hold prejudices that we don’t even know that we have—goes a long way to making the world a better place and is something I hope to do as Poet Laureate.

We hold a similar belief that a lot of the world maintains a narrow framework for what is normal, or what is neurotypical, and experiences outside of that central accepted ‘normal’ have a lot to teach us about what is real, what is true about the world, and what our hearts really long for. I think it is beautiful to hear you talk about your desire to approach and write with these ‘outside’ voices and to use poetry, which I think of as the language of the heart—I don’t know if you would agree—to transmit shared experience.

I do see poetry as the language of the heart, even though people might hear that and think, ‘Woah, what does that mean?’ It means that my feelings and my deeply held values and beliefs are what speaks through my poetry. We have all written and read things that don’t come from the heart, including things that might be called poetry, but poetry, at least for me, is made of the feeling stuff and not so much the thinking stuff.

When we talk about poetry coming from the heart, it is important to me because it touches on another question you asked—about what poetry does. Words by themselves, I don’t think that they have the power to change people, but I think that they have the power to change how people see things. And when people see things differently, they may change the feelings that they hold in their hearts. That is to say, poetry doesn’t make people act differently unless it makes people see and feel things differently. But, also, it is not really up to me to decide what poetry is. I spend a lot of time thinking about how to write a good poem, which I think needs to change what people see and feel and think, or some combination of those three things that might change how people act or gives people hope to keep acting in a certain way.

In almost a conclusion, I wanted to bring some of the things that we have been talking about to your poem “To Council, 2024,” the first poem that you have written in your laureateship. In this poem, you begin by making note of how you arrived here, in Halifax, recalling your father’s foresight in moving to the heart of the city—then you proceed to situate yourself in the local landscape, traveling through and observing the city, its changing streets, its architecture and the way that architecture speaks to histories that are often violent, and noting the people who live here, especially those who are often neglected or abused by the policy-makers and cops.

I spent some time this year thinking about what I call “a poetics of arrival,” which is essentially the conviction that it matters how we narrate our own journeys and tell our own stories. I think story is very powerful and can inform how we find ourselves in the present and what we chose to do with our situation, and we can all tell our own stories of arrival in many different ways. I read your poem with this notion in mind, and the care you take in situating yourself as both a local and a witness of local political life feels important, especially in your first poem written as Poet Laureate. Is there anything that you want to add in accounting for your arrival, both as a person living here and as Poet Laureate? How has your journey brought you to the worldview that you currently hold? How does that experience inform your work?

I was giving some thought to how I have come to this place in my life, part of which is becoming the Poet Laureate. I have lived a quite comfortable life, economically, having the privilege of parents who are comfortably middle class. And I have never known, through recessions and difficult times, any feeling of insecurity. I never realized how much that had influenced me until later in life, that type of security. I have also suffered psychologically in a number of ways that I connect with perfectionism and with internalizing a colonial and capitalist and sexist and racist way of seeing the world. Because I am a mixed-race woman, I am Mad, and I am fat, I have been a lot of things that don’t match up to the ideal that these systems promote, and that was a cause for a lot of psychological distress. I also have a probably biological predisposition for depression and psychosis. I have a university degree, which I don’t believe I earned very well, but it has given me access to work that I wouldn’t have had access to otherwise, which is, in my mind, a privilege.

That is some of the background on how I arrived here, but I also think, because I grew up in a home with supportive parents where books and art mattered, I had a lot of exposure to things that have led me to write, and I think reading novels has helped me develop a lot of empathy. I have had a comfortable life despite my mental health challenges, which have been really grievous at times, and realizing this makes me think about what makes up a good life. Like having a certain amount of economic and emotional security. These are not new thoughts, but in my life, I see how much they influence where I am and how I got here, and I think that everyone should have those things. These are things I value, the things that peacetime brings. ‘Peacetime’ meaning more than just the absence of war; ‘peacetime’ meaning the ability to live freely or “freeishly” in a place where a lot of our needs can be met. And we have in Canada a place that, compared to many parts of the world, offers a lot to some who are lucky enough to have enough resources and support.

Speaking as Poet Laureate, or just as yourself, do you have any advice to young poets or words of wisdom or hope to offer the local community?

I guess I would say, especially to young poets, read a lot. That is advice that people give young writers a lot, but keep that curiosity and openness and go with gusto after filling some of the gaps in your knowledge and experience through reading. That would be a wonderful thing for young poets to do. While I am not a big chaser of experience, I am a chaser of knowledge about the world, which includes subjective and objective knowledge, so I try to be open to reading all forms. And as for wisdom and hope for the community, one of the quotes from Bahá’u’lláh, the founder of Bahá’í faith, that I have been thinking about a lot goes,

“O SON OF SPIRIT! The best beloved of all things in My sight is Justice; turn not away therefrom if thou desirest Me, and neglect it not that I may confide in thee. By its aid thou shalt see with thine own eyes and not through the eyes of others, and shalt know of thine own knowledge and not through the knowledge of thy neighbor. Ponder this in thy heart; how it behooveth thee to be. Verily justice is My gift to thee and the sign of My loving-kindness. Set it then before thine eyes.” (Bahá’u’lláh)

What it basically says is that keeping justice in your sight will help you see the world in your own authentic way and see truth your own way. I believe in this idea, especially that justice is important in the world and that it will help us to see as we are meant to see to express that—which, I really think, is my job as a poet.

Author spotlight: Anna Quon Read More »

Author spotlight: Sue Goyette

Sue Goyette is a poet and educator living in Kjipuktuk. She is the author of nine collections of poetry and one novel and was the Poet Laureate of Halifax Regional Municipality from 2020 to 2024. During her laureateship, she worked with HRM to establish the Youth Poet Laureate program as her legacy project, making space for young voices in public forums.

Dea Toivonen, Program Officer (Arts Education): I want to ask about your term as Poet Laureate and how it felt to be in this role. Did you have ambitions or expectations for your term? Were they met? Was there anything that surprised you about the development in your role?

Sue Goyette: I was really interested in being in the role and bringing in an aspect of young people, so the Youth Poet Laureate was really important to my mandate. Prior to becoming Poet Laureate, I was going to those Friday climate protests that were organized by young students, and often, they would have the mic and speak poetry. I was really interested in how they were responding to their own bewilderment and frustration through poems. You know, I think everyone should have a mentor who is, like, twenty or younger—people who are responding to the conditions that have been created for them.

Then I got the position, and two weeks later, there was the total meltdown of Covid, so it was interesting how that changed the dynamic. I am really active on social media, sharing writing prompts and poems by other people. I just felt like I should be a presence representing poetry at that time because we were all so blown away and afraid.

You entered this role at a politically interesting and devastating time, ranging from the earlier days of the Covid-19 pandemic to recently. In this period, it feels like there has been an escalation of overlapping political failures and reckonings. As a poet and representative of the literary arts and spoken word, you were not given an ‘easy’ time to respond to. You have also been a beacon of consistency and perseverance, as you have continued to stay connected to the present realities and keep an open heart. This is one of the things I remember the most distinctly from the first poetry course I took with you—that you ended the class with a call for us, as poets, as humans alive today, to keep our hearts open, no matter how devastating and difficult that might feel. So firstly, thank you for that reminder, which I recall again and again when I can feel the impulse to protect myself by disengaging. Relatedly, do you have any advice for people struggling to keep an open heart or people who have closed off from feeling, given the vast grief of the world today?

What we are seeing is like when the sea monster finally breaches the water. Before, we had only just seen a tip of it. And then it’s like, Oh my God!, the system of oppression: white-bodied supremacy, late capitalist, neoliberal systems, the violence of colonization. And what happened in the summer of 2021—there was George Floyd and a string of murders by the police—and the next summer was an intensifying of the homelessness crisis here, with the tents at Halifax’s old library, and the city called in the police. We saw police using bicycles to thrash people down, pepper-spraying a 12-year-old. The violence was intense. And later that summer, there were police in Superstore because the price of food got so high that people were running with food. So yeah, cognitive dissonance—oh boy, like upper case. Like, how does this make any sense?

And yet, the most righteous and wondrous, dastardly thing we can do in the face of that oppressive, genius system is embrace our humanity, switching from a transactional way of being to a more relational way of being and caring for each other. I mean, if we just did that in little hives of community, gradually those communities would connect—and we are seeing it! You know, in encampments, in how some people are protecting the tents of people who don’t want to live in shelters or were promised places that weren’t yet finished but were still evicted. We are seeing the care and mutual aid that is coming up and the spaces for people to connect, to make art, and to pray, to protest, to learn about Palestine.

The climate crisis meanwhile is on a rampage, and I think keeping an open heart is a radical act, and it might feel hard. I think it’s okay to turn up with a wobbly voice, or to be in tears or to need someone to hold your hand. I think this is immense what we are living through, and I worry that not enough people are acknowledging it. I go to these events, like music events, and I always want to leave if people start as if everything is okay. I just want someone to stand, if they have a microphone, and at least say, “Wow, this is messed up, and I hope you are okay.”

Your poetry and the expanse of topics and approaches in your writing is vast, spanning from personal memoir to the local natural world to integrating feminist theory and ecocriticism. I get the sense, reading your work, of the poet as a jack of all trades, knowing a little bit about a lot of things and being able to trace new paths between and through these things to illuminate something new about their relations. Can you speak to the relationship between your poetic practice and knowledge—or, more specifically, what are the forms of inquiry that you interact with, and how do these inflect your craft?

I don’t see myself as a jack of all trades, I guess, but I am deeply curious about a lot of things—and I know that when I let my curiosity lead me, I land in places that feel like exactly where I need to be at that time. And the relational aspect in my work comes from a way of being, which makes its own way in how it connects, that I have nothing to do with but which I am always so grateful for. So it’s kind of like trusting a way of being to make meaning from, and the method is the creative act, if that makes sense.

It seems like you are inverting a lot of common ways of living—turning those on their head and totally reprioritizing.

Yeah. Like I have chosen to live in a gift economy. I do things for people and don’t charge. I just understand that it’s going to come back around, and I put faith in that. When I am asked to give talks, I give them a lot of thought and I walk around with it, but I turn up without notes because I trust that being in that space and talking from my heart will create an experience and an adventure for all of us that might be exactly what we all need. I have let that happen often enough that I am okay with it now and not as afraid, but I like that I am afraid: that means that there is something at stake.

Your approach to poetry is often speculative in that it seems to respond to a ‘what if?’ question. It conjures possible near futures, as in Monocultures (Gaspereau Press, 2022), or employs speculative strategies for reinventing personal memoir, as in Anthesis: A Memoir (Gaspereau Press, 2020). Do you think ‘speculative’ is an accurate term for your approach to poetics? How do you think poetry and the speculative commingle? What are some of the strengths of a speculative approach to writing?

I think the imagination kicks in when an old way of being is dying. How this is going isn’t sustainable, and everyone I know who is living with an invigorated creative practice is writing just past their knowing—and I think just past the edge of knowledge is speculative. I’d much rather be writing in an open system where I don’t know what is going to happen than a closed system where I arrive already knowing how it is going to end.

So, the speculative is activating the creative process as a methodology, as a way of being in this trouble that we are finding ourselves in, and that keeps me open. It is like a practice that I am trying to embody all the time, so that if something happens in the world, I can respond in a way that is open and unexpected and can maybe change something in the way a poem does. The fact that we are able to take creative risks and act without knowing the outcome, I think, is one of our superpowers. And right now we need that kind of engagement. Also,stakes are low in a poem: you are just writing and can be like, “What happens if this happens!? Ok, that didn’t work out. Ok, I’ll try something else.” It’s a good way to taste the future. Because it’s just a poem, you know. Very few people read them.

Speculating and improvising are so key for being agile and being willing to change and try something new. Just because we have done something a certain way so many times before doesn’t mean we have to keep doing it that way. Being able to shift into a new way of being is so crucial right now, and it’s crucial for our humanity and it’s a good way to be with each other. What if the creative process and creating and how we feel after we have been creative is the best thing for the world right now? What if that is the radical act? I think people are writing and reading past the edge because something significant is changing. Everyone I admire says, ‘stay with the trouble’ and ‘you need a bit of the past for the future.’ It’s a great time to be an artist! It’s very invigorating, if the world doesn’t get you too down.

Your poetic practice is often grounded in a commitment to observation over time. You visited an aloe vera plant daily for almost 200 days. You archived the days of December, 2020, leading up to the Solstice in poems that were published in The Coast. Can you speak to how these sorts of durational practices affect you and your work?

I think our brains really like discipline and there is a freedom to discipline. So durational practice, to me, is a number of things. It is a part of my discipline, which involves turning up. And I have been turning up to writing for so many years that I don’t feel like I’m breathing when I don’t. But it’s also about slowing down. We are so hurried, and there is something so remarkable to slowing down and watching something become itself. When you show up you see the emergence, and the manifestation of things. Bearing witness or with-ness to something as it is becoming is like being in the company of something else’s creative act, which in turn fortifies and recharges mine. It’s a way of being, and it’s kind of the way I am. Like when the magnolia is on the verge of opening, I want to watch every day, because woah, what a class act, first of all, and second of all, what a mystery! Like, why?! What?! Who thought of this!? So, this durational practice is relational and usually land-based. I think so much of what we know of the land is dying off. You know, people report that they don’t see half as many bugs as they used to. There are so many little things not turning up in the way we are used to, and I just want to be here for it while it’s still here.

Are there any writers or artists right now that you are inspired and excited by? Who are you reading?

I read widely. I am reading poets talking about poetry. I am reading a book about how animals communicate and the multispecies relationships and the history of those relationships that I am fascinated by. I am reading a book that I am really excited about called Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira. And I am reading a book by the Dalai Lama on the Heart Sutra because I am very interested in this, as my heart is just a mess all the time. I am always reading like eight to ten books at once, which is gross. But I am also trying to change my language around that and see that as part of my natural curiosity and being a lifelong learner and not my ADHD (which it probably is too). It’s more of a curiosity-led way of being. You know, I land on things that connect to other things and it’s really exciting! When the texts start shimmering together in unexpected ways, it really reminds me that I am right where I need to be.

What are you working on now? What strategies or experiences are most informing your current approach to writing?

I am working on essays that are poetic in form. I am also working on poems about tents, which seems to be in the zeitgeist right now, and I am very interested in the transitionary, the crucial need for housing and for safe-enough places, like encampments. And weirdly, I am writing in the company of a live-cam on two endangered red wolves. So, all those things. And it depends on how I feel every morning. I was commissioned a lot in the last few months, so I wrote an essay about happiness and an essay about someone’s art show that I think is going to come to town soon. For that, I had to think beyond what I am interested in, which was really good to do, but now I am just feasting on what I am interested in.

Author spotlight: Sue Goyette Read More »

Author spotlight: Clare Goulet

Clare Goulet is a poet, essayist, editor, and instructor and the coordinator of the Writing Center at MSVU. Her interests include interdisciplinary writing, poetics, metaphor and the work of Jan Zwicky, especially applications of her notion of ‘lyric philosophy.’ Graphis scripta / writing lichen (Gaspereau Press, 2024) is her first collection of poems. Her writing has appeared in The Fiddlehead, Grain, Room, Collateral, Poetry Canada Review, and The Dalhousie Review. She lives and teaches in Kjipuktuk/Halifax, NS.

Dea Toivonen, Program Officer (Arts Education): How did you arrive at lichen as your subject? Do you have any seminal memories involving lichen that began this fascination?

Clare Goulet: Yes! One deep memory: Growing up, my backyard was woods. One summer, at 3 or 4, I climbed alone to the top of what seemed a granite mountain thick with crumbly brown bits—Umbilicaria [rock tripe] it turns out—something to peel as I lay on my stomach and sang to myself. I remember the heat and how the lichen-covered surface scratched my bare skin. I don’t remember a world without lichen.

I rediscovered them more consciously in Labrador—they’re the first growth after snowmelt and make treeless rock seem lush, teeming, rainforest. I came back from walks with full pockets, arranged them on a pine board, and resisted learning names to prolong that first encounter of seeing something as it is. Once names kick in you don’t see the same way—plus the danger of thinking you know or own, moving on once the label is pasted over. So I cultivated ignorance and just sat with them awhile. 

Resistance broke in 2003 when Lichens of North America came out, big as a 19th century family bible, gorgeous and sacred. It was all there: fungus and algae, symbiosis and historic uses, Latin and common names—goblin lights, shield, here come the metaphors—with chemistry and keys to species. Philosopher-poet Jan Zwicky put out Wisdom and Metaphor that same year, so the two books cooked together in a pot on the back of the stove while I kept collecting lichen for joy and teaching poetry for work. Simmer, simmer. 

Until the inevitable: in St. John’s in 2006, I gave a passionate paper on metaphor with a parallel thread on lichen—both composites of different elements that in relation make something new. Even their histories are analogous! Both dismissed for millennia, just starting to be understood. A fresh comparison of two or more things isn’t a figure of speech; it’s a figure of thought that changes your mind. And lichen isn’t a plant, it’s a hangout (fungus, algae, yeasts), a relationship you can hold in your hand. I mean, how cool is that?

I wanted metaphorical structures—poems—to explore that analogy. I sketched a lichen A-Z field guide on a notebook page then shelved it for umpteen years to raise my amazing kid. It felt good to get back to it. A joy. It felt like singing on that rock in the woods again.

After the manuscript went to press, I treated myself to the just-out English translation of Vincent Zonca’s Lichens and discovered that American poet Brenda Hillman made a similar analogy. Don McKay too, mapping that analogy via essay with genius verve in his All New Animal Acts. We’d each arrived to it in our own way and time, and I love that we crossed paths. 

It seems that the process of integrating research into your work is quite intensive. Do you enjoy extensive research? What was your research process like?

It felt like simple curiosity. Once I opened up the Pandora’s box of what-are-these-critters, hyphal tentacles spread in every direction, and I followed—down literal paths in the woods around the pond, into libraries, herbaria, science journals, conversations with botanists, mediaeval drawings, fairy tales. Every book on lichen I’ve seen—centuries of them, even the most disciplined and scientific—seems pulled to cover everything: history, dyes, perfume and taxonomy, illustration and medicine, as well as types and species. This book’s alphabet structure, its index of names, thankfully gave it a tight container. Within that, it does spill everywhere. And when I thought it was done, I still ended up in an Oxford herbarium handling Linnaeaus’s specimens, then in 1810 Irish botanical letters of Ellen Hutchins, and now there’s a new section… a kind of herbarium visit for the reader. I blame lichen: its system is to integrate everything and spread.

In researching for this collection, what was the most shocking or exciting discovery that you made?

Three shocks. The first was symbiosis. When I first started collecting, I didn’t know about symbiosis: fungus plus photobiont in partnership, roomies. Swoon. The second was the thrill of being alive for Toby Spribille’s 2016 finding of not two but three partners—or more!—with the presence of yeasts. The third was slapstick. I was standing on a dock at Elbow Lake, Ontario, zooming in with my phone-camera on lush cup lichens at eye level on a shed roof. I was at maximum enlargement when a monstrous multi-eyed, fanged spider filled the whole screen. I screamed and fell off the dock. 

Much of your career has been as a teacher, running a writing center, and as an editor. How do these experiences inform your writing? Do you find that your editorial experience refines your writing voice? Challenges it?

For sure the three feel symbiotic. Even the editing is an extension of teaching and mentoring, which I love. Does my editorial experience ‘refine my writing voice’? God no. If only. As a poetry editor, going all the way back to Helen Humphreys’s Anthem with Brick, I’m a slow, careful perfectionist-type, tilting to minimalist. As a writer of this book, I turned out to be loose, chatty, exuberant, disobedient. That was a shock. Perhaps in the practical circumstance of working solo parent, I had to deke my inner editor simply to get this book made. At live readings, she still comes out, that editor, horrified and tweaking and tightening, or changing up the order: and that’s ok, because the book is out.

Something that struck me—that I think this collection does exceptionally—is operate on multiple temporal scales. It conjures deep geological time, it engages with human history through mythology and historic figures from many eras, and it often occupies a contemporary landscape, populated with late 20th and 21st century cultural references. There were parts of the collection that felt primordial and elemental, some that felt particularly “pop” and of this moment, and many that felt both at the same time. How were you thinking about temporality and situating the lyrical voice in time?

If you look at lichen long enough, you start thinking like lichen, which means reaching in all directions and integrating as you go. I looked at a lichen, and it pointed everywhere. And maybe—in the same way a first novel is often autobiographical, bringing in everything in that writer’s life to date—this first book of poems ended up bringing in a lifetime of reading. In some ways, it’s a book responding to books, to myth and stories and language and translation. I didn’t intend that. 

Deep time, I have to laugh: I was text editor for geologists Rob Fensome and Graham Williams for their Last Billion Years—twice, both editions—so geologic time is now a reflex. They taught me how to swing from the long view to the close shot and how to see both in any moment. It’s relaxing to know we’re just specks and dust. 

Your language and rhythm, as well as surprising citational choices— from Looney Tunes, to ‘walk into a bar’ jokes, to ancient Greek philosophers, to Vogue magazine (and much more)—bring a great sense of humour to your poetry. I was interested in tone as I was reading, finding the tone ranging from trickster-esque or even flirtatious to the gravity of seriously reckoning with human finitude. Can you speak to your intended tone (or tones) and how those choices relate to the overall ambition of the collection?

I let the lichen, or my response to a particular lichen, situate the voice and tone—and these species are wildly diverse! Allowing that was tough; I prefer books and albums that are extreme in consistency, even monotone. But you can’t respond to tiny, hidden elf-ear the way you can to a bodacious red Cladonia. Each elicits certain thoughts, memories, rhythms, line lengths. 

This drove Andrew at Gaspereau a bit nuts, as it presented a problem for page design, as poems varied from short lines to long, spare to storied. In the end, he hung each poem, as he explains it, “on a vertical centre line strung between the title and the folio to allow inner and outer margins to expand and contract as needed.” His design creates a physically coherent book, which was key, and his selection of Matthew Carter’s Galliard for typeface keeps it spacious. I am so grateful to Andrew for this wizardry, and it was fascinating to watch how the connection of tone and style unfolds through a built physical structure. And to see how early that takes shape—I’ll never write in anything but a 5×7 notebook again. 

Your collection largely treats lichen as a metaphor for metaphor, and for either/or and both/and forms of knowing. What do you think we can learn from these ways of knowing, and what do you believe the power and possibility of breaking out of binary thought forms is? Essentially, what do you think this does? How does it change us?

You’ve cut to the heart of what I care about. I mean, if the quantum physics of the 1920s is to be believed (though we still live day to day as if it isn’t, like a weird flat-earth society), then simultaneous opposing states or multiple states co-existing is just how it is. So why wouldn’t we make things that enact or point to that, or create and organize ourselves in ways that align with the rest of the universe? This kind of thinking is emerging more in younger generations: adaptable, flexible, persistent, fluid, social, collaborative, more open to thought that includes but moves beyond analysis. Jan Zwicky’s Lyric Philosophy, Iain McGilchrist’s Master and his Emissary, Sheldrake’s Entangled Life, Robyn Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: perhaps these books and the current lichen renaissance strike a chord because other forms of knowing have failed us or turned out to be not what the world is, not how even our own 3-pound brains work. Metaphor and lichen offer another way of being—though whether we adapt, like lichen, soon enough to escape consequences is unlikely.

Can you speak more to how you see language’s relationship to the world and the way that your work is taking up an interest in both language’s possibilities and its limitations?

Language fails us. And yet!—

Are you working on any new projects? Do you have a sense of what you are inspired to next pursue?

A novel at last ready to go out, after a necessary hiatus, and a new work started, Loan Words—minimalist pieces made of words that English borrowed (not always nicely) from other cultures, telling those stories with the words taken. When we open our mouths, we speak with voices of other times and places—language tangles, and everything connects. 

Author spotlight: Clare Goulet Read More »

Author spotlight: Donna Jones Alward

Donna Jones Alward is a New York Times bestselling author of many beloved romance novels that have been translated into over a dozen languages. She lives in Nova Scotia with her husband and two cats, and her much anticipated first work of historical fiction, When the World Fell Silent (HarperCollins, 2024), is out this summer, 2024.

Join us on August 20 at the WFNS office (Halifax) for the launch of When the World Fell Silent.

Dea Toivonen, Program Officer (Arts Education): When the World Fell Silent—your forthcoming novel, a work of historical fiction—seems like quite a departure from your history of writing romance. Did this feel like a big gear-shifting moment for you? Can you speak to this pivot?

Donna Alward Jones: It was definitely a big shifting of gears, but one I was ready for! I had been writing romance for over 15 years when I started When the World Fell Silent and was looking for something new and challenging. I’m not sure I would have taken the leap if it hadn’t been for my publisher suggesting it, but I think things happen for a reason. I really didn’t want to look back and regret not doing it because I was afraid to take on something new and challenging, so I said yes and knuckled down to face a big learning curve. 

What has it been like as a writer with an established readership who know you as a romance writer to write in a different genre? Do you expect this book to appeal to a different readership?

It’s been a little bit tricky—mostly in deciding how to approach it. I decided to publish under a variation of my name to make a small differentiation; I also did a complete website redesign and have been adding historical content to my social media while still marketing my contemporary romance. But here’s the thing about romance readers: they are generally voracious. Many read other genres as well, so I think that, while this book will appeal to a whole other readership, I’ll also bring some of my established audience with me—because they read so widely. I think it’s more likely for romance readers to transfer over to historical fiction than for historical fiction readers to move to romance. 

Were there any unanticipated difficulties in writing historical fiction—or departing from romance writing—that you didn’t anticipate?

I read a lot of historical fiction and know a lot of hist fic authors, so nothing really came as a big surprise. That doesn’t mean it was easy, though. I knew plotting would be more intensive, for example, and the story itself more complex. It’s twice the length that I’m used to—so that sort of thing. 

Can you speak to your choice to write a book about the Halifax Explosion and its aftermath? Has this always been of interest to you?

You know, it still amazes me that I wasn’t taught about the explosion in Social Studies or Canadian History. I first learned of it when I read [Hugh MacLennan’s] Barometer Rising in my Atlantic Literature class in grade 12. Then, when I moved to the HRM in 2008, I learned a whole lot more. It was a natural fit for me to use as a backdrop for my novel: I have always been intrigued by how people respond and rebuild after tragedy. Plus, there’s the added perk of sharing something momentous that happened right here with the rest of the world. 

Have you read other fictional accounts of the Halifax Explosion? Where do you think your account fits into this history?

I’ve read a few but not many. I adore Shattered by Jennie Marsland, a local author, and also really enjoyed Tides of Honour by Genevieve Graham. Each of us has a different account, and I think that’s because, while the historical record remains the same, it’s the characters and their journeys that really form the story. 

A lot of your work is very place-based and uses historical buildings and landscapes to tell a story. Did this make the transition to writing historical fiction more seamless for you?

I wouldn’t exactly call it seamless. But yes, a strong sense of place is something I try to use to anchor a story. A lot of switching to historical fiction was taking what I know and simply employing it in a slightly different way. It doesn’t matter if it’s a small, contemporary town or an Alberta ranch or 1917 Halifax: worldbuilding through the eyes of the character is still done in the same basic way.

Are there any places in Halifax where you spent a lot of time or visited while you were writing When the World Fell Silent

I cannot say enough about the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic: the exhibit is so fantastic. The first time I went for the purpose of research (I’d already been a few times) was in 2020, so there were public health restrictions in place. I was the only person there for two hours. I’ve been back several times, and I’m doing a Tuesday Talk there in November. 

Did you need to do a lot of research for this book? What was that process like?

I expanded my book budget for sure! There are so many terrific nonfiction books about the explosion, and I bought most of them; I went to the museum several times, and I also had the assistance of the librarians at Halifax Central Library in accessing materials that could not be checked out. Sometimes for other details—such as information about Camp Hill Hospital and nursing during the war—I did Google searches, and I also loved, loved, loved Newspapers.com. It is so easy to go down a research rabbit hole while looking at old newspapers!

Do you plan on continuing to write historical fiction or explore other genres in the future?

I’m definitely continuing to write historical fiction. It’s been a big challenge but so enjoyable! I’m really happy I made the decision to pivot.

You have a book launch in Halifax at WFNS coming up in August. How has the support of the local writing scene been for you, now and throughout your career?

I’m a recent member of WFNS, but for many years I belonged to RWAC—Romance Writers of Atlantic Canada. Having a supportive writing community has been incredibly important to me; this can be a really solitary endeavour. I joined WFNS almost a year ago, and I have felt incredibly welcomed. I participating in Booktoberfest and the Nova Swoons event and the Writing Rumble. Meeting new people in the writing scene has been wonderful! I hope to see some of my new friends at the launch of When the World Fell Silent on August 20.

What are you working on now?

I’m writing a story set partially on the Titanic, partially on the Carpathia, and then winding up here in Halifax. It’s got two female protagonists who sail on the Titanic to begin a new life—and whose plans are changed by the disaster.

Author spotlight: Donna Jones Alward Read More »

Author Spotlight: Shannon Webb-Campbell, 2024 Ellemeno Prize recipient

Recipient of the inaugural Ellemeno Visual Literature PrizeShannon Webb-Campbell is of Mi’kmaq and settler heritage. She is a member of Flat Bay First Nation. Her books include Re: Wild Her (Book*hug, forthcoming 2025), Lunar Tides (2022), I Am a Body of Land (2019), and Still No Word (2015), which was the recipient of Egale Canada’s Out in Print Award. Shannon is a PhD candidate at the University of New Brunswick and the editor of Visual Arts News Magazine.

Of Shannon’s winning poem, “Her Eros Restored,” prize jurors Sue MacLeod, Jessica Scott Kerrin, and Carol Shillibeer had this to say:

“‘Her Eros Restored’ loosens a too-tight corset—each of its poetic sections responding to Les Chiffons de La Châtre — Corsets roses [Rags of the Castle — Pink Corsets] (1960) by Gérard Deschamps. It does so by reclaiming small moments of feminine autonomy. From the first section’s ‘catapulting through moonlight… on the equinox’ to the last section’s ‘tangle like root vegetables,’ the poem perceives a world in which a person of mixed heritage, devalued within the dominant culture, can both fly above its restrictions and simultaneously dance with the earth and sea—so that life feels as if a new story is being born—a story of power, energy, love, and authenticity. No mean achievement. This is a thing of beauty.”

Read “Her Eros Restored” below, followed by our interview with Shannon.

Her Eros Restored
after Gérard Deschamps, Les Chiffons de La Châtre – Corsets roses, printemps 1960

 

1
on the last day of summer
we catch a Trans-Atlantic flight over midnight
catapulting through moonlight
before a swirling hurricane
makes landfall on the Equinox
we kick up our heels
as the city of light embraces
its second new year

 

 

2
at Le Comptoir Parisen alone
I write long after Anaïs Nin
for a world that does not exist
she was the first of her kind
to pursue pleasure for its own sake
I am now a sultry femme
a visionary sprite
who splits, sips and slurps

 

 

3
we are drinking champagne with the rats
on the steps of the Pantheon
beneath the only star in Paris
you toast to the writers and philosophers
gulping brut out of paper cups
I thank the poets, chemists, and revolutionaries
blood buzzed we tiptoe backwards
walking separately along the Seine

 

 

4
I need to break the glass of Deschamps’
Les Chiffons de La Carte—Corsets roses
smashing the patriarchy I must
set women’s rags and underwear free—
it’s no longer springtime in the 1960s, ladies!
unhinge your brasseries, panties, corsets and girdles
let the old girls breathe and fight back beyond
wives, mothers, child-eaters, witches and whores

 

 

5
you see the house lights
Illuminate Palais Garnier
I am strapped inside the opera house
on a boat ride of toil-and-trouble woes
charting a three sisters’ tragedy
waves of love, lust and revenge
while fancy Parisians take candlelit selfies
you wander alone in the rain

 

 

6
years after the wages of crude men
where I got cornered on slick streets
whose too aggressive tongues
pushed me hard down cobblestone
I became a Paris runaround
wearing my extravagant outfits—
pleather dresses, pleated skirts, fanciful feathers
you restored my best lace

 

 

7
reading e.e cummings’ erotic poems out loud
under covers we tangle like root vegetables
wrapped up in borrowed sheets you read to me
around you and forever: I am hugging the sea
tracing my lips with your wet fingertips
you tell me your only wish
a desire to draw me nude
but you never do

Andy Verboom (WFNS Program Manager): Tell us about your influences, Shannon. In your regular writing practice, how do the works of other artists and writers guide your hand? Do you think your primary literary form—poetry—is particularly attuned to influence from artistic others?

Shannon Webb-Campbell: My regular writing practice spans all kinds of inspirations from other artists and writers. As the editor of Visual Ars News and Muskrat Magazine, I spend a lot of time experiencing, reflecting on, and writing about art. I frequently visit galleries, engage with artists, and have my own visual practice. Art has leaked into my poetic practice. Tuning into other art forms encourages us to think, see, and feel differently. To experience the bends of sorts. As a poet, I draw from artistic others but also from poetry in general. Poetry bends language. Perhaps it encourages us to bend with life, too.

AV: I like this metaphorical knitting of “the bends”—a dramatic bodily disorientation in a rapidly changed environment—with the more common connotations of “bending,” like refraction and flexibility. Do you experience impactful artworks as productive disorientations? Put another way, do artworks need to disorientate us in order to shift our perspectives?

SWC: This is an interesting question, Andy. Part of me feels like, when I am disoriented, I look to art as a way of orienting, but perhaps it’s vice versa. Sometimes I am seeking pleasure, other times intellectual nourishment, but most often, I am interested in new ways of seeing the world, a disruption or shift from my own point of view. Art does this. Poetry also works in this way, too. When they are impactful, I think art and poetry are incredibly rich and productive forms of disorientation, a space where we can detach from our day-to-day thoughts and give our creative minds room to spark. Art and poetry are means to open up new possibilities, different ways of thinking and experience new and old life cycles.

AV: Your artist’s statement for “Her Eros Restored” mentions encountering Deschamps’s Les Chiffons de La Châtre during a research trip to Paris. What were you there to research, and how did that topic lead to you to this artwork at the Centre Pompidou?

SWC: In autumn of 2022, I travelled to Paris to saturate myself in art, architecture, and beauty as part of sketching out my next poetry collection, Re: Wild Her (which is forthcoming with Book*hug in 2025), and I encountered Deschamps’s Les Chiffons de La Châtre at the Centre Pompidou for the second time.

The first time I visited the work was on a solo trip to Paris in 2009, which was after selling most of my belongings, including my clothes, and hosting a small lomography art show, Moving Pictures, at Love, Me Boutique on Dresden Row to help fund my trip. Deschamps’s Les Chiffons de La Châtre left an impression in my mid 20s, but what struck me was how different I felt experiencing the work for a second time, which all these years later still bears the traces of the bodies who wore the rags and discarded women’s underwear. “Her Eros Restored” is a poetic attempt to overthrow the patriarchy, subvert the male gaze, and set these bodies and their discarded under linens and corsets free.

AV: “Her Eros Restored” is included in that fourth, forthcoming poetry collection, Re: Wild Her. As you approach a book-length collection, how do you think about its individual poems? And what does it mean, for you, to further separate a poem into individual parts or sections?

SWC: I initially imagined writing “Her Eros Restored” as a long poem but got distracted. Other poems interrupted the flow of that idea. Initially, I conceived of it as a numerical poem, but that’s evolved recently through the editing process with my fabulous editor, Sandra Ridley. The version of “Her Eros Restored” that won the first-ever Ellemeno Visual Literature Prize has gone through its own rewilding process and will appear slightly altered in the published book.

I think separating the poem into parts or sections lets each stanza exist as its own nesting doll. The space and line breaks are important to give the poetics room to breathe, as well as air out those fleshy pink corsets and panties that have been under Deschamps’s glass since the 1960s.

AV: Is there an echo, then, between the process of composing “Her Eros Restored”—the interruption and return to Deschamps’s work—and the space essential to the poem’s structure? Or am I overcomplicating things?

SWC: Honestly, I don’t think I had the poetic tools to draw upon when I first encountered Les Chiffons de La Châtre. In fact, the only piece of writing I published from my first trip to Paris are two letters included in When The Nights Are Twice As Long: Love Letters of Canadian Poets, an anthology edited by David Esso and Jeanette Lynes (Goose Lane, 2015). The anthology features over 129 love letters by English Canadian poets P.K. Page to F.R. Scott, Leonard Cohen, Louis Riel, Milton Acorn’s letters to his former wife Gwendolyn MacEwen, and Susan Musgrave’s letters to her late husband Stephen Reid.

AV: How does Re: Wild Her fit into the arc of your earlier collections?

SWC: Still No Word (Breakwater 2015), which was the inaugural recipient of Egale Canada’s Out in Print Award, seeks the appearance of the self in others and the recognition of others within the self, and it inhabits the mercurial space between public and private. Edited and introduced by Lee Maracle, I Am a Body of Land (Book*hug 2019), is a complex revisioning of an earlier work exploring poetic responsibility and accountability. Lunar Tides imagines the primordial connections between love, grief and water, structured within the lunar calendar. In a way, Re: Wild Her follows the arc of my earlier books as a poetic extension, but is a text entirely its own.

 

Author Spotlight: Shannon Webb-Campbell, 2024 Ellemeno Prize recipient Read More »

Author Spotlight: Jack Wong

Author/illustrator and NSCAD alumni Jack Wong has had quite a prolific year! With two picture books out in 2023 (When You Can Swim, Scholastic; and The Words We Share, Annick Press) and a third one coming in spring of 2024 (All That Grows, Groundwood Books), Jack has made a splash on the children’s literature scene to great acclaim. His accolades include receiving the 2023 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award and the Governor General’s Literary Award in Young People’s Literature for When You Can Swim, and a Blue Spruce Award nomination for The Words We Share. Jack has participated in competitive mentorships from Annick Press and Visual Arts Nova Scotia, and he spends his free time volunteering in the Reading with Newcomer Children program, an initiative of IBBY Canada. He will also be participating in the 2024 Canadian Children’s Book Week tour in New Brunswick. We were thrilled that he had time in his busy schedule to chat with us about his work.

You’ve certainly been busy this past year! Have you had any chance to catch your breath?

Not really! Releasing three books in the span of a year has been pretty intense. It wasn’t really planned that way: I had the opportunity to be interacting with three separate publishers, and their respective projects ended up landing at around the same time. It’s a great fortune, but I’m also living with the consequences! And publishing is of such a pace that you can do a course correction (e.g., have a better eye for scheduling future projects), but you’re kind of stuck with any decisions you already made for another three or four years.

We’ve heard you describe yourself as a “Jack-of-all-trades.” After a varied career in several other fields, what made you turn your attention to writing and illustrating children’s books? And how have your previous life experiences prepared you for the task?

I’ll skip over how I ventured into the arts from another career altogether (engineering) and pick up after graduating from NSCAD, when I spent several years struggling to find a means of artistic expression. I recall during that time several chance encounters with picture books that felt like the most moving and exciting aesthetic experiences I’d had in a long time — comparable to memorable moments at art galleries, for example — and deciding that that was the medium I wanted to work in, too. Of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that those chance encounters with children’s books came, in the first place, as a result of doing little projects with family and friends for their children.

One thing I’ve learned, not from working in any field in particular but just from having tried so many things in general, is how not to worry about imposter syndrome. We can focus so much on not fitting some imagined standard and lose sight of the fact that, by dint of our own grab bags of individual life experiences, we’ll all invariably approach the same task slightly differently. That slight difference is all that any one of us, as artists, ever has to offer.

It’s an impressive talent to be able to both write and illustrate a picture book. Do you start with the text first, or the illustrations? Or do you create them in tandem?

At the beginning, when a story or idea is still just all in my head, I find that I’m thinking in both words and pictures. For whatever reason, I tend to grab at the words first, aiming to pin down a manuscript before attempting the illustrations. I think it’s mostly because it takes a lot more effort to be drafting with a sketchbook than with a word processor!

For your debut picture book, When You Can Swim, you embarked on a promotional tour to schools in the United States, from North Carolina to California. What was it like to connect with your young audience? And what advice would you give to other kidlit writers preparing for school visits?

The first school visit I ever did, I was introduced by this archetypal children’s librarian: the one with the sonorous, expressive voice and infectious energy that just commanded the whole room — and for a brief moment I was petrified, thinking, “Right, that’s how you address a room full of kids — was I supposed to be like that?” Thankfully, I realized pretty quickly that other people play their roles so that you can play yours: by doing what they did, that librarian had perfectly prepared their group to be ready and attentive for me to do my thing.

My best advice is to be yourself and to be very well-prepared (which I hope isn’t paradoxical). I have a fairly small voice, but sometimes what actually results from that trait is a more intimate experience: at times, I can feel kids are on the edge of their seats just because of my hushed delivery. Being prepared allows me to play to my strengths: instead of just stumbling upon the moments where that effect is desirable, I try to have my script down to the exact words so I have opportunities for suspense or surprise built in.

When You Can Swim is such a beautiful love letter to the joy of swimming! What do you enjoy most about swimming, and where is your favourite place to swim in Nova Scotia?

Thank you! It may surprise some people that I actually find swimming kind of daunting and uncomfortable. Any time I swim outdoors, I need a big mental push to get in the water, even if I’m invariably glad afterwards that I took the plunge. If the book is successful in creating an encouraging yet empathetic tone towards swimming, it’s because I actually wrote it as much as a pep talk for myself as for the young reader.

Though many places represented in the book are further afield (as far as Meat Cove at the northern tip of Cape Breton), my go-to place to swim is probably Chocolate Lake, which is just up the road from me. We live in such a beautiful place to have lakes dotting the landscape — kids here don’t know how lucky they are!

The Words We Share will surely resonate with many newcomer families in which children often translate a new second language for their parents. Why was it important for you to write this story, and what do you hope readers will take away from it?

The Words We Share draws from my own childhood experiences, immigrating with my family to Canada from Hong Kong when I was six years old, then translating for my parents when I picked up English much more quickly than they did. I’m certainly thrilled at the prospect that kids who have similar experiences will feel seen by and represented in this book, but I also think that the higher service I can do is to make other kids see and understand them through story. For that reason, my focus was always to create a story that was engaging and entertaining and universal — the reader who doesn’t have lived experience of immigrating or translating should still be able to feel it’s a story for them, too.

All That Grows is due to come out this spring, just in time for us all to get excited about digging into our gardens! Can you tell us a little bit about what we can expect from this book, and what inspired you to write this story?

All That Grows follows a boy learning about the natural environment when he starts helping his green-thumbed older sister in her garden. The more he hears about different plants, however (not to mention their seemingly arbitrary classifications as flower, vegetable, or weed), the more he becomes aware of how complex the world is, and the less he feels he knows — especially in contrast with his sister, who somehow seems to know everything.

While this book has STEM appeal on its surface, I hope it succeeds in conveying larger things than the apparent subject matter. I wrote the story during the first months of the pandemic; for me, a child contending with a flood of received facts and judgements about the natural world serves as an analog for that period of time when what we learned from daily health briefings seemed to raise more questions than they answered, and reminded all of us that we really don’t know very much. How we resolve to move forward, in the face of uncertainty, is very much the underlying theme of the book.

You’ve held several book launches at Woozles and seem to have a great relationship with their staff. How important is it to build relationships with booksellers? Any advice for authors who might be hesitant when it comes to self-promotion?

I am extremely lucky to have the support of Woozles! While it’s been invaluable to have a relationship with my local children’s bookstore, I didn’t intentionally set out to build one. For a while, I was just that childless shopper who always felt sheepish browsing for hours at their old Birmingham Street location… It was such a relief that the staff (starting with long-time seller Nadine King) welcomed my presence just the same, and I was eager to meet their kindness. I think it helps when the professional relationships you need to forge are with those whom you admire anyway, and Woozles made that easy.

I’ve personally found so much enrichment in reframing “self-promotion” as acts of expressing gratitude. It’s an incredible thing for any person to give their time and consideration to a book. All I’m really doing is either thanking the reader for having read it, or thanking them in advance for reading it in the future!

What do you do when you have writer’s (or illustrator’s) block?

I can’t say I’ve figured that out! I try to subscribe to the old adages: write anyway, everyday, so that you’re present when the good stuff arrives, etc… More often than not, however, I find I’m not so much blocked — I know I have an idea in my head — but the prospect of actually grabbing hold of it is so daunting. Over time, I’ve learned to place more and more faith in incremental improvement, and try to adopt the mindset and the conditions for that to happen. When I have to revise a piece of writing, I’ll give myself just an hour or so each day over a period of time, and each session I’ll completely re-type the previous day’s draft, whether I have anything in mind to revise or not. Each time, a few choices are made in the process, however minor, and the ball is advanced an inch closer to the goalpost. Of course, it helps that most of the things I write are very short!

After your third book comes out this spring, are you going to take a break, or do you have any other projects on the go?

I took a bit of time off for the holidays, but other than that, it’s nose-to-the-grindstone. Luckily I’m very excited about the next things! I’m currently illustrating a picture book on acclaimed cellist Yo-Yo Ma (written by James Howe, author of Bunnicula and other classics), while working on early development for my next written-and-illustrated book with Scholastic.

Author Spotlight: Jack Wong Read More »

Author Spotlight: Jill MacLean

Three of Jill MacLean’s five novels for middle-graders and young adults won the Ann Connor Brimer Award for Atlantic Canadian Children’s Literature. A fourth book won the Red Cedar Award. Two of the books are in Nova Scotia’s schools. She was born in Berkshire, the setting for her newly-released medieval novel for adults, The Arrows of Mercy, and re-visiting it—in reality in the 21st century and in imagination in the 14th—has given her much pleasure. She now lives in Bedford, Nova Scotia, near her family.

What do you feel passionate about?

My website gives a partial answer to this question: the power of words; a good story, well-told; the need to have characters alive in my head; canoeing, reading, gardening and travel; family and friends (far from least, even if last).

A relatively easy list to compile.

The passions that drive my writing are less conscious. They can nudge me towards genuine discoveries and they supply the energy that enables me to stick with a novel from beginning to end, through innumerable revisions and disheartening rejections. Passion demands persistence.

When I write, I don’t start out with themes in mind. I have to trust they’ll emerge as the story shapes itself and I’m often the last one to grasp what they are, even though they’ve grasped me for months. Theme, for me, equals passion.

How does that passion figure into your new novel, The Arrows of Mercy?

Two of the themes that underlie this novel are, in modern terms, scorched-earth warfare and PTSD.

I was born in England in early 1941, a time when Britain was in danger of being invaded, a time of intense anxiety. I had uncles in the forces, an aunt living through the blitz, a healthy young father who was an aeronautical engineer and took the train to work five days a week, conspicuously not in uniform. I remember long curls of barbed wire, blackout curtains and ration books, air-raid shelters, sirens, gas masks made of floppy green rubber that stank. I remember the victory parade from my perch on my father’s shoulders. By writing this novel, I’ve learned that war affected me, small though I was.

Edmund, my protagonist, was conscripted into the king’s army as an archer, and survived thirteen months of brutal warfare in northern France that left him haunted by the blood on his hands. I still have traces of PTSD from the long ago car accident in which my daughter died, and I suspect that many of our first responders suffer from full-fledged post-traumatic stress. Loss is a theme throughout all my books.

In the nineties, I completed a master’s degree in theological studies, taking the maximum allowable number of courses in comparative religion, and was fascinated by the stories cultures tell themselves in order to give meaning to life, to impose order on randomness. Even so, Edmund’s religious doubts took me by surprise. I found them intensely interesting.

To summarize all this, whenever a novel of mine is released, I feel as though I’ve undressed in public.

You are perhaps best known as a middle grade writer, having penned several award-winning books including The Nine Lives of Travis Keating and The Present Tense of Prinny Murphy. Why was it time to write a novel for adults?

By the time I’d finished the fifth of my novels for young readers, I was afraid I was falling into a literary rut: four of the books overtly about bullying, four of them set in Newfoundland (where my family was living at the time), all of them contemporary. Time to call a halt, change gears. Clichés abounded. Panic abounded, too.

Into that hiatus dropped my longtime fascination with the medieval period. I’ve been to the Cloisters, Cluny and Chartres, that great stone pile shot through with blues and reds. During my various trips to England, I sat in many a thick-walled Norman church steeped in the spirits of those who’d found solace there over the last eight hundred years. A medieval novel, then. Although the manuscript started out as YA, this soon changed. I wanted no constrictions, I wanted to write whatever came into my head. I wanted an adult audience.

Tell me about your decision to place this book in the past— 1348, to be exact.

The medieval period stretches, roughly, from 500 to 1500. What we now call the Hundred Years War started in 1337 under Edward III, who felt he had a legitimate claim to the French throne. From the beginning, I’d known Edmund would be an archer. The battle of Crécy, in which English archers slaughtered “the flower of French knighthood” was in 1346, the siege of Calais 1346 – 1347. Plague came to England in 1348. One by one, the dates closed in.

What kind of research did you engage in? Did your research take you to any interesting places? How did the pandemic affect your ability to do research?

I started reading early in 2014, taking full advantage of Dalhousie’s extensive medieval collection. The setting hit me on the head one day: Berkshire, the county where I was born – where else? I asked my son if he’d go to England with me that fall to do the driving, he agreed, and off we went. In London he was able to watch the last stage of the British version of the Tours de France (he’s a committed long-distance bicyclist), while I went to the British Museum and British Library. Foyles Bookshop in Charing Cross added to the weight of each of our suitcases.

We picked up the car in Reading, took off for Wales (the first roundabout was a shocker) and explored the restoration of a medieval village in Comeston. We got lost in Cardiff, made it back to Berkshire, and drove the back lanes in the southwest of the county, narrow, winding lanes with hedgerows high as trees. Just as well for the sake of the local population that he was driving – and such a pleasure to spend ten days with my then 48-year-old son (we managed to find some wonderful pubs).

On the banks of the Kennet River, somewhere between Kintbury and Newbury, I found where Edmund lived, wandered the fields and woods, and knew I had to write this book.

Can you talk about the language you used for The Arrows of Mercy?

It was tricky. From the start I didn’t want to write about aristocrats. It was the lowest echelon of 14th century England that snagged me, the peasants, the villeins, whose unending labours allowed knights to fight and bishops to pray. I couldn’t replicate Berkshire dialect, Middle English was the language of the villeins, French of the aristocrats and Latin of the church. Gradually it came clear that Edmund, during the long siege of Calais, was tutored by a squire in grammar, verse and story, awakening in him a passion for words and “what rides their underbelly.” His manner of speech and thought thus differed from that of his neighbours when he came home, another factor in the isolation he experienced. Throughout the narrative, I used words like cottar, assart, maslin, chevage, virgate, because they were integral to life in the village (there’s a glossary at the end of the book). I also investigated medieval swearing (fun) and made up a few words along the way.

I wondered if you could talk about writing about the plague during a time of pandemic. What kinds of parallels were you making?

I researched the book during 2014, wrote it over the next two years, then started revisions, which lasted, literally, for years. So the actual writing was well before Covid.

When the pandemic happened with its various restrictions, the writer in me was rather amused that Edmund’s village, in its way, had been practicing “social distancing” and that Agnes the wise-woman knew enough to wear a cloth over her face and wash her hands, and to preach these precautions to others, some of whom listened, some of whom did not.
Geraldine Books, by the way, in Year of Wonders, brilliantly describes a 17th century village in Derbyshire, which, when infected by plague, totally isolated itself from the outside world.

Why did you decide to self-publish The Arrows of Mercy? What challenges does self-publishing present?

Because I was in love with the research, I wrote a sprawling mess of a novel, characters tearing off in all directions, events galloping across the pages. After the book went through two professional edits, I felt it was ready to send out to Canadian and UK agents. It wasn’t. Rejections dinged into my inbox. I had another professional edit. More revisions. More rejections, both from agents and Canadian publishers. Still more revisions. Finally, when I’d changed the ending innumerable times, when the manuscript had gone from 156,000 words to 113,000, I knew I’d found the essence of the story and the revisions had to stop.

I write to communicate and I wanted a book in my hand. After researching self-publication, I settled on a company out west and spent five months working with them so that I could hold that book. The challenges now? No placement of the novel in bookstores, as by traditional publishers. No promotion, no publicity. For three months I’m focusing on marketing The Arrows of Mercy, then I’ll write over the summer (I’m desperate to get back to that daunting blank screen) and do more marketing in the fall.

I made a substantial start on the sequel last summer—and I swear it won’t take eight years to finish.

Did you have any readings or launches you’d like to mention?

The launch of The Arrows of Mercy was wonderful, way beyond my expectations. More than seventy people in attendance, Mike Hamm of Bookmark sold over fifty books, and Brian Bartlett in his introduction was most generous in his praise of the novel. I’d also invited a champion archer and medieval enthusiast, who was kind enough to come in peasant garb with his longbow and describe how the bow, the weapon of peasants, changed the face of European warfare in the 14th century, starting with the battle of Crécy.

There was such warmth in the room, such a gathering of old friends and family—the three younger generations of my family did all the set-up and take-down, and when you add laughter, conversation and an armload of lovely flowers, it’s little wonder I was high for days afterwards.

So Edmund is now out in today’s world. I wish him well.

Author Spotlight: Jill MacLean Read More »

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Recommended Experience Levels

The Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia (WFNS) recommends that participants in any given workshop have similar levels of creative writing and / or publication experience. This ensures that each participant gets value from the workshop⁠ and is presented with information, strategies, and skills that suit their career stage. The “Recommended experience level” section of each workshop description refers to the following definitions used by WFNS.

  • New writers: those with less than two years’ creative writing experience and/or no short-form publications (e.g., short stories, personal essays, or poems in literary magazines, journals, anthologies, or chapbooks).
  • Emerging writers: those with more than two years’ creative writing experience and/or numerous short-form publications.
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Please keep in mind that each form of creative writing (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and writing for children and young adults) provides you with a unique set of experiences and skills, so you might consider yourself an ‘established author’ in one form but a ‘new writer’ in another.

For “intensive” and “masterclass” creative writing workshops, which provide more opportunities for peer-to-peer feedback, the recommended experience level should be followed closely.

For all other workshops, the recommended experience level is just that—a recommendation—and we encourage potential participants to follow their own judgment when registering.

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