10 Questions with Michelle Grierson
Between kindergarten and graduate school, I’ve had the privilege of working with so many amazing mentors. More than any other teacher, though, Michelle Grierson changed me. As a high school student in Michelle’s dance classes, I learned so much about the nuts and bolt of making art in all its forms. More importantly, Michelle modeled for me what it might look like to be a grown up woman leading a creative life. Without her influence, I am not sure I would be a writer today.
When I picked up her debut novel this spring, I knew it would be good, but it was so much better than I could have imagined. I was blown away by the strength of her prose, and by her ability to sweep me away into a world that felt at once profoundly real and utterly magical. I was over the moon when she agreed to speak with me about it.
Although 13 years had passed since we had last seen each other, talking with her felt instantly familiar. Before I knew it, 2 1/2 hours had flown by!
Michelle Grierson is the author of Becoming Leidah, published by Simon and Schuster.
Michelle: Katy! I know you say people call you Kate, but I can’t.
Kate: Lots of people still call me Katy. You can call me whatever you want! Also, you look exactly the same as you have since I was a teenager. Exactly.
Michelle: No! This is what 50 looks like! You can see the wrinkles around my eyes.
Kate: I have those too, see?! You’re still teaching, right?
Michelle: Yup! Going on 28 years.
Kate: That’s wild. When you were first my teacher, it was only your second or third year. Time is such a strange thing!
Michelle: I’m in the last leg now. My retirement date is four years from now. My son is 13 and graduating from grade 8, and then is off to high school. In my mind, when he’s done, I’m done.
Kate: Crazy!
Michelle: So, what are you doing now? I checked out your website, but what is the whole story? You’re writing, right? How old are your girls?
Kate: I’m writing. The girls are 8 and 6. They’re the coolest people I know, and I there have been many moments of joy this past year, but they’re also everywhere and they never leave. It’s so hard. This past year, I have managed to finally break through with my writing in a small way. It’s been pretty interesting, feeling like I finally have some momentum, but then dealing with the reality of virtual school and having zero access to childcare.
Michelle: I’m so thankful that my son is 13, so I can just teach and not worry so much about him.
Kate: Which brings me to my first question . . .
1. What has it been like to teach dance virtually during the pandemic?
Michelle: This whole world we are in is so weird, and I don’t like it at all. The way I teach is so physical and embodied. It’s all about connection, really. So this experience has been super challenging for me, and has required me to adjust my belief system. My belief that we have to be in physical presence together. I have learned a lot, and my students are awesome, they really are. But the thing that I really don’t like about this model of learning, beyond the fact that it is a two dimensional world and we are all so separate, is that it is so easy to default to busy work, because we don’t know what else to do, and because we need something tangible to mark.
Kate: Yes!
Michelle: But I have worked really hard to set up a creative space in the same kind of vein that you would get in the classroom, which, as a dance teacher, has been tough. Some days I have two computers with four Google Meets going, and it's nuts, but I am determined to have them work through choreography together just like they would in the classroom. It’s a lot tougher, but we’ve figured it out.
Hold on a second. I don’t know if you can hear the dogs growling. I have two dogs, and this is the sound of my life.
Kate: I get it! My husband has very kindly taken our dog out on a very long walk. He just turned one and he is such a sweetie, but also still such a handful (Note: my dog not my husband).
Michelle: We have a pandemic puppy, too. Here, I’ll show you. This is her. Her energy is ridiculous. And then our other dog is now four, so she does not want to have anything to do with the puppy, who we adopted because we thought that she needed company. We were wrong! She looks at me all the time, like, “I can’t believe you did this to me!”
Kate: That’s how my children often look at me about our dog! They are starting to love him, but it has been a struggle.
2. Tell me about your journey towards writing and publishing this book? How did you get here?
When I was really little—5, 6, 7 years old, and an aspiring ballerina, I also loved to draw and to write. Which is so crazy, because it is still my process. I used to put on dance attire, turn on music, sometimes Tchaikovsky, sometimes David Bowie—whatever was on my parents’ record player. I would dance, and then write whatever images were coming to me in a journal, and draw things to go with that. And so, back then I always thought I was going to be a ballerina, a novelist, and a therapist.
Kate: Of course.
Michelle: In high school I really loved creative writing, and I thought, Ok, maybe I’m going to be a writer. Of course I was still dancing and painting. When I applied to university, I applied according to those interests, so I thought, I’ll apply to York for Dance, and Trent or Carleton for Journalism, and to Guelph for visual art. What happened? I got a scholarship to Guelph, so that was the track I took.
So, I’ve been writing forever—mostly poetry for the first half of my life. I’ve been writing this story for a very long time, but it’s morphed a lot. But it’s always kind of been in me, because I’ve been so fascinated with water and myth. The story kind of formulated into more of a novel in the last 8 years, maybe. I couldn’t put it away. I would get these pockets of time where I would write, and then I would leave it for 8 months or a year at a time. But then I just started to feel that it became more urgent. The characters were telling me what to write, almost. I thought, I’ve got to do something with this because it won’t leave me alone!
Once I actually had something pretty solid, I went to the Humber School for Writers. That’s kind of where I thought, Ok, yup. This is something real and I should probably keep working on it.
Kate: So, the Humber program is totally mentorship-based? How is it structured?
Michelle: Yup. It’s online. Once you’re accepted, they partner you with a professional editor or author. You submit pages to your mentor, and they send you notes back, and you work that way, going back and forth through virtual space. My editor was Karen Connelly, who is a pretty famous Canadian author. She was great, because she didn’t mince words ever! Because I had so much written already, her plan was to say, “look, you have skill. You know where you’re heading with this. Don’t take my notes, revise, and then send me back a revision. You can do that on your own. I trust you. Just keep sending me new stuff.” So that’s what we did.
That’s where I noticed I had two novels in one. She really helped me to see that. She was effusive when she loved it, she would be like, “this is weird, and wonderful, and I love it!” And then when she hated it, she would say, “Blah! Awful! Melodramatic! Get rid of it!” Which was great! There was never any doubting what she meant.
Kate: When I was in grad school, my mentor for my thesis book was Anne Michaels.
Michelle: Oh, wow! That’s amazing.
Kate. It was. She was amazing, and she was very gentle. But looking back, I didn’t get nearly as much out of that mentorship, or the entire experience of doing a Creative Writing MA, really, as I could have. Which was totally on me. I wasn’t ready. I cared so much about validation, about having some sort of credential that proved I was legitimate, that I didn’t really understand how to do the work I needed to do in order to actually become a better writer. And I didn’t really understand the level of grit that was required to make it in the writing world. At the end of the program, when Anne Michaels asked me what I was going to do with my manuscript, I told her that I was only going to submit it to Anansi, which is pretty much the top independent press in Canada. She kind of looked at me sideways, and said, “I just don’t want you to get discouraged by the first ‘no.’ You need to promise me you’ll keep going, even if they don’t accept this book.” I remember nodding, but that advice just slid right off me. Because I had come to believe that you were either a genius or you weren’t, and if you weren’t, then it was embarrassing to even try.
When I got that ‘no,’ as I inevitably did, I was so embarrassed that I hid it and didn’t tell anyone it had happened. And I didn’t write seriously for years. I found that letter recently, tucked into an old stack of papers. It was the best kind of rejection—personal, encouraging. It was handwritten for Pete’s sake. I was so mad at myself. I should have framed it. Instead, I lost years. It took me until my 30’s to unravel all of those toxic stereotypes about artistic genius and understand that what matters is doing the work and being willing to put it out there. I have cultivated a different mindset now, where I think about submitting work as a sort of rejection therapy. Engaging in that cycle of creating something, putting it out there, getting feedback about how crappy and flawed it is, and starting again is an almost spiritual process for me.
Michelle: I think it is incredible that you figured it out in your 30’s. Because I did not put my writing out there. I had been writing forever, and I never put it out there. I never tried. And that was because I was afraid of being seen as less than. It’s a bad habit, really, when you think about how much we don’t try, because we’ve been trained to be afraid of failure. That’s a whole other topic, about pedagogy and education. I really try to set up my classroom, so that kids aren’t being assessed all the time. What they’re being given is valuable feedback that they actually seek out that is not attached to how valuable the kid is. Rather than telling a kid their work doesn’t have value, I try to shift the thinking to “this is so cool, let’s keep working on it.” I think it would have made a big difference if I had had more of that as a kid, instead of being consumed with this fear of not getting perfect marks. I remember saying “if I’m not the best right out of the gate, then there’s no point.” That completely changed how I was in the world. I stayed away from anything that I didn’t think I could be the best at.
Kate: And in the arts, I think we are also up against pressure from both inside and outside that world. Inside, there is still this persistent myth of Artistic Genius that makes us afraid to reveal that we are not smart enough, or well-read enough, or cool enough. There is a sense that failure of the work is failure of the self, and that talent is a fixed, finite thing that you either have or you don’t. This makes it feel so perilous to put anything out there. At the same time, within society more generally, it often feels like being an artist is only okay if you have some sort of success that non-artists can recognize, like awards, or lucrative sales, or book deals with major publishers. The fear of being perceived as a flake who dabbles in poetry has always had an absurd amount of power over me.
Michelle: For me, I didn’t have the nerve to put my stuff out there. Even once I was working with Karen Connelly, every time I would get notes back from her I would be filled with anxiety. I would carefully peek at it—almost like this package that I was afraid of—and if I would see little signs that she liked it, words like wild and weird, I would be so relieved and tear it open. But if I saw even the tiniest indication that the feedback was negative, I would be, like, “Oh, God!” And that was me in my late 40’s, so you did well to figure it out when you did. It’s a demon that so many of us who create have to overcome, and actually when we do, we see that the demon is really an angel. Because once you figure it out, you can use it to your advantage.
Kate: Yes! My ability to absorb rejection and keep going is now my superpower. But we digress. So, what happened after you finished the program?
Michelle: Coming out of the program, continuing to work on it on my own, I decided to focus on one side of the story, and that’s what became the manuscript. I entered it into the Fold Contest. Lucky me, my first time putting it out into the world and it actually manifested! I didn’t have to go through all sorts of rejection. When I hear stories of what other people have gone through, I think I probably would have given up. 100 percent, I would have.
Kate: So what was the other side of the narrative that you moved away from?
Michelle: I’m working on that in a new novel. It’s not going to be connected. Originally, I thought it would be a sequel, but my editor at Simon and Schuster right away said that we needed to change the ending of Becoming Leidah, because they wouldn’t be able to guarantee that they would publish a second novel until they saw how the sales were like for the first one. So that was fine. I knew I could still work with that material, I just had to shift the intention of the main character and make some changes so that the stories are no longer connected.
Kate: I had a really similar experience with my forthcoming picture book. I wrote a prequel piece, but my editor said that they rarely publish sequels or prequels, and if they did it wouldn’t be until after they saw how the first one did. So I did try to write it as a separate story, but it wasn’t picked up, and honestly it never really felt quite right that way. So I have tucked it away for now. Maybe one day it will see the light of day!
Michelle: Yes. In my mind I think I am going to write another book that gives me closure on this story. So, I have this thought that I need to do a prequel. I need to find out how all of this happens? But, who knows? We’ll see!
Above: Michelle’s Norwegian ancestors: her great great grandparents, and her great, great grandmother with her 7 sisters.
3. I remember you once describing the ability to practice multiple art forms as in terms of having different buckets with which to draw from the same river. I still think about it all the time. Is this still how you think about creative work? How does your work as a novelist relate to or diverge from your work as a dancer, a teacher, or a painter? Are they different animals? Do they work different muscles? Serve different purposes? Or do they boil down to different ways of doing the same thing?
Michelle: I feel like my work in each of these mediums all have a very similar sense of intention. By intention I mean—and this is going to sound really airy fairy, but that’s ok! I own it!— the intention is really to make people understand that there are magical properties, magical things in this world that people have forgotten. I think that is part of how I teach as well. Like, sure, OK, I will learn how to teach in a virtual space, I will learn to use technology. But ultimately, that is getting us away from knowledge that every single person, whatever their race or religion, has in their bodies. It’s about embodied reclaiming of stuff that you already know but have forgotten. When I teach dance it is really about getting people back to their breath, to their intuitive channel. I mean, if you look at the work of Martha Graham, that is one of the core concepts. That is at the center of how I teach dance. We have the capacity within us to tap into something higher than us. And that doesn’t mean that I’m professing a certain religious view point, it’s just that I believe that there is something beyond us. And that could be science, just the beauty of this world. I don’t know how we got here. But let’s wake up to that, and not get stuck in our own navels. This intention is important to any images that I work with, whatever the medium. It’s all about waking people up to this possibility.
Kate: Becoming Leidah feels in many ways like the most fully realized version of the same work I watched you create as a choreographer and dancer way back when I was a teenager. Though the plot and the characters are not the same, I could see so many of the same elements at play—motifs of water and blood, a meditation on the relationship between domesticity and freedom, your use of non-linear structures that moved in a spiral. It was like you were saying to me, “Look! This is what I was trying to do all along!”
Michelle: I’ve heard this a lot from people who know me. People who don’t know me, obviously, are just going to read the work as is. For me, it was very similar in terms of how the processes worked. I don’t know how much you remember about the process of creating dance shows with me . . .
Kate: Everything. I remember everything.
Michelle: With the exception of one piece, it never came out chronologically. Things dropped when they dropped, like quilt patches. Our job was to connect the dots, to figure out how these things related to each other. That was very similar to the writing process for this book. It was like a dance with all of these images. And that’s very much how the story started, too. It was just images, and it took me years to figure out what they were and how they connected.
Kate: I know that your work as an educator has a different purpose and a different payoff than the work you do independently as a writer or artist, but as collaborative as the process of creating always was in your class, there was also a sense that you had a vision you were trying to bring to life through us. Part of me did always suspect you must have found it a bit frustrating sometimes, trying to create these big, ambitious works of art using largely untrained high school students as your medium. I say that not to put down those students—I was one of them! I benefited enormously from being part of your creative process despite my very limited skills as a dancer. I always felt like you were always working slightly over my head all the time.
Michelle: I’m so sorry!
Kate: No! I think it was really valuable. When I was in my teacher education program learning about the zone of proximal development, in which you are always trying to pull the student up to the next level of learning by never letting them sit in a sense of mastery, I immediately thought of your teaching. The gift it gave me was that it normalized struggle in creative or academic work. It normalized discomfort. That has allowed me to be able to feel ok swimming in uncertainty, in things that were a little bit beyond what I could fully comprehend in that moment. It took many years, decades even, for me to really understand the value of that skill.
The experience of being in your class was also so helpful to me as a writer in terms of craft. My elementary and high school education offered very little in the way of creative writing instruction. No one really taught me how to write a poem or structure a story. And, turns out, MA programs aren’t really about that, either. So for a long time the only thing I had to fall back on were the principles that you had taught me about the structure and composition of movement. For years I wrote short stories and poems in rondo form, because that's all I knew how to do. And it worked! It got me to a certain point.
Which brings me to . . .
4. In my experience, many writers are either really focused on the language, on crafting exquisite prose or verse, or they are good at thinking in terms of overarching structures—beats and arcs. You seem to be gifted at both! You are so skilled at the level of the line; your language is gorgeous, precise, never obvious or expected. It is equally attentive to the sound of the words and the images they evoke. But it’s your structure that really gets me! You are weaving together multiple point of views and also moving back and forth through time. In unskilled hands, that could be a disaster. But reading this book, I never felt confused about who I was following or where I was in the timeline. AND you were able to do that without it ever feeling heavy-handed or like you were showing off. Each of these moves allowed meaning to unfold in a particular way, so that each revelation had such weight. How did you learn to do this??!!
Michelle: This is where I go [shrug]. I don’t really know. When I submitted it, the whole thing was in present tense. The whole thing! That was a conscious decision on my part, because I wanted everything to feel immediate. Also, that was part of the old Norse cosmology, their conception of time folding like a blanket, with the past, present, and future all as one, all able to affect each other. And then, of course, when I went through the editing process with my editor at Simon and Schuster, Laurie Grassi, who is wonderful, she was pretty insistent that we needed to put those chapters set in the past in the past tense. It was the most tedious, time consuming thing. BUT it was definitely needed. Otherwise it would have been really confusing!
I think it was Anais Nin who said “I can’t swim in shallow water.” That’s me. I can not swim in shallow water. I have to go deep. That’s where that structure comes from. I needed there to be layers, not only in the timeline, but also in the point of view, and also in the cosmology that was an umbrella for the whole thing. There is the reality that people live in, and then there is this whole myth layer, with Odhinn and all the Norse gods. And then there is this in-between space; Maeva is the in-between. She is trying to live on land, but she can’t really survive there. Leidah is the embodiment of all of that in one single little form. (Note from Kate: The exact wording of the Nin quote is: “I must be a mermaid . . . I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.” Pretty apt, no?)
That’s the way I look at reality. I can’t imagine just looking at reality only as it seems right now. To me, there are so many invisible things. We have no clear sense of what they are, but they’re there. I feel them. I intuit them. I actually envy people who can write a book about one reality. It’s so clean. Things are never clean with me.
Actually, I feel like it is just a way of being in the world. I am so happy that’s your feedback—that this structure works for you. Of course, lots of people are giving me the feedback that it doesn’t work. I mean, I didn’t even know that Goodreads existed, but it turns out there are people out there with opinions! That’s been a whole process for me, learning to stay true to my writer's voice while also remembering that there are readers out there that can’t function without a traditional narrative structure, that triangle everybody teaches. Even I teach that when I am talking about narrative in drama. And really, my story does follow that model, but there’s so many layers of stuff going on.
I am learning that some people are close, careful readers who connect the dots, and some people are not. That’s not a judgment. Some people read because they need escape—they want to pick up a book and find a quick thing that entertains them and distracts them. Other people love falling into a poetic world. I’ve always been that reader, so I wrote a book that was the kind of narrative I wanted to read. When I was writing it, when I was structuring it, it didn’t even occur to me to think will this sell?
Kate: And not just will it sell, but also thinking about where will it sell. Where does it sit in the market? There are these overlapping categories that you have to grapple with when writing fiction, particularly fiction aimed at women. There’s this tricky set of divisions between commercial fiction on one hand, literary fiction on the other hand, and upmarket or book club fiction somewhere in between. Then there is this slippery notion of women’s fiction that kind of overlaps with all of these categories, and implies certain characteristics or expectations. Having to decide what your book is, where it fits, because a bookseller is going to have to figure out where to put this feels like a bit of a necessary evil to me. I get why it is helpful, but it also seems limiting.
Michelle: Yes. And as you know, I don’t do that. I was lucky enough to find an editor who just saw the merit in the work. I just keep praying, sending things up to our dance angels, our writing angels, and I just say “let Leidah find her people.” That’s what needs to happen. Let the book swim, just as Leidah is swimming towards her people at the end of the story, those people she had been searching for all along.
Above: My son and I went to Norway and Iceland in 2017, just as I was finishing the first draft of the manuscript. We travelled to places where my Norwegian family lived (as well as north of the Arctic circle to Lofoten). The bone table is from a Viking festival in Lofoten, which helped me to imagine what a 19th century market might look like; the rocks with the seaweed hair definitely inspired some of the shoreline imagery in the book.
5. It can be so difficult to write from a child’s perspective. There are logistical challenges in terms of how you communicate certain information to your reader while being true to what a child would naturally attend to in a given situation, what they would believably notice. Then there's the whole question of voice. I think people either tend to write children as so mature in their outlook or their vocabulary that they don’t ring true, or they go too far the other way, dumbing down the language so far that the character ends up feeling like an adult doing an impersonation of a kid. How did you find Leidah’s voice?
Michelle: Her voice was actually the first that came. I feel like she spoke to me. I think writers and dancers and musicians understand what I mean when I say that. I literally heard her voice in my head, and I just transcribed what she told me to say. I also knew that because she had this specialness about her, because she was an old soul, that she had this precociousness and this child-like sense of wonder that she wasn’t aware of. My son was like that as a little kid, as your kids seem to be. He had an incredible vocabulary, and he wasn’t aware of it until he was around other kids who hadn’t honed their vocabulary to the same extent yet, and then suddenly they realize that they speak in a way that is not necessarily how all kids talk.
Kate: That very much has been our experience, too. In my writing for kids, I often get certain words or phrases pointed out to me by critique partners or people who read my work as being things they don’t believe a child would say or think. Almost always those are words or details that I have taken directly from my own children, or else from memories of myself as a child. I do understand the idea there are things that won’t fly in fiction even if they really happened because they don’t read as believable. I also think, though, there is a point at which we are just underestimating what kids will understand, or what will resonate with them.
Michelle: That is so interesting. It makes me wonder who is policing these boundaries, and whether they have developmental theory behind them. Do they have children!?
Kate: I think it is partly about the idea of gatekeepers, that it is parents, grandparents, teachers, and librarians who buy the books, and they sometimes have strong ideas about what is appropriate. I do think that is changing. The more we move towards allowing more voices from more diverse communities and experiences to be heard, the more we have to rethink our assumptions about who we think child readers are and what they need. Often when people make claims about the need to protect children from certain ideas or subjects, what they are really saying is that they want to protect certain children from certain kinds of stories. I think that there is a growing sense that the role of kids' books should not just be to comfort or entertain but also to reflect the lived experiences of all kinds of kids, and to arm them to understand and navigate a difficult, complex world. And of course to do that in a way that never feels didactic or moralistic.
6. I am a little bit obsessed with other people’s workspaces. Can you tell me a little bit about yours?
Michelle: My space is a half-renovated loft with exposed rafters. There’s a walk out to a balcony, overlooking our maple forest. We didn't even know the room existed—there was no access from inside the house. Outside, it looked like a makeshift trapdoor had been carved out.
When you are out on the deck, it feels like you are in a treehouse. Lots of light (everything is in natural tones— the rest of my house is full of colour, but my studio needed to be a blank canvas to create in; I also paint and draw up there). It's a bit unfinished and rustic, with a huge wall to paint or write on. I tend to do huge maps with plot items on sticky notes, so I can move things around. There's also a book shelf with only the research books that are relevant to whatever I'm writing. It was filled with Norse and Celtic mythology, and now it is slowly being filled with nineteenth century ghost stories, history of artists, writers, architecture, etc.
7. Launching any novel, let alone a debut, during a pandemic comes with very unique challenges. What has been hard or different about this experience? What are you looking forward to doing once this time has passed?
Michelle: So, most of the editing was done. A lot of people at work, when they found out that I had written this book, responded with, “Oh my god! You’ve written a novel! Good for you. I did nothing during the pandemic!” But actually, the novel was already written and it was just the final stages of the last draft that I was working on during the pandemic. You would think that the pandemic would allow all this time to sink into the creating and self reflection, but nope. It was a gift to have more time at the very beginning of the pandemic, when we weren’t even teaching online yet, to really look closely at that last draft.
In terms of writing the next book, even though we are still at home now, I’m struggling to find time and space. I find writing is incredibly satisfying when I’m on a really deep dive, but in order to get to that deep dive, I’ve got to swim through a lot of shallow water. And the problem is that the time I get is shallow water. I need, like, eight uninterrupted hours to really get to the meat of something.
Kate: I talk about this all the time with my writing friends. When the pandemic started, I was working on a middle grade novel, and I had set some really aggressive timelines for myself. I quickly discovered that I could not hold space in my brain for all the moving parts of a novel in this situation. I eventually had to forgive myself for not meeting those self-imposed deadlines and let go of that project for now. Instead, I found myself writing picture books in a very focused way, and even returning to poetry for the first time in a decade, because I can do that kind of work in the small pockets of time I am able to steal throughout the week.
It’s very interesting to me that you immediately interpreted this question as being about writing a novel during a pandemic, as opposed to launching one. I suspect that speaks to the parts being an author that feel natural to you and the parts that don’t. It seems like maybe the publicity side of things is something that’s not super comfy for you yet.
Michelle: All of this is new for me, and publicity is the part that I really don’t get yet. I have spent so many years—on purpose!—being a private person. I was someone who was not on social media. If you had googled my name two years ago, there would be nothing. I have cultivated this hermit existence for myself with purpose and intention. And then I write this book and am told, obviously, that I need to have some kind of presence on social media. So, that’s probably been the biggest struggle of this whole process, balancing my personal need to not be on a screen and not have people pry into my life, and the fact that, of course, I want people to read the book! So I’ve had to figure out how you get a book out there, particularly one that does not fit the mold of a typical best seller, and how you do that as a person who really doesn’t want to be in the spotlight. I’ve been really challenged to try and figure out how to do that in a way that feels honest and has integrity and doesn’t feel like I’m selling my soul.
Kate: I do think that what you are talking about is a part of becoming a mature writer. When you are younger I think it is easy to see a clear divide between being an “ARTIST,” a person who is pure and untainted by the commercial side of this work, and being a sell out. But as you grow, you realize the danger of that kind of thinking is that it can lead you to abdicate responsibility for your own career. At the end of the day, if you are not willing to shout about this book you have written, to stand up and say publicly that you think this book you made is amazing and everyone should spend $20 on it, then who’s going to do that for you? The trick is trying to find a way to do that in a way that still feels like it has integrity, as you said, and is inline with who you are, what you stand for, and how you operate. I keep thinking about how all of the aspects of publicity that would be more natural for someone like you are unfortunately not available during the pandemic—things like running workshops, or visiting book clubs, or doing signings in indie bookstores. Those are absent right now. But they’ll come back.
Michelle: Right. Right.
Kate: I’ve been lucky, because picture books have such a long lead time. Before the pandemic, the idea of having to wait three years for my book to come out felt torturous, but it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Not only do I not have to launch during the pandemic, but I have had the gift of all this time to slowly build a presence in this community and an online presence that feels authentic and meaningful to me. A big part of that has been this blog, these conversations. In a lot of ways it seems like an odd choice—most people are moving away from blogs! And, honestly, each one of these posts takes so much time and effort to create. I think it’s worth it, though, because these conversations are meaningful to me, and they’re fun! Doing long form deep-dives with people I find interesting is a much more natural way for me to connect with people than Twitter, which I am terrible at. And they allow me to offer something that might (I hope!) be of some value to others in exchange for the sense of community and the help they offer me. It allows the whole process to feel more reciprocal and less gross. But it’s hard!
Michelle: It’s totally hard! And I don’t know what it would be like any other time. My struggle right now is to figure out how to get the book noticed by people who would feel like this is actually an interesting read that appeals to them. How to connect with readers for whom this story will have resonance.
I did do an interview with In the Hills magazine, which was lovely! They sent a young reporter who was on her way to Oxford to study Literature. She interviewed me at my house (in a Covid-safe way!), and it was lovely! We spent two and a half hours just chatting, talking about books and all sorts of things. That kind of interaction feels much more me.
I also knew I had to be on Instagram, so I said to myself, “I’ll try this,” and I find that much easier than Twitter, because I am a very visual person. When I share things about my life, I’d rather not necessarily share big things, although I have recently been sharing a little bit about my mom who has dementia. I think because that’s so present in me --it’s the thing that we’re dealing with-- I feel ok sharing that. It’s my throw into the ring of saying, “this is me, and this is me being vulnerable. And this is what I’m dealing with.”
Kate: There are a couple of other writer’s I think you should be following, because I think they have a lot to offer around all this stuff. One is Kerry Clare, who is a Toronto-based author. Her most recent book, Waiting for a Start to Fall was fantastic, but she also has a really strong online presence, particularly on Instagram, and a phenomenal blog called Pickle Me This. Her work is very different from yours, but she is a great model to look for how to be active online in a way that feels considered and purposeful.
Another voice I think you would appreciate is the British author and BookTuber Jen Campbell. I think you would love her fiction and poetry--she is really big on myth and fairytale and magic. She also offers so much insight and commentary around the representation of disabilities in literature which I have found so helpful. AND the work she reviews is so fantastic--she is a real champion of literary and experimental work. Honestly, she is one of those people who produces so much work and so much content I wonder if she ever sleeps.
8. What should we all be reading, watching, and listening to this summer?
Michelle: Oh, my god. That’s a lot! I have about 20 books on the go right now. I don’t know how anyone can find time to write, and do the deep dives, and read everything. Right now I’m researching for my second book, and also trying to keep up with a few current things. I just started Finding the Mother Tree. I’m also reading Braiding Sweetgrass and love it. And obviously right now we’re so focused, rightly so, on equity and becoming antiracist, so there are tons of books that I have or am reading about that, but the best one so far is We Want to Do More Than Survive: How to Be an Abolitionist Teacher by Bettina Love. I read it and went, “wow!” Now it’s circulating around the members of my department. It’s a must read! I just read The Memory Collectors, which is the debut novel by an author from Vancouver. That was cool. There’s just so much on my shelf right now!
I have been watching pretty much everything I can get my hands on about time loops and crazy dives into ancient knowledge. Everything has subtitles! Also the show Dark on Netflix. That’s a really interesting one! It’s German, subtitled, obviously! Another one on Netflix called The Gift. My taste is pretty unusual, though! I am not the person to ask if you are looking for mainstream hits!
Kate: It seems like one weird side benefit of the pandemic has been that there’s so much more non-English content being featured on Netflix. I think it is just because not enough domestic content has been able to be created. There is so much Scandinavian stuff!
Michelle: Oh, yeah! Tons. Have you watched Home for Christmas?
Kate: Yes!
Michelle: I loved it!
Kate: If I am being honest, I watch much less dark or challenging content than I used to, because I am only able to watch TV or movies after the kids are finally asleep, when I am exhausted and just want to collapse and be comforted.
Michelle: Right.
Kate: I am much more likely to read challenging books than I am to watch upsetting or difficult things. One show I have really loved during the pandemic is Schitt’s Creek. I actually had trouble emotionally when we finished.
Michelle: Oh, yeah! I can’t believe I didn’t say that! That’s our number one, for sure!
Kate: One of the reasons that it hit me so hard, I think, was that it was partially shot in Orangeville where we grew up. It really highlighted for me the astounding gap between, not only the actual lack of inclusiveness when I was in high school, but what was even possible to imagine, and what they are able to believably evoke in that show. The jump is huge. Gigantic! Even though one could argue it is still aspirational in some ways, that it views the experience of being gay in a small town in Ontario in 2021 through rose-coloured glasses to some extent, it shows people what is possible. That it has been so embraced gives me so much hope and reminds me that real change is sometimes so much closer than we can imagine.
Michelle: I watched it with my son when he was, like, eleven. And I loved the show for that, because it presented this as normal within the world he creates. I’ve heard Dan Levy talk about that, about how we need more stories that actually show love and joy, and not the dark side of what probably would have happened to his character—bullying, or worse—because that’s what we need to see and absorb so can say “Of course this is possible!”
Kate: And I do think it is important that we understand that those experiences of bullying are part of that character’s past. That’s alluded to and woven into the narrative, but it is not the focus of the plot. It acknowledges trauma without fetishizing it.
Michelle: And it's not heavy handed. I think we’ve already seen it all the way through twice. Sometimes my son will say, “I just need to laugh. Let’s just watch an episode.”
The other two sitcoms that I love are Derry Girls . . .
Kate: Yes!
Michelle: And Moone Boy.
Kate: I don’t know that one. Adding it to my TBW list!
Kate: If you like Derry Girls, you should read Heather Smith. She writes brilliant Middle Grade and YA novels. Her latest, Barrie Squires Full Tilt has a real Derry Girls vibe.
Kate: And I want to know what you're listening to. I am so obsessed with podcasts that I sometimes forget to listen to music these days.
Michelle: My go-to is always Max Richter, who is a German composer who does a lot of soundtracks for movies and TV. There is just something about his work--his older stuff particularly. There is another composer I love from Amsterdam, Joep Beving. I just kind of stumbled upon him, and I am so loving his stuff. This is all instrumental, which is what I find that I need to listen to, especially when I’m writing. If I want something with lyrics, I love Daughter. I have also been listening to some Norwegian and Icelandic artists, so Aurora. I just love her--she is just full of pixie dust, and has some great stuff out there. And I’m still listening to a lot of stuff that’s old, a lot of Funk and R&B, a lot of Nina Simone, stuff like that.
9. What objects or rituals do you need in order to write?
Michelle: Hmm.... I like to have a clean space before I do anything creative, so cleaning is definitely a part of my rituals. I also need my journals / notes within arms reach, as well as some research books (sometimes I just like to read a few pages of historical info to sink me back into the writing). But the most necessary item is a huge mug of hot water and lemon.
Oh, and one last ritual: hiking with my son and two dogs (sometimes we also bounce on the trampoline). And then, we write. My son is 13 and a really good writer / musician / artist— his nudging always gets me motivated.
10. Alright. The last question. If you could throw a fantasy dinner party with any ten people, who would you invite, what would be on the menu, and what would you listen to?
Michelle: Ten! Usually people say, like, three. That’s a tough question Ms. Jenks.
Kate: Yup.
Michelle: Well, of course the Brontes. Martha Graham of course. Maybe Pina Bausch? That’s four. I’m realizing that it’s all women so far, but it probably would be all women. Probably a visual artist, Frida Kahlo possibly, or someone like Kiki Smith. I have so many, I wouldn’t know how to narrow it down! I think I would invite my mom, just because she would upend the whole thing. There would be all this intellectual, creative sharing and she would just start speaking in gibberish. We need a little bit of that. Plus, she’s my mom and I love her. My son would have to be there for sure. He’s like my partner in crime in so many ways. Maybe Joan of Arc? And one of my great, great grandmothers, too. Just ‘cause I want some information. Like, I really need to know some stuff!
Kate: And what would you eat?
Michelle: A variety of finger foods, because we would be so into the conversation that we couldn’t manage a whole meal. Maybe some sushi, and even some Victorian finger foods, like little sandwiches. There are strawberries on the table, definitely dark chocolate. Always dark chocolate.
