Dear Reader,
Summer has arrived and passed halfway with rolling heatwaves, well-earned languor, a rising wordcount on my third manuscript, the expected stupor accompanying synchronous online classes, and loneliness.
More and more it seems that Vancouver is a lonely place to live, as might be the case with every beautiful city. The prices of rent and gas and groceries and parking permits go up while the mountains remain unaccommodating, gorgeous, and distant. Enough! I promised myself I wouldn’t be dramatic. It’s just that my friends keep getting sucked back into the vortex of Ontario and leaving little pockets of absence behind them. This year I have the feeling that summer should be avoided at all costs and we should all agree to live in autumn forever. It’s nice, I’ll admit, to throw on that same T-shirt and shorts every morning without the fuss of sweaters and jackets and socks and boots and umbrellas. But something in me actually likes the rush and ritual of heading out into the day. I have to remember that there are fewer wet dog footprints to wipe up at the back door. The patio plants have managed to stay upright and I’ve been eating kale and scallions from the garden. The beach is a pleasant place to visit. I’ll find my little joys where they inevitably exist.
And I won’t complain too much about loneliness. I’ve dealt with the opposite for too long to put up much of a stink. In June, when the publisher of my novel, Tear, notified me that Rakuten Kobo wanted to chat with all shortlisted authors of their Emerging Writer Prize, with the central interview question being about the author’s experience of loneliness while writing their first novel, I was surprised that there could be any discussion on the topic.
“Loneliness!” I thought. “What a luxury!” I had moved across the country, spent an absurd number of years collecting grad school degrees, and scraped my way out of a long-term relationship in order to be left just a little more alone. It seemed an odd question to ask, considering the jobs I had to work to keep myself afloat while going to school and writing Tear. Considering everything—considering the size of my Tokyo apartment, and the top-speed sprint of my life at that time, and the customers asking for their specialized coffee orders, and the pandemic, and the lockdown, and the roommates stuffed into the houses where I lived, first in Ontario and then British Columbia—considering everything, what a strange question to ask! My life while writing Tear wasn’t lonely, it was crowded and hazardous; there was hardly enough space to breathe.
Of course, with all my indignation about not being lonely, I missed the cues that could have tipped me off to the fact that this wasn’t just an interview for better publicity, as the Kobo folks had claimed. We were seven minutes or so into the recording when Kobo CEO Michael Tamblyn interrupted his own questions to tell me I had won the prize, and that the whole thing had been a ruse to capture my reaction on video. They weren’t interviewing all of the shortlisted authors, just me and the other winners. And—thank goodness—they didn’t really need a full answer to their question about loneliness.
Some things that have cut the (blessed) loneliness during my manuscript writing this summer:
Gardening in my patio planter boxes, running, eating an ungodly amount of Earnest Ice Cream, reading good books (more on this below), walking with my partner by the Seawall, camping, watching old slasher films and listening to podcast episodes of The Evolution of Horror, playing detective to discover what is eating my carrots in the night, falling in step with a steady march of library school assignments—most often banal but most often bearable, staring at art, navigating the usual financial anxieties, and corresponding with my editor from Norton as we unearthed the peculiar differences between American and Canadian lingo—like “toonies” for two-dollar coins, and “bunkies” for small cabins in Ontario cottage country.
Also, napping.
With love,
E
Writing Updates:
My book, Tear (Invisible Publishing), won the 2023 Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for literary fiction.
Here’s the interview with CEO Michael Tamblyn during which I was told I had won, and here’s the video explaining the prize and capturing the winners’ reactions.
I spoke with CBC Radio London’s Rebecca Zandbergen about Tear, life as a writer, and the role that the London, ON setting plays in my first novel. Here’s a recording of the interview.
Tear is officially available in braille through interlibrary loan across Canada! A physical copy of the braille book can be requested through your local public library.
My short story, “Rewind,” was published in the horror anthology, What Draws Us Near (Little Ghost Books, ed. by Keith Cadieux and Adam Petrash), alongside stories by such stellar authors as Seyward Goodhand and Suzette Mayr. The book can be purchased online or in person from Little Ghost Books in Toronto.
My next book, Cicada Summer, a surrealist collision of the novel and short story genres, will be published by W. W. Norton & Co. in Summer, 2024.
What I’ve Been Reading (and Loving):
Our Wives Under the Sea (2022), a novel by Julia Armfield
Mrs. Caliban (1982), a novella by Rachel Ingalls
The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture (2022), a nonfiction book by Gabor Maté (with Daniel Maté)
What I’ve Been Watching (and Loving):
The Banshees of Inisherin (2022), a film directed by Martin McDonagh
Peeping Tom (1960), a film directed by Michael Powell
Frances, Ha (2012), a film directed by Noah Baumbach