Why I Wrote This Book: Issue #26

Featuring Ellen Chang-Richardson, Suzanne Craig-Whytock, Elliott Gish, and Lorri Neilsen Glenn

Why do your favourite Canadian authors write the books they write? Let’s find out in this exclusive feature here at The Miramichi Reader.


Ellen Chang-Richardson, author of Blood Belies (Wolsak & Wynn, April 2024)

In May 2020, I fell down a research rabbit hole. It was Asian Heritage Month and, as anti-Asian sentiments swirled around me due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was curious. What was the history of Asian Canadians? Why did officials designate the month of May as our heritage month? Where did our stories begin and how did we get to where we are today? Canada for me, like for many, had always been the golden standard of progressive acceptance. Yet Canada remains the only place in the world I have ever been spit on for simply existing in my own skin.

On the other side of the same coin, Asian communities are no strangers to racism and xenophobia. My own familial history is rife with it and, growing up, my brother and I were taught that certain global majorities were inferior to us because of the degree of melanin in their skin. It has taken years of breaking down these stereotypes, decolonizing our own minds, to relearn what it means to be human.

After clicking around Wikipedia, Canada.ca, and pages upon pages of The Canadian Encyclopedia, I stumbled across a 1902 Privy Council publication: Report of the Royal Commission on Chinese and Japanese Immigration. Four hundred and forty-two pages long, this document is bile inducing and heartbreaking at the same time. It is a four hundred and forty-two page explanation as to why this country — a country built on broken promises and stolen land — should restrict immigration on the basis of racism and xenophobia.

And that is why I wrote this book. There are many Canadians who either do not understand, or choose to ignore, the racist realities of this place we inhabit. It is important to be aware; to remember and to understand our past; to critically examine our present; and to try our best to be better than who we were taught and brought up to be.

We are currently on the cusp of an alt-right populist upheaval. We need to stand against the surge so that we have a hand in shaping a future we’re proud to be a part of. It is my hope that this book, these poems, shine a light on at least one aspect of that multi-faceted battle, encouraging its readers to action.

Ellen Chang-Richardson is an award-winning poet of Taiwanese and Chinese Cambodian descent whose multi-genre writing has appeared in AugurThe FiddleheadGrainPlenitudeWatch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate CrisisThe Spirits Have Nothing to Do with Us: New Chinese Canadian Fiction and others. The co-founder of Riverbed Reading Series, they are a member of Room’s editorial collective, long con magazine’s editorial board and the creative poetry collective VII. They are represented by Tasneem Motala at the Rights Factory and currently live on the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Nation (Ottawa, Canada).


Suzanne Craig-Whytock, Author of Charybdis (JC Studio Press, March 2024)

The inspiration for Charybdis, a dual timeline novel involving a graduate student in Literature (Greta Randall) who is researching the mysterious life of a reclusive Victorian poet (Louisa Duberger), came from two sources.

First, I collect antiques, and I had purchased a box of old photos to frame for a display. Inside, there were hundreds of photographs, many from the late 1800s/early 1900s. One of them was a portrait of two children, presumably a brother and sister. She looked vulnerable, frightened even, and he looked sly (you can see the actual photo at the end of the novel). I began to wonder about their story, their relationship, and it turned into a flash fiction piece called “Charybdis,” which appeared in my first short story collection Feasting Upon The Bones. I’d always thought about turning it into a longer story and that’s where my aunt came in.

My Aunt Margaret was the second source of inspiration for the story, or at least her poetry was. I knew that I wanted to write about the mystery of a Victorian poet, but I’m not really a poet myself, let alone someone who can write in a style that might be considered Victorian. But one day, my aunt shared her own poetry with me (I had no idea that she’d written so prolifically) and they were exactly right for the book — some were cheerful and upbeat, some were dark and tragic, but they all had the right tone and style. She graciously gave me permission to use a few of them, so I built the novel around them. The result is something that I’m extremely proud of — I love literary thrillers with a twist, and I hope other people enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!

Suzanne Craig-Whytock is the author of four novels: Smile (2017), The Dome (English version, 2019; international Arabic translation, 2022), The Seventh Devil (2021), and The Devil You Know, all published by Bookland Press. She is also the author of two short story collections: Feasting Upon The Bones (2021) and At The End Of It All (2023), both published by Potter’s Grove Press. Her new novel Charybdis will be released in Spring 2024. Suzanne is also the editor-in-chief of DarkWinter Literary Magazine, an Ontario, Canada-based online publication featuring short fiction and poetry, as well as the founder of DarkWinter Press. What Any Normal Person Would Do is her first creative non-fiction publication.


Elliott Gish, author of Grey Dog (ECW Press, April 2024)

When I was eleven years old, I was in love with the past, obsessed with butter churns, covered wagons, Anne of Green Gables and Little House on the Prairie. I loved the past so much that I attended summer camp at King’s Landing, a “living museum” where children just as cool as me learned how to milk cows and hook rugs. Photographs exist of my chubby, freckled pre-teen self in a bonnet and apron, gamely attempting to square dance.

It was King’s Landing that I saw when I began to write about the fictional town of Lowry Bridge in Grey Dog, my debut novel. My protagonist, Ada Byrd, starts as a prim and proper Victorian spinster. As the narrative moves, she unravels, plagued by a strange creature in the woods that sends her gruesome messages. I turned the familiar setting of the camp I went to as a child into a place that was eerie and unknowable. I turned my all-consuming childhood obsession
with calico dresses and one-room schoolhouses into something horrifying.

I wrote this book because it made sense to both my eleven-year-old self, whose grasp of
history stopped at log cabins and wagon rides, and my adult self, who has a richer, more
complicated understanding of the past. I wrote it because I wanted to explore themes of trauma,
queerness, repression, and liberation through the lens of a favourite era. Most of all, I wrote it
because it is the kind of book that I have always longed to read.

Elliott Gish is a writer and librarian from Halifax, where she lives with her partner. A graduate of Simon Fraser University’s Writer’s Studio, Gish’s fiction has appeared in many journals, including the New Quarterly, the Baltimore Review, and the Dalhousie Review, and was nominated for a 2022 Pushcart Prize.


Lorri Neilsen Glenn, author of The Old Moon in Her Arms (Nimbus, April 2024)

I am grateful to be old. Yet when I leaf through the birthday cards on the drugstore rack, I wince. Jokes about hearing loss, failing memory or fogey sex. Firefighters hosing down a blaze of candles. At my age, it’s like looking at a huge photo of everyone I’ve known in which people begin to disappear one by one by one. Poof. Poof. Gone. My aunt Kay lived until she was 106, by the time she was 100 she had no peers left.

I wrote The Old Moon in Her Arms: Women I Have Known and Been to acknowledge all those I call kin — foremothers, friends, family, landscapes and seascapes I carry with me as I age. People without whom I would never have made it to now. The Cree concept of wahkohtowin speaks to our interconnectedness with one another and with the earth; we are responsible for one another. Each of us experiences joys, losses, turning points and tragedies that have enriched our lives, teaching us what matters. In the 100-plus short prose pieces in The Old Moon in her Arms I look back on what I’ve learned and look forward to what’s ahead. What lessons do I bring with me into my final years?

Lorri Neilsen Glenn‘s most recent book is Following the River: Traces of Red River Women (Wolsak and Wynn), an award-winning work about her Ininiwak and Métis grandmothers and their contemporaries. Lorri is the author and contributing editor of fourteen titles of nonfiction and poetry, Halifax’s first Métis Poet Laureate, and Professor Emerita at Mount Saint Vincent University. An award-winning teacher and researcher, Lorri has served on juries for the Canada Council, CBC literary awards and numerous provincial and national book prizes. Neilsen Glenn’s poetry has been adapted several times for libretti and her essays and poems appear in numerous anthologies and literary journals. She was a recipient of Halifax’s Women of Excellence award, has had appointments as Writer in Residence across Canada and served as President of the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia. Lorri has mentored writers across Canada and in Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, Greece, and Chile. She divides her time between Halifax and Rose Bay, Nova Scotia.