Why I Wrote This Book: Issue #36 — September Extended Edition!

Featuring Kim Fahner, Suzy Krause, Tasneem Jamal, Ricky Lima, Stacey Bartlett, and David O’Meara

Anyone who works in books will tell you they love to hate the month of September. This is the busy season—the fall festivals are in full swing. It’s the time to be out there buying books to cozy up with as the weather (hopefully) cools!

Here’s an extended Why I Wrote This Book full with new titles out this month. The bookstores, libraries, book fairs and festivals are open! Go get your copy! 🏃🏃🏃🏃

Kim Fahner, author of The Donoghue Girl (Latitude 46 Publishing, September 2024)

I wrote The Donoghue Girl because of a compelling family photograph, and because of a story that one of my great-aunts told me—a family story that only some people in the family seemed to know about, while others did not. The photo is a 1930s black and white one that was taken on the edge of a lake in Northern Ontario, in amidst a collection of birch and pine trees, and in a landscape that is scattered through with rocks. There is a handsome, well-dressed man who reclines on a tartan picnic blanket, his face partially obscured by a leafy tree branch, while my grandmother and my great-aunt sit next to—and opposite—him. When I first saw it, I thought it was from a time when my grandparents were courting. Perhaps my great-aunt had been a chaperone of sorts. 

Years after I first saw the photo, an elderly great-aunt—one of my grandmother’s sisters—had mentioned that my grandfather had courted my great aunt, Norah, before marrying her sister, Alice. I was shocked. When I asked other people in the family about the story, some knew, while others didn’t. Some relatives just shook their heads and scoffed at me, thinking maybe I’d made it up. 

Writing this novel let me take the skeleton of the story and flesh it out, as it were. I created a fictionalized Irish Catholic family, but put them in the real town where my great-grandparents had lived and worked—a mining town that used to sit on the outskirts of Sudbury. There are points in the story that are based on facts—the love triangle itself, the settings, the shift to Finland during the Winter War, the importance of mining and commerce to my maternal family’s history, and the two houses on Wembley Drive and Kingsmount Boulevard. Some of the character names come from my family tree, but the actual characters are made up and imagined. 

Mostly, I wanted to explore the story of Lizzie. Why was she so drawn to Michael Power? He was charismatic and attractive, and a bit of a womanizer, so she should really have run in the other direction. And what of Ann, her sister, the one who was left behind, left to watch everything happen from the sidelines? I imagined Lizzie was a modern kind of woman stuck in a time that didn’t allow women great agency in terms of marriage or career choice. Sometimes the only way out of an oppressive family in the 1930s was to marry—but you could be leaping from the frying pan and into a fire without knowing it. The Donoghue Girl is Lizzie’s story more than anyone else’s, and it’s her spitfire soul and tenacity that makes me love her as a character. After all this time with her in my head, ten years or so, it’s hard to believe other people will get to know her now, too.

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Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. She has published two chapbooks, You Must Imagine the Cold Here (Scrivener, 1997) and Fault Lines and Shatter Cones (Emergency Flash Mob Press, 2023), as well as five full books of poetry, including: braille on water (Penumbra Press, 2001), The Narcoleptic Madonna (Penumbra Press, 2012), Some Other Sky (Black Moss Press, 2017), These Wings (Pedlar Press, 2019), and Emptying the Ocean (Frontenac House, 2022). Kim is the First Vice-Chair of The Writers’ Union of Canada (2023-25), a full member of the League of Canadian Poets, and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. She was Poet Laureate for the City of Greater Sudbury from 2016-18.

Suzy Krause, author of I Think We’ve Been Here Before (Radiant Press, September 2024)

I Think We’ve Been Here Before was born out of a recurring dream in which the world was ending. It was an objectively terrifying one: me, standing on a hill with all of the people I love, watching a burning ball, an asteroid or something, come straight at us, knowing it was the absolute end of everything. But I wasn’t scared. Actually, I loved that dream. I’d always wake up feeling calm and comforted, wishing I could climb back into it. I wondered if I could recreate that feeling in a book. Cozy terror.

A friend told me that people often have dreams about the end of the world when, in real life, they’re leaving something behind, moving on to something new. She said dreams can be a person’s brain trying to make sense of stuff that’s weird or hard or unprecedented. This seemed accurate to me—a lot of big things in my life were changing at the time. And it made sense to me that these dreams might be my subconscious working through these changes. Maybe I was trying to comfort and reassure myself. Maybe, underneath all of the uncertainty and fear, I knew that the changes were good.

All of this got me thinking about that phrase, “the end of the world,” and how often in life it really does feel like the world is ending: we change our mind about something big, we move to a new job or a new place, an important relationship shifts or ends. “The end of the world” has such a negative connotation—but it’s often so necessary and even beautiful, for a thing to end, even a good thing. We say, “Calm down, it’s not the end of the world.” Well, so what if it is? Maybe what comes next will be better and we’ll wish we’d gotten there sooner. So I wrote this book to see if I even could, first of all, but also to explore questions about living and dying, questions like, what do art and love and family mean when the world is ending? Is it possible to feel okay about your impending destruction? And, while we’re here, what is up with quantum entanglement and déjà vu? I don’t know that this book actually answers any of these questions, but I’d like to think that asking is more important than answering anyway.

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Suzy Krause is the bestselling author of  Sorry I Missed You and  Valencia and Valentine. She grew up on a little farm in rural Saskatchewan and now lives in Regina, where she writes novels inspired by crappy jobs, creepy houses, personal metaphorical apocalypses, and favourite songs. Her work has been translated into Russian and Estonian. Suzy lives in Regina, Saskatchewan.

Tasneem Jamal, author of I Never Said That I Was Brave (House of Anansi Press, September 2024)

I noticed in 2018 that whenever I sat down to write, scenes from my childhood in Kitchener in the late 1970s and early 1980s were appearing to me. These scenes contained visual images as well as tastes and sounds (the foods I ate and the music I listened to in those days). With minimal editorializing I wrote down what I felt and heard and saw and tasted. After about 18 months of doing this—during the few hours a week I could devote to my fiction—I noticed recurring themes and characters. One of the themes that emerged was instability—instability of landscape, memory and even reality. I pulled the scenes together into a narrative. From there I played around with some longtime personal obsessions that tied into this instability (namely: quantum physics and infidelity) and a book took shape. 

It was, for me, a surprisingly organic process, using both conscious and unconscious mental processes.

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TASNEEM JAMAL was born in Mbarara, Uganda, and immigrated to Canada in 1975. Her debut novel Where the Air Is Sweet was published to critical acclaim in 2014. That same year she was named one of 12 rising CanLit stars on CBC’s annual list of Writers to Watch. Her writing has appeared in Chatelaine, Saturday Night magazine, and the Literary Review of Canada. She is the writing coach of The X Page Storytelling Workshop and an editor at The New Quarterly literary magazine. She lives in Kitchener.

Ricky Lima, author of Undergrowth (Top Shelf Productions, September 2024)

Undergrowth is an exploration of grief and trauma through the lens of cool robot battles. I was looking for a way to find answers for myself and I found that writing speculative fiction was the best way to do it. I originally didn’t set out to explore those themes, I mainly wanted to create a story that had a lot of action in it, but the Mech genre lends itself well to themes of grief. I think it’s the copious amounts of destruction. When we want to explore grief oftentimes we want to also destroy everything, or at least have everything disappear. What better way to make that happen than with giant organic mech’s?

I also wanted to write this book as a form of escape for people. I appreciate literature that doesn’t take itself too seriously and gives the reader an opportunity to experience something else outside of themselves. The sneaky bit is that sometimes people learn about themselves even through this escapism. That’s what I strive for in my writing, hiding the medicine in the cheese… you know? like what you try and sneak medicine to your dog. 

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Ricky Lima is a writer and educator from Brampton, Ontario. He enjoys writing interesting stories and helping people. Sometimes those two things are the same.

Stacey Bartlett, author of Free Sings the Sea (Monarch Educational Services, September 2024)

Free Sings the Sea is a story of faith, family, and freedom. There are few Young Adult novels with domestic violence as a theme and many young people experiencing its devastating effects on their mental health and their families. This book was written to fill that gap, and to offer hope for change and a brighter future to struggling young adults within the pages of a thrilling story and a sweet romance.

The tag line on the cover of Free Sings the Sea reads: What would you do for the ones you love? I pray readers will ponder this question and then proceed with courage and compassion to make positive changes in their own lives and help others do the same.

I have reached for a book all my life when I need direction, courage, or simply to step away from this world and into another one. I hope my novel will provide comfort for readers someday and come into their lives just when they need it the most!

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Stacey is a writer living in the beautiful mountains of Western North Carolina. Two of her novels will be published in September 2024 and February 2025 with Monarch Educational Services, and her work appears in the eleventh edition (2024) of County Lines Literary Journal. Her story COUNT ON THE MOUNTAINS was published in the spring 2024 issue of Reckon Review.

David O’Meara, author of Chandelier (Nightwood Editions, September 2024)

There are points in everyone’s life where events take over and it’s all one can do to control the mayhem. In the midst of the personal spot fires and explosions, you are naturally looking for some clear sky and open ground. Attendant on the crisis, when it happens, are moments of pain, confusion, guilt, anger, contradiction, clarity, repression and revelation. I’ve lived through this and had friends live through this. Chandelier is a fictional response to these crises.

Plotwise, Hugo is travelling to Barcelona to confront a rival architect at a conference. Sarah, a former real estate agent, once married to Hugo, is driving up to Gatineau to sell a family cottage after losing her life savings in a Ponzi scheme. Meanwhile, their daughter Georgia, depressed and overwhelmed, is teaching in South Korea. The tensions of the past converge in the present. I wanted to explore who they are and how they react to their ongoing challenges in all their raw emotion and generosity. Plotwise, the story is fiction. But the human response is real. The characters continually surprised me with their stupidity and insight. I hope the sentences are humorous, dramatic, eloquent, annoying, unexpected, and sometimes beautiful.

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David O’Meara is the award-winning author of five collections of poetry, most recently Masses On Radar (Coach House Books). His books have been shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award, the ReLit Award, the Trillium Book Award and the K.M. Hunter Award, and have won the Archibald Lampman Award four times. His poetry has been nominated for a National Magazine Award, quoted in a Tragically Hip song and used as libretto for a pastoral cantata for unaccompanied chorus, written by composer Scott Tresham. He is the director of the Plan 99 Reading Series and he was the founding Artistic Director for the VERSeFest Poetry Festival. He lives in Ottawa.