Our guest this week is Susan Wadds (What the Living Do, Regal House Publishing, March 2024). Susan describes her biggest writing challenge as taking all the disparate pieces of her story and organizing/structuring them into a coherent whole and shares the various techniques she’s tried (including an atelier in France!). Later we delve into how cultivating dream agents can pay off and the one thing that’s most surprised her about the audience for her debut.

Resources mentioned in this interview: Amherst Writers & Artists

Winner of the 2024 Canadian Book Club Award for her debut novel and the 2016 Writer's Union of Canada's Prose Contest, Susan Wadds' work has appeared in various publications, including carteblance, The Blood Pudding, Room, and Waterwheel Review. A graduate of the Humber School for Writers and a proud member of The Writers Union of Canada and The Canadian Authors Association, Susan is a certified Amherst Writers and Artists (AWA) workshop facilitator. She grew up in Toronto, Montreal, and London Ontario, and has lived in British Columbia, Oregon, India, France, and Italy. She's sort of settled down and currently lives on a quiet river in traditional Anishinaabe territory with an odd assortment of human and cats.

To learn more about Susan, click here.

This week we welcome Jann Everard (Blue Runaways, Stonehewer Books, March 2024) to the podcast. In a switch-up to our regular fare of novelists, Jann’s women’s fiction debut is a collection of twelve short stories instead and we spend time talking about how one goes about first picking the selections (including looking at themes and cohesion), then ordering them for flow and pace, and finally the challenge of getting a collection published in today’s market. If you’ve ever wondered about writing short fiction, this episode will give you a glimpse behind the scenes of an alternative marketplace for your creative ideas.

Jann Everard is a Canadian author who began writing later in life and published her first work at age 45 in Canada’s national newspaper The Globe and Mail. She went on to become an award-winning writer whose stories have been published in Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Iceland. Born in Halifax, Canada, Jann settled in Toronto, where she worked in health administration and raised two sons. A life-long traveler and outdoorswoman, she now makes her home on British Columbia’s Vancouver Island, hiking, kayaking, writing, and being inspired by nature. Blue Runaways is a Next Generation Indie Book Award Finalist and received an Honourary Mention from the Sunshine Coast Writers and Editors Society Book Awards for British Columbia Authors.

To learn more about Jann, click here.

Our guest this week is Melissa Bacon (Through Her Lens, Atmosphere Press, April 2024). What if you aren’t setting out to build a career as an author but instead have one fascinating book you’re dying to write? Where most of the writers on the pod hope to write more books, Melissa, a fine art photographer and statistician, took 10 years to research and write her historical novel set in Britain during WWII, and isn’t all that sure she wants to do it again. And that’s okay in our book. Meanwhile, she loves the feeling of holding a book with her byline in her hands and is excited about bringing this untold story of women analysts and the contribution they made to the Allied victory to the world.

Melissa Clark Bacon was raised and stayed in Little Rock, Arkansas. She writes stories and makes photographs using historic and alternative printing processes. Her short story, The Handkerchief, where her character Millie first appears, won Best in Show Adult Fiction Short Story at the Grand Prairie Festival of the Arts. Her current creative work focuses on revealing unnoticed women from the past through captivating stories and photographs that aspire to elevate their contributions and offer them up as role models to women today.

To learn more about Melissa, click here.