Today Tricia chats with Alicia Elliott, writer and editor, about her "deliciously dark and disturbing" stories, how identity is not a hard-and-fast concept, how to seprate politics and art, her own personal story of becoming a writer, and more.

Show Notes

• Do we need to feel uncomfortable when writing? When reading?
• What is considered correct, normal, comfortable? What happens when you only write about and with these boundaries?
• What are we casting out, especially in language? 
• What is failure for Alicia, and how did it shape her as a writer today?
• How did Alicia deal with rejection?
• What's behind the curtain?

Book and Author References

And Then She Fell by Alicia Elliott
A Mind Spread Out On the Ground by Alicia Elliott
Tanya Talaga, journalist and author
The Wizard of Oz, 1939 film
Episode 5 of this podcast, featuring Adrian Michael Kelly

About Alicia Elliott

Alicia Elliott is a Mohawk writer and editor living in Brantford, Ontario. She has written for The Globe and Mail, CBC, Hazlitt and many others. She's had numerous essays nominated for National Magazine Awards, winning Gold in 2017 and an honorable mention in 2020. Her short fiction was selected for Best American Short Stories 2018 (by Roxane Gay), Best Canadian Stories 2018 and Journey Prize Stories 30. Alicia was chosen by Tanya Talaga as the 2018 recipient of the RBC Taylor Emerging Writer Award. Her first book, A Mind Spread Out On The Ground, was a national bestseller in Canada. It was also nominated for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction and won the Forest of Reading Evergreen Award.

Alicia's next book, And Then She Fell, is out now!

Show Transcript

A complete transcript of this episode will be available soon.

Acknowledgement

This episode was recorded and produced on the traditional homeland of the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and the Huron-Wendat First Nations.

Today Aara chats with Adrian Michael Kelly, author and writing coach, about growing up in northern Ontario, class, identity, the power and meaning of failure, his upcoming memoir, and more.

Show Notes

• How small communities and the working class informed Adrian's writing
• The importance of class in our society
• How Adrian learned to write authentically by embracing the reality of his own perceptions
• Can we imagine ourselves "into the cells of other people"?
• Is writing an escape from personality or identity?
• The involuntary urge to write, and how one can still block it
• How to deal with writer's block and failure
• Adrian's upcoming memoir
• How can a writing life involve meaningful community, self-care, mature commitment to spirituality?

Book and Author References

Episode 4 of the KWF Podcast featuring Jessica Johns
Down Sterling Road by Adrian Michael Kelly
The Ambassador of What: Stories by Adrian Michael Kelly
TS Eliot, 20th century American writer
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

About Adrian Michael Kelly

Adrian Michael Kelly is a writer of short fiction, fiction, and essayist as well as a writing coach. He is the author of the novel Down Sterling Road. His short fiction has appeared in three compilations of Best Canadian Stories and in the Journey Prize Anthology, and his essays and journalism have appeared in The Globe & Mail, the Calgary Herald, CNQ: Canadian Notes and Queries, and other periodicals.  He holds a doctorate in English (with a creative writing focus) and has taught writing and literature to students and professionals worldwide. 

Adrian’s most recent work is his debut short fiction collection The Ambassador of What, a series of linked stories about fathers, sons, and the complicated reality that is family. A Canadian Notes & Queries review calls “the way Kelly wields (and welds together) words is astounding . . . When your brain finally clicks into Kelly’s rhythm, Ambassador accomplishes something rare: it feels fresh, a brand-new mode of storytelling; it rearticulates your way of seeing the world, reprograms your brain, gets your feet tapping to a different beat. And this is what makes it a book worth slowing down for.” 

Adrian was born in Timmins, grew up in Campbellford, and currently lives in Kingston. 

Learn more about Adrian.

Show Transcript

A complete transcript of this episode will be available soon.

Today Tricia chats with author Jessica Johns about identifying with one's own characters, representing the incredible diversity of Indigenous peoples, the responsibility of a writer and a reader, and so much more.

Show Notes

• How does Jessica's writing come out?
• What does it mean to sustain writing with work in other areas?
• How do we define an individual's responsibility, accepting that we are never truly alone?
• How is failure not about rejection?
• Why is receiving help and love hard for so many people?
• What is "auntieship", and how can it sometimes for a verb?
• Why are animals actual characters, not just mood-setters?

Book and Author References

Empire of Wild by Cherie Dimaline
Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice
Bad Cree by Jessica Johns
The Trickster Trilogy by Eden Robinson

About Jessica Johns

Jessica Johns is a nehiyaw aunty with English-Irish ancestry and a member of Sucker Creek First Nation. Her debut novel, Bad Cree, was shortlisted for the Amazon First Novel Award and won the MacEwan Book of the Year award.

Her fiction, poetry, and nonfiction has been published in Cosmonauts Avenue, Glass Buffalo, CV2, SAD Magazine, Red Rising Magazine, Poetry is Dead, Bad Nudes, Grain, The Fiddlehead, Canadian Art, C Magazine, Brick, Reissue, Maisonneuve, The Globe and Mail, Best Canadian Essays 2019, among others. She has spoken at various literary and arts festivals such as The Bay Area Book Festival, WORD Vancouver, Vancouver Writers Fest, FOLD Festival, Victoria Festival of Authors, London’s Literary and Creative Arts Festival, and Blue Metropolis.

Her visual art has been featured at the 2022 Rhubarb Festival, grunt gallery, and at Latitude 53. 

She serves on the editorial board for GUTS – An Anti-Colonial Feminist Magazine, the advisory board for the Indigenous Brilliance reading series, and also brews kombucha as the founder of kokôm kombucha.

Learn more about Jessica.

Show Transcript

A complete transcript of this episode will be available soon.