How I Wrote This – Details, episodes & analysis

Shaena Lambert has published two collections of short stories, The Falling Woman and Oh, my darling and two novels, Radiance and Petra and been nominated for literary prizes including the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, the Danuta Gleed Award, and the Frank O'Connor Award for the Short Story. A Canadian with German heritage, she talks about echoes from the past and how the artistic legacy of her great-grandfather, grandfather, mother - and aunt, an 80-year-old burlesque dancer who was inducted into the Las Vegas Burlesque Hall of Fame - has left its mark on her.

While an activist in the Canadian Peace Movement in the ‘80s and ‘90s, Shaena met Petra Kelly, the charismatic leader of the Green Party in West Germany, and Petra’s lover, Gert Bastien, who accompanied her. After the shock of her death, Petra became the subject of Sheana’s second novel.

Off the Record, edited by John Metcalf, is the most recent collection of essays and short stories where you can find Shaena’s writing.  

Listen to our conversation now.

How I Wrote This is created and hosted by Pamela Hensley

Presented by Knockabout Media. 

Original music by Tyler K. Rauman

Find out more at our website: www.howiwrotethisthepodcast.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Michelle Syba talks with Pamela about speaking in tongues, getting slain in the spirit, and why she is surprised that Richard Dawkins is surprised at the tenacity of religion.

Michelle became a lapsed Pentecostal before she got her PhD from Harvard in English and began teaching literature and religion in the college’s creative writing program. She left the faith not because she disagreed with the doctrine but because she felt herself more moved by Middlemarch than the Bible. In 2018, after attending one of the Banff Centre’s writing workshops, she started working on the stories that became the collection called End Times.

Listen to our conversation to hear how Michelle wrote this book while grappling with a culture she still didn’t fully understand.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

H. Nigel Thomas talks with Pamela about identity, living vicariously through fictional characters, and the unchangeability of human nature.

When Nigel was 22 years old, he left St. Vincent and the Grenadines for Quebec where he studied African American Literature, earning degrees from Concordia, McGill and Université de Montréal. He became a high school teacher then a professor before publishing his first novel, Spirits in the Dark. Nigel is the editor of Kola Magazine, host of the Lectures Logos reading series, has twice been shortlisted for the Hugh McLennan Prize for Fiction, won the 2013 Universite Laval Homage aux Createurs, the 2020 Martin Luther King Junior Achievement Award, the 2021 QWF Judy Mappin Community Award, and in 2022 the Canada Council for the Arts John Molson Prize.

Throughout his career, Nigel has written about and supported the Black and gay communities in his adopted country. Learn more in our delightful conversation.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Neil Smith describes how, when he first began writing, there was one thing he was sure of: he didn’t want to write auto-fiction. But his childhood was the kind that haunted him and eventually, he had to turn tragedy into art. 

Neil is a novelist, translator, and short story writer whose 2007 award-winning debut collection, Bang Crunch was re-released in July of this year and has been translated into several languages, most recently Russian. In 2015, he published his first novel, Boo, about a boy in the afterlife and the following year was nominated for the Governor General’s Award for his translation of Geneviève Pettersen’s novel La déesse des mouches à feu into The Goddess of Fireflies.

In this candid and highly personal conversation, Neil talks about his latest novel, Jones, the heartbreaking tale about a troubling childhood that he describes as 75% true.

Trigger warning: sexual abuse / suicide

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Kim Thúy talks to Pamela about her grandmother’s invention of condos, how fear paralyzes the mind and body, and the eternal gratitude she feels for her parents - and people of Granby, Quebec.

Until the age of ten, Kim lived a relatively privileged life in Saigon. But when the war in Vietnam ended, the Communists took over and her family decided there was no alternative but to flee. They boarded a wooden boat and made it to Malaysia where they lived in a refugee camp before moving to Quebec.

Kim went on to study linguistics and law, opened a restaurant, and became one of Canada’s most beloved authors. Her debut novel, Ru, won many prizes and awards including the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and Canada Reads, and was adapted to a film that premiered this September at TIFF. Ru was followed by three more novels, Man, Vi, and Em, as well as a children’s picture book, a cookbook, and contributions to non-fiction.

Hear Kim’s incredible story in this sweeping conversation that spans the years from her life in Vietnam up to the present day.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Baharan Baniahmadi talks to Pamela about growing up in Tehran, navigating a duplicitous life, and how her mother’s last words were a plea for her to leave the country.

Just four years after moving to Quebec, Baharan published Prophetess and won the 2022 QWF Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction. In lyrical prose, she captures the story of a young girl who witnesses a terrible crime against her sister. The girl goes into shock, becomes mute, and develops strange physical reactions to men as she begins to recognize - then later act on - the oppression in this world.

Listen to find out more about Baharan’s journey and why she is writing her next book in French.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sean Michaels talks with Pamela about starting the mp3 blog Said the Gramophone, why writing fiction is not a mercenary job, and how winning the Scotiabank Giller Prize changed his life.

Sean emigrated from Scotland at the age of five, grew up in Ottawa, and moved to Montreal to study at McGill University. While still a student, he created Said the Gramophone, an mp3 music blog that would later be rated by Time Magazine as one of the top 25 blogs in the world. After spending years on a novel that was never published, he wrote Us Conductors and in 2014 won the biggest literary prize in Canada. He claimed it was lucky and went on to write a novel about luck, The Wagers, while writing columns for the Guardian and The Globe and Mail and the occasional article for Rolling Stone.

Find out more in our conversation and learn about his latest novel, Do You Remember Being Born?, in which a poet collaborates with AI.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mikhail Iossel talks with Pamela about growing up in the former Soviet Union, becoming an underground writer in a KGB-monitored group, and the lasting damage of the Trump presidency on the reputation of America.

Mikhail was born in Leningrad in the ‘50s. The son of a prominent scientist, his application for leaving his country was refused and his education all but wasted when he quit his engineering job to become a security guard at an amusement park. At the age of 30, he finally made it to the US just before the collapse of the Communist Bloc. Despite his rudimentary English, he was accepted to study Creative Writing at the University of New Hampshire and before long, his short stories were published in literary journals and he assembled his first collection, Every Hunter Wants to Know. Today he is a professor at Concordia University and a contributor to magazines like the New Yorker. He is also a founder and Creative Director of the Summer Literary Seminars international program where friends such as George Saunders and Francine Prose have acted as faculty.

Listen to here to our lively and fascinating conversation.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Anita Rau Badami talks with Pamela about travelling by train through India, witnessing the violence that followed the assassination of Indira Ghani, and how her visual art intersects with her writing.

Anita moved to Calgary in 1991 when her husband was pursuing a Master’s degree at the university. Already a journalist, she enrolled in a creative writing program and began the manuscript for the novel that became Tamarind Mem. Four years later she published her second novel, The Hero’s Walk, which was a regional winner for the Commonwealth Prize, long-listed for the IMPAC Dublin and the Orange Prize for Fiction, and a contender for Canada Reads. Can you Hear the Nightbird Call and Tell it to the Trees were the two books that followed when she moved to Montreal.

Anita’s writing was recognized by the Writers’ Trust when she won the Marian Engel Award and the Scotiabank Giller Prize administrators when she was asked to chair the jury in 2017. Listen to our delightful conversation here.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Heather is a best-selling, award-winning novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. In 2006 she published her debut novel Lullabies for Little Criminals, which critics called “hypnotic” and praised for depicting “the most sympathetic abusive father in literature”. It won the Hugh McLennan Prize for Fiction, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the Governor Generals’ Award, and when it won the Canada Reads competition in 2007, it catapulted Heather to literary stardom. She has since published The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, a collection of stories called Daydreams of Angels, and two more novels, The Lonely Hearts Hotel and When We Lost Our Heads.

In this entertaining conversation, learn more about Heather’s early life and a hint of what’s to come in her next novel, her first to depart from Montreal.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.