Winner of The Writer’s Union of Canada’s Prose Contest in 2016, Susan Wadds‘ work has appeared in carteblanche, The Blood Pudding, Room, Waterwheel Review, and many more. The first two chapters of her debut novel, What The Living Do, (Regal House Publishing, 2024), won the Lazuli Group’s Prose Contest, and were published in Azure Magazine. What the Living Do was a finalist for the 2024 Canadian Book Club Award. A graduate of the Humber School for Writers and a proud member of The Writers Union of Canada, Susan is a certified Amherst Writers and Artists (AWA) workshop facilitator. She lives on a quiet river on Williams Treaty land in traditional Anishinaabe territory with an odd assortment of humans and cats.
How do you come up with book titles?
This novel’s title is taken from Marie Howe’s poem of the same name. After completing the manuscript, I thought about that poem and read it again. What the Living Do, you could say, is what my main character is attempting to figure out. So, perfect. Originally, this story was titled, Home Fires, but when my friend, Sue Reynolds had some ARCs printed for me, I saw that at first glance, it looked like Home Fries. And we weren’t having that. Then it was Roadkill, but there are several novels with that name and I didn’t want readers to imagine this was a gruesome story.
As people learned about your book, what unexpected things happened along the way?
What surprised me the most is that men enjoy the story. I had imagined that this was a book only women would relate to. I was delighted to have four wonderfully skilled male writers—Nick Bantock, John Gould, Patrick Taylor, and Phil Dwyer—blurb the novel. But I’d asked them, so I wasn’t prepared for the response from so many men. One reader said he learned a lot about women reading the story. Another friend admitted that unless he knew me, he wouldn’t have purchased the novel, but after reading it, he bought copies for all his male friends.
Women say they relate to my character’s odd response to her partner and those who care about her, and that it’s an accurate depiction of a trauma response.
How do you start a novel/story/poem?
Usually I begin any story or poem from a prompt—visual or poetic or circumstantial. I may come to the screen with an idea of something I want to 
address but the prompts will often take me in slant. This keeps the writing fresh, to take it in unexpected directions.
Where do your ideas come from for narratives/poems?
Ideas are like clouds. They float by, take many shapes, shift, dissolve, and if I’m attentive and have an instrument with which to record that idea, it begins to rain onto the page and a story or poem begins to form. How’s that for an original analogy?
Since the mid-seventies, when a friend experienced a brain aneurysm, I’ve been fascinated by identity. Her mathematical skills remained intact but her personality had dramatically altered, and she retained almost nothing of her emotional, interpersonal memories. I tried my hand at writing a play inspired by her transformation, but I was a young writer and hadn’t a grasp on the deeper implications of the changes. Later, in 2012, I wrote a short story, “What’s Left,” that imagined her interior experience. Many stories, novels and memoirs approach the personality loss associated with various forms of dementia, but it seems to me that our egos, or identities, are pretty fragile things, and somewhat suspect in terms of us believing that they represent who we truly are. I say that because there are so many ways our personalities can be snatched away. For instance, brain injury often seems to result in the emergence of a stranger.
I keep asking, Are we who we think we are? And what if…”
What’s the hardest part of writing or publishing?
Now there’s a question! I’ll start by saying, the easiest, funnest part of writing is the first flush—when ideas, images, dialogue just flow, the “zone” if you will. Since I’m a pantser, no matter how hard I try to map and plan and structure, I always fail—because I don’t know how the story will go—the hard part is pulling all the fun ideas and scenes into a cohesive whole. Then, structure weirdly, comes after I’ve written two hundred pages. And then just getting the chronology in line with say, the weather, is a pain. I’m not proud of this, but after writing several novels and trying my best to be pragmatic, to have a PLAN, I have to admit that I suck at that. I have a stack of writers’ help books and devices, and have taken myriad courses but my so-called process is kind of a mess. I write and write and write, and then try to figure out how to pull it all together so that it makes sense.
And please don’t get me started on publishing. One might believe that when they at last write “END” that they have finished. (Films about writers deceive us, let’s just say that. We don’t write the novel in a week of delirious frenzy, print it out, send to our agent or publisher, and next thing you know, our novel is filling the windows of every bookstore and long lines form just to hear us read.)
After dozens of drafts to get it where we can finally leave it, so begins the slog of trying to write a synopsis, and tougher yet, a “log line” –your story in one or two sentences. But that’s just the start. Then comes the penning of a query letter in order to begin the submission process. After numerous rejections from your dream agents, you query dozens of others. Then you begin to query independent publishers, wondering all the while if you should just bite the bullet and self-publish.
But then, a women-run independent press offers you publication and after you wash away those tears of relief and gratitude, you’d be tempted to believe you’re off and running. But trust me, the work has just begun. Now you have to sell it. Get it out in the world. Get bookstores and libraries and podcasters to notice you. Then you realize you can’t do it all, and so many awards, venues, reviewers, etc. don’t deal directly with authors. So you hire a publicist. That’s when it starts to ease up a bit. But then, you’re almost ready to start the process all over again because your next novel is finished.
Why should people want to read your books?
They want a real-life, unromanticized woman who flips the script on gender roles and they enjoy lyrical writing about tough subjects.
There’s fair bit of interest, scientific and otherwise, in the links between creativity and insanity. How crazy must someone be to be a good author?
I don’t think you have to be crazy to be a good author, but your brain has to work on so many levels—you need to be a psychotherapist, a parent, a mathematician, as well as a dreamer and a historian to write something compelling and true.
However, an author is crazy if they’re writing to get rich, get love, or be famous. That’s what I have to say about that!
We’ve all heard the advice that authors should “write what they know.” But fiction emerges from imagination and creation of new worlds. Do you feel a tension between what you’ve experienced and what lives only in your mind?
Yes, certainly. We have to take “what we know” and scramble it up, because often what actually “happened” is unbelievable. Or we want to protect ourselves or those we care about, so instead of writing a memoir, we obscure the facts and make stuff up to try to tell the story we need to tell. It’s often the first question an author is asked at any event. “How much of this novel is based on you or your life?” I’ll pull out threads to illustrate how real life is used and shifted to suit the story.
I currently have a novel on submission that took me over fifteen years to write because the genesis was a traumatic event in my life and it took numerous rewrites and time to achieve enough distance to write an effective arc. I didn’t want it to be my story, but it was a story I needed to tell.
One of my teachers, Barbara Turner-Vesselago, advises writers to “Go fearward.” In other words, to write what we don’t want to write. I love it when I can grab a sad, violent, or frightening moment in my life and instantly fictionalize it. There may be blood on the page, but the sense of liberation is worth every drop.
Do you belong to any writing groups or communities, either online or offline?
I belong to The Writers Union of Canada, The Canadian Authors Association, and Women’s Fiction Writers Association, and I’m an Amherst Writers & Artists Writing Workshop Affiliate. I generate most of my writing in community. The AWA method has given me inspiration, encouragement, and support. Since the lockdown, my online workshops have flourished, allowing me to step away from my therapeutic bodywork practice and dedicate a minimum of ten hours a week to generate new writing. As an AWA facilitator, one is required to take the same risks as the participants, and must read at least once in a workshop, so that has helped immensely to complete short stories, poems, and, yes, two novels.
But once the scenes are written, I need to go off alone and figure it all out. Last year, for instance, I was accepted to an artist residency in France where I spent five weeks organizing and polishing this last novel. Retreats where the focus is primarily on time to write are essential to me.
What’s next for you?
I’m working on a novel with speculative elements, which is a new challenge that I’m loving. And this coming May, I’m leading a writing retreat in Spain. My friend, Esana, leads the group in gentle yoga to start the day, and then after breakfast, we gather to write together from prompts I offer. Then the afternoon is free to write, read, nap, walk… until after dinner, we meet for a salon, where writers can read or we discuss elements of craft, art, or culture.