Cedar Bowers is a writer from Galiano Island, B.C., whose fiction has been published in Joyland, Taddle Creek and The Malahat Magazine. Astra is her first novel.

In it, Bowers tells the story of Astra Brine, a woman who was raised on a remote British Columbia commune by a neglectful father and struggles to find her place in the world. Told through the eyes of the people she crosses paths with over the years, Astra uncovers difficult truths about who they are and what they yearn for.

Astra is on the longlist for the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize. The shortlist will be announced on Oct. 5, 2021 and the winner will be announced on Nov. 8, 2021.

Cedar Bowers spoke to CBC Books about writing her debut novel.

I started writing Astra when I was about 32. I just had my second kid and I decided I needed to try to write. I had never really written before, but it had been a secret wish of mine. I didn't want to wake up at 80 and regret that I never tried. I started with one short story. It was about a man who was a reluctant father, who lived on a commune. He was thinking about how much he didn't want to be a dad. After I wrote that story, I wrote a second story about a teenage girl, as seen through the eyes of her boyfriend. Once I had these two stories, I realized I was talking to this daughter. The man's daughter was this teenage girl. I suddenly came up with the idea of talking about one person through the eyes of other people. I liked the idea of exploring gossip and judgment and to try to create a book through everybody's eyes watching this one person as she grew up.

I grew up in a small town. In small towns, talking about people is really important. I don't think it's completely negative. I think there's a lot of positives there, too. It's how people create safety and understanding and empathy of others. Yet at the same time, I feel like it can be harmful when people have perceived ideas about who you are. It can take a long time to shed those ideas.

I was going through a similar process at that time myself. I have no formal education. I've always been told that I was really bad at language. Even though I love to read, I was the person who was never supposed to write a book. I wanted to throw that away. So I wrote Astra. I didn't even think about publishing it at all. It was just a personal fight, something I needed to prove to myself. I put Astra through that same process over 60 years of her life, of shedding other people's ideas of who she should be as she discovered who she was. It was a bit of a mirroring of what I was going through at that time.

I have always been a fan of character driven stories and books. I had this idea that there could be a book told about anybody on the planet if you found a collection of people who they had affected — those people could tell a story about that person.

I like that idea that nobody is boring. Nobody has too quiet of a life to talk about. Everybody has certain struggles. Everybody has done bad things. I like the idea of accessing Astra through all the ways she has hurt people, through all the ways she's tried, while the reader gets to form their own opinion of her. I liked that idea that we could get to know somebody only through hearing other people's stories and their judgments and perceptions would change our judgments and perceptions.

I started mostly writing in nap time breaks with babies sleeping on me. I wrote anywhere. I had both kids at home at the time. So it was in fits and spurts. I was also very secretive while I wrote Astra. I wrote it over nine years. So it has been nine years since I started, but I was very secretive for the first couple of years. I would do parent swaps with kids and grab a couple of hours and just work. But then once my kids started to go to school, I started to have much more freedom to finish the manuscript and to work hard.

I will work anywhere. I have worked in the backseat of the car. When my kids have been doing activities. I have worked with kids sleeping on me. I have worked with sound-cancelling headphones at my kitchen table. I now have a desk that's in the corner of the kitchen and so I will work there. So anywhere, I will write anywhere.

Definitely doubt. I think everybody feels imposter syndrome. I think it's a human experience to feel it to some degree. But I had been watching writers. I had been reading books. I didn't think that I belonged for many reasons. I also struggled in school. I had no confidence that I could even create a sentence. I was always in learning assistance classes and I needed help with English and language and grammar. It was a struggle to get over that, to say anybody can learn anything if they're interested. I believe that we need to not close the door and limit writing to only a small group of people.

I'm drawn to directionless people, people who have not been given a clear path in which they should take, people who've had to make that up on their own. There's so many different types of people who have had to go through that themselves.

But I was drawn to telling one woman's story. I wanted to write about one woman who hasn't been given a good toolbox to work with. She leaves home after not having much guidance from adults in her life. She needs to find love and try to find direction. She needs to build a life for herself. It was something I went through and it's something I have seen many people go through.