Author Suzanne Craig-Whytock 'just about fell off my chair' when she was long-listed for humour award
'It's really important to highlight and platform a variety of voices,' she says of starting lit magazine
Author Suzanne Craig-Whytock has written post-apocalyptic fantasies and dark thrillers to humour for teens and adults and has a number of titles to her name including The Dome, Smile and Feasting Upon the Bones.
Earlier this year, her book What Any Normal Person Would Do was up for the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour.
The Drumbo, Ont., author also launched DarkWinterLit, a literary magazine to support other authors and get their work out into world.
She joined CBC Kitchener-Waterloo's The Morning Edition with host Craig Norris to talk about What Any Normal Person Would Do, the experience of it being nominated for a Leacock award and why she wants to support other authors through her literary magazine.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. The audio for the interview is at the bottom of this article.
Craig Norris: Tell me about your book What Any Normal Person Would Do.
Suzanne Craig-Whytock: So I've been writing a humour blog for 10 years now. I post once a week just humorous anecdotes and stories and this is kind of a prequel to me starting my own publishing company as well.
I thought if I'm going to start publishing books, I should maybe try something of my own and experiment on myself instead of, you know, some poor soul. So I put together some humorous anecdotes, you know, kind of from the past and some new material and put it together in a book.
Then I saw that the Leacock Awards were open. I thought, what the heck, I'll submit it to the Leacock Awards. Never in a million years thinking that I would get long listed.
When I got the email, I just about fell off my chair when I saw my name on the long list alongside other very notable people like Rick Mercer and the person who won — Patrick DeWitt.
Norris: What should people be thinking about as they read the book?
Craig-Whytock: Be prepared. My mind's a little strange. I'm probably a little more funny on the page than I am in person. It gives me a chance to do more with the machinations of my mind.
Norris: How did it feel to see your name on the list for the Leacock Awards?
Craig-Whytock: It was so exciting to be ranked up there. I think they had over 80 submissions this year from some very well-known writers. My husband went to the banquet and I didn't expect anything but the emcee actually did call my name and say, you know, 'one of our long-listers is here' and had me get up and people applauded. And it was so cool.
Norris: Your books don't all fit into the same category, how do you decide what kind of book you are going to write?
Craig-Whytock: It's a tricky question. It's just kind of what strikes me at the moment.
I write some very dark work. My short stories are psychologically dark. My last book was a gothic thriller and steeped in a lot of poetry as well because poetry is something I'm passionate about.
My new manuscript is post-apocalyptic and again, with a lot of poetry weaving through it and the book I'm currently working on is a humorous murder mystery. I thought I'd take advantage of the Leacock long-list nomination and maybe work a little more on the humour genre since I do a lot of humour writing in my daily life.
Norris: Does everything you write about come from within you or outside of you?
Craig-Whytock: It's a combination of both. I like to take a situation and say: What if?
My new manuscript, the one that I'm currently in the editing process with, the whole impetus for that was that I saw three people walking through a parking lot one day. They were passing by a dumpster and there was an older man and two younger women.
I thought, I wonder where they're going and why are they together? What's happening? Then I kind of envisioned it as post-apocalyptic and then created the story around those three people. They kind of bloomed into my new books called Nomads of the Modern Wasteland.
Norris: Tell me about why you started your literary magazine, DarkWinterLit.
Craig-Whytock: As my writing career kind of ramped up, I was writing a lot of short fiction and submitting it to other literary magazines and loving when I got an acceptance for something like that. At a certain point I started working for an American literary magazine as a submissions reader. I would see a lot of really good material that went through me and then never got published.
I thought, what if I just started my own literary magazine and I could publish the things that I really like and I wouldn't have to worry about anybody else saying no, it doesn't quite fit or no, we don't have room for it. There are not a lot of literary magazines currently in Canada, as far as I know, that publish online weekly, let alone twice a week, which is what Dark Winter does.
On Mondays and Thursdays we highlight a poet and a short story writer. Then from the magazine I went into the press and started the publishing company from there.
Norris: Talk about why it's so important for people to support local authors.
Craig-Whytock: A lot of people don't have a big platform. There's a lot of places that will only take people who are really established. There are so many wonderful voices out there from emerging writers.
What I'm doing is trying to give them that step up to say I've been published and then go on and maybe, you know, be published again and again and get those voices out there. There's so much diversity. I think it's really important to highlight and platform a variety of voices.
LISTEN | Author Suzanne Craig-Whytock on why she started her own literary magazine:
