Why writing fiction for young people inspires Jen Ferguson to keep hope alive
The Michif/Métis and Canadian author spoke about her latest YA novel, Those Pink Mountain Nights
What does it mean to be resilient as a young Indigenous person? This is the question the protagonist of Those Pink Mountain Nights asks of herself when a local girl goes missing. YA author Jen Ferguson reflects on the moments of joy and hardship of growing up in Alberta in her latest novel.
Ferguson is a YA author, activist and academic of Michif/Métis and Canadian settler heritage, based in Los Angeles. Ferguson has a PhD in English and creative writing. Her debut novel, The Summer of Bitter and Sweet, won the 2022 Governor General's Literary Award for young people's literature — text.
Those Pink Mountain Nights is a YA novel set in Alberta that follows three teenagers — Berlin, Cameron and Jessie — who are brought together by working at Pink Mountain Pizza. A possible sighting of Kiki, Cameron's cousin who disappeared five months earlier, sets off a course of events over one week in their small, snowy town that will alter all their lives.
Those Pink Mountain Nights explores topics such as missing and murdered Indigenous women, mental health and sexuality.
Ferguson joined The Next Chapter's Ryan B. Patrick to talk about the optimism of writing about and for young adults.
Those Pink Mountain Nights is centred around a teen named Berlin who's working at an independent pizza parlour. So, tell me about Berlin. What's happening here? Who is she at the start of the book?
At the beginning of the book, Berlin has just been sort of ghosted from her best friend and she doesn't know why. She's also just started this new job about a month ago and she loves it. It's a place where her responsibility and her ethics seem to be really well represented by her boss.
She's also recognizing that while she doesn't have typical symptoms of depression, or what she thinks is depression, she's having a hard time connecting with people. She's having a hard time feeling joy.
You mentioned you worked at a pizza parlour during the summer. Tell me about that dynamic in terms of teens running a store. You're pretty much operating on your own without any adult intervention.
I've been thinking a lot about third spaces and what happens when you take a teenager out of their home life. They have to behave a particular way in their home life and then they have to behave a particular way in their school life.
I realized I like telling stories that happen in a third space, like the ice cream shack or like the pizza parlour, because that's one of the places where these teenage characters get to test their identities in a way that is outside of school and home.
They get to test the idea of who they are.
These teenage characters get to test their identities in a way that is outside of school and home. They get to test the idea of who they are.- Jen Ferguson
Both of your books, Jen, are set in Alberta. What's your connection to Alberta?
I am an Army brat and I grew up all over Canada. I spent some years in Calgary when I was younger and then I moved to Lloydminster, Alta. when I was 15. I spent Grade 10 and 11 there and Alberta really got into my psyche.
I don't know if it's like the age I was when I lived there, how when you're 15, 16 everything is foundational. So when I lived in Lloydminster one of the things that I remember clearly was there was like one Black family in town, there were a couple Asian families in town.
It was one of the first places where I saw clear anti-Indigenous violence, both in word and action. But it was also the town where the oil workers from up north came for their two weeks off.
This book really does tackle some serious issues, particularly missing and murdered Indigenous women by way of a missing girl in the book named Kiki. Kiki's heritage is Black and Indigenous. What did you want to explore there?
I thought it was important here to remind readers that there are missing girls whose faces show up on the news, whose stories get told over and over again, but you're much more likely to be ignored if you are a Native missing girl or a Black missing girl.
Making Kiki both Native and Black highlighted the disparity of her value to the policing community or to the media community.
Making Kiki both Native and Black highlighted the disparity of her value to the policing community or to the media community.- Jen Ferguson
So thinking of your own heritage, how did you want to explore Kiki's heritage? You go into some themes like anti-Black racism and Indigenous racism. What did you want to kind of dig into or unpack?
My first book, The Summer of Bitter and Sweet, is about a kind of racism that most woke white people can point to and be like, "It's there, I see it!" and I wanted to explore something different in Those Pink Mountain Nights.
I was thinking about the kind of violence that minority communities do to each other, which is something that when I was handing this book around in its early stages to friends who were BIPOC or queer or disabled, they could see what was happening really clearly.
Your work often revolves around the concept of resilience. So what does that word mean for these characters in the book?
I have a difficult relationship with resilience.
So I think that a lot of Native people, we've sort of clung to that word as a word to mean strength. That we are strong because we are resilient in face of all of these things that try to take us down or try to make us invisible or try to harm us and I thought a lot about this.
For me, I keep thinking that resilience is a short term coping strategy. It shouldn't be how you have to live your life.
Resilience is a short term coping strategy. It shouldn't be how you have to live your life.- Jen Ferguson
I think about that a lot as well just by being who I am and what I do. I'm often talking about how [books are] about identity, belonging and resilience but these aren't discrete elements. They're very integrated and you have to unpack and navigate. How do you do that, particularly in the YA context?
I think that that one of the things about a YA novel that I've decided for myself is that if I'm going to write for teens, I have to be willing to write hope and joy into a story — even when it's a story about the real life hard things that today's teens are going through.
It's something if you spend a lot of time around teenagers that you'll notice about their ways of being in the world. And that is, teens can be going through like the hardest things, and yet there will still be moments where you will catch a group of them just like uproariously laughing over the silliest thing. I think when we become adults, we become more conservative in a lot of ways, and one of those ways is we don't let joy and hope into our lives in the same way anymore.
If I'm going to write for teens, I have to be willing to write hope and joy into a story.- Jen Ferguson
Maybe where I have hope or maybe my way of practicing hope is that I'm writing for teenagers. And so that is my hopeful offering, that I still think the world has possibility and change for young people.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.