A Grandmother Begins the Story follows five generations of Métis women as they work to heal themselves and the land. Their stories intertwine in striking and thrilling ways, leaving the messages reverberating after the final page.

Porter also wrote the memoir Scratching River, the nonfiction book Approaching Fire, which was shortlisted for the Indigenous Voices Award in 2021 and a book of poetry, Inquiries, which was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. She lives in Newfoundland and Labrador. Porter made the 2019 CBC Nonfiction Prize longlist for her story Fireweed. Before that, she'd also made the 2017 CBC Poetry Prize longlist for Slicing Lemons in April and the 2016 CBC Poetry Prize longlist for Between you and home.

A Grandmother Begins the Story is on the shortlist for the 2023 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. The annual $60,000 award recognizes the best novel or short story collection by a Canadian author. The winner will be announced at the Writers' Trust awards gala on Nov. 21, 2023.

You can read an excerpt below.

I had my choice down there, didn't I? Eve, she chose the apple. That's the story they tell, the story they told us all. At the school and at the church on the Sunday that was oh so holy. I didn't want the apple, no. I went and I chose him, the one with the fiddle, the man who put all his restless self into his songs and who made people's feet dance in their moccasins on the dirt floors and in their fancy shoes on the dance hall's wooden floors, move in ways they'd never before, step so quick and light they'd wonder who it was that had touched their feet. It was him. Every time.

Dee heard a rumour spreading through the herd, leaping from cow to bull to calf. The herd would be divided. A truck and trailer would come and load up the chosen. Some of them would be moving on. She had to ask an auntie, What did moving on mean?

So my grandmother — my grandmother who I never met, by the way, because my birth mom refused to get us together saying her mom was a piece of work — called me up to ask if I'd help her kill herself. Which isn't helping; it's doing it. I said sure, I'm a part-time assassin. In my spare time. But can you afford my fees? I'm good and I don't come cheap, I said. She said be serious. I am, I said, dead serious. Then she called me a cunt and a few other things, I didn't catch them all. Okay then, I said, what's in the will — you got the money to pay? She hung up. I didn't even get to ask how she got my number. I'd think I made the conversation up, but my phone logged the call, tells me I talked for five minutes with someone named L Goulet. What does L stand for? I don't know, she never told me her name.

Like I said, I never met her before she dropped this on me. And she didn't have the guts to ask in person.

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Caption: The Metis author Michelle Porter talks to Shelagh Rogers about her debut novel, A Grandmother Begins the Story, which features a multiplicity of voices, human and otherwise.

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She couldn't take the old organ with her where she was going, that was for sure. All morning she'd been poking about the main floor, searching for the things that made up her sputtering life, the things she always forgot: reading glasses, cellphone, her father's old sash, the little statue of Mary that had belonged to her mama Mamé, an old book of piano music that her sister had marked up. So many things to forget and then she thought of her piano and it came over her all of a sudden that she couldn't bear to live away from it, not even for 12 weeks. And what was she going to do when she up and died? They said that was going to happen before the year was up and she should get around to telling people as soon as anything, say her goodbyes, but instead she went and booked herself into rehab, stubborn old hag that she was.

She put her hand on the spinet organ's faded wooden frame. Geneviève didn't know how the organ got to be so old. The spinet was small and a bit frail now, but the old girl still had a strong voice and she still responded to Gen's touch, still created music beneath her fingers. Velma had socked away as much as she could of her performance earnings and competition winnings to pay for it, had been so proud to bring it into that log house their father built. And every once in a while it was just like it was when Velma was there, standing near the end of the piano, emptying her bow and her fiddle into every song, telling Geneviève with a glance when to wait and when to rush ahead. Been a long time since anybody was there to tell her to hold back on anything. Long time.

Excerpted from A Grandmother Begins the Story by Michelle Porter. Copyright © 2023 Michelle Porter. Published by Viking Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.