My revisions for my next novel, The Realm Invisible, are done, so now we enter the production phase! We are talking about the cover! There will be copy edits, but the book is the book now, after long labours. When I have news about a publication date, I’ll share it and tell you more about that book.

So my publications for the next while go like this:

• Mercutio, out now in the UK, August 2026 in Canada, April 2027 in the US (although the electronic versions are available in the US now)

• The Swordmaster, September 2026

• The Realm Invisible, sometime in 2027, I expect

And then, who knows! I don’t have any publishing contracts beyond that, and to be honest I feel like I need to take a big breath anyway, so it’s a good thing. I am working on a project, though, which is a novella I’ve wanted to write for a while, and which I received a grant to write from the Canada Council for the Arts.

It’s set in Winnipeg, in 1919. I’ve been excited to write this story about the place where I grew up. One might think that it would be easier than writing about some other place, but for me, it’s actually more difficult. Or maybe I should say it’s difficult in a different way.

The process of turning experience into fiction is sometimes described with words like “estrangement”, “alienation”, “distancing” — when we tell a story, we are holding something up to the light, which means the holder and the thing and the light are all distinct from each other. We all do this to some degree when we tell stories, even true ones, but when we set out to write fiction, the broader permission to invent gives us more distance.

I find this complicated when it comes to writing about my homes. One of my best stories (“Limestone, Lye and the Buzzing of Flies”) wrestles very directly with my own time and place. It is about a girl who lived exactly where I lived, when I lived there, and who spent her summers riding her bike with her male best friend to the same place where I spent my summers riding my bike with my male best friend. I put distance between myself and the girl in the story by making her, simply, not me, which seemed clear enough to me, although I realized later that of course that wouldn’t be obvious to the reader, who doesn’t know which parts are the autobiographical ones. (Her family is not mine and none of the characters or key events in the plot are drawn from my experiences.)

When I wrote “The Morning House”, I made the differences in the cast of characters a little more obvious to a casual observer, but I would say “The Morning House” is actually the more autobiographical story in many ways. “Limestone” is wrestling with a time and a place and a collection of histories and cultural pathologies; “The Morning House” is wrestling with my personal experiences as a caregiver.

Anyway, with those very rare exceptions aside, I typically write about people who are not much like me, in times not my own, in places where I have never lived. While I have travelled to most of the places I’ve written about, I have learned that travel is not as useful to me as one might think, because I’m usually writing about those places as they were centuries ago, and the street life and smells and sounds and daily practicalities are all things I’m going to have to research anyway. It’s far more useful to me to read a contemporary traveler’s account of what it was like to visit, say, Paris in the 1750s, than it is for me to visit Paris now.

So now I’m writing about Winnipeg, where I went to high school. It feels like it should be easier to write about a home than to write about somewhere else, but that just translates, for me, into a strange pressure to “get it right.” But what, exactly, am I getting right? I’m writing about Winnipeg in 1919, which both is and is not the city I lived in (near, actually — I bussed in to high school from the country) from 1980 to 1994.

When I was growing up, the rough hotel bars on Main Street were landmarks I passed a million times. Once, after I had moved away from Winnipeg and felt very far from home, I happened to see a stranger wearing a New Occidental Hotel t-shirt¹ and nearly burst into tears at the sudden reminder of something so familiar. The Main Street of 1919 also had hotels and beer parlours (including a hotel on the site of the New Occidental), but that was during a period of prohibition, for one thing, and for another, decades of decisions that turned Main Street into the complicated place it was when I was a kid simply hadn’t happened yet. Main Street’s no longer the place I knew, for that matter. (The New Occidental is no more.)

I could write about Winnipeg in the 1990s (although memory is deceptive too!) but I’m not doing that — I’m writing about it in 1919, which requires unlearning as much as learning. I do think that there’s a hindsight understanding I can bring to the significance of decisions people made in 1919, but that’s going to lie pretty deep under the story.

So that’s what I’m working on, somewhat nervously trying to offer a new story to this place that I love, and exploring new-to-me ways of storytelling with it, and it’s going very slowly but well.

Here’s “Oldest Oak at Brookside”, by John K. Samson, who writes about Winnipeg and its history so beautifully.