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Michelle Syba talks with Pamela about speaking in tongues, getting slain in the spirit, and why she is surprised that Richard Dawkins is surprised at the tenacity of religion.

Michelle became a lapsed Pentecostal before she got her PhD from Harvard in English and began teaching literature and religion in the college’s creative writing program. She left the faith not because she disagreed with the doctrine but because she felt herself more moved by Middlemarch than the Bible. In 2018, after attending one of the Banff Centre’s writing workshops, she started working on the stories that became the collection called End Times.

Listen to our conversation to hear how Michelle wrote this book while grappling with a culture she still didn’t fully understand.

An introduction to the new podcast about authors, their books, and the story behind their stories.

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Sponsored by DeStiil Booksellers

Promotional support from the Quebec Writers’ Federation

Michelle Syba talks with Pamela about speaking in tongues, getting slain in the spirit, and why she is surprised that Richard Dawkins is surprised at the tenacity of religion.

Michelle became a lapsed Pentecostal before she got her PhD from Harvard in English and began teaching literature and religion in the college’s creative writing program. She left the faith not because she disagreed with the doctrine but because she felt herself more moved by Middlemarch than the Bible. In 2018, after attending one of the Banff Centre’s writing workshops, she started working on the stories that became the collection called End Times.

Listen to our conversation to hear how Michelle wrote this book while grappling with a culture she still didn’t fully understand.

H. Nigel Thomas talks with Pamela about identity, living vicariously through fictional characters, and the unchangeability of human nature.

When Nigel was 22 years old, he left St. Vincent and the Grenadines for Quebec where he studied African American Literature, earning degrees from Concordia, McGill and Université de Montréal. He became a high school teacher then a professor before publishing his first novel, Spirits in the Dark. Nigel is the editor of Kola Magazine, host of the Lectures Logos reading series, has twice been shortlisted for the Hugh McLennan Prize for Fiction, won the 2013 Universite Laval Homage aux Createurs, the 2020 Martin Luther King Junior Achievement Award, the 2021 QWF Judy Mappin Community Award, and in 2022 the Canada Council for the Arts John Molson Prize.

Throughout his career, Nigel has written about and supported the Black and gay communities in his adopted country. Learn more in our delightful conversation.

Neil Smith describes how, when he first began writing, there was one thing he was sure of: he didn’t want to write auto-fiction. But his childhood was the kind that haunted him and eventually, he had to turn tragedy into art. 

Neil is a novelist, translator, and short story writer whose 2007 award-winning debut collection, Bang Crunch was re-released in July of this year and has been translated into several languages, most recently Russian. In 2015, he published his first novel, Boo, about a boy in the afterlife and the following year was nominated for the Governor General’s Award for his translation of Geneviève Pettersen’s novel La déesse des mouches à feu into The Goddess of Fireflies.

In this candid and highly personal conversation, Neil talks about his latest novel, Jones, the heartbreaking tale about a troubling childhood that he describes as 75% true.

Trigger warning: sexual abuse / suicide

Kim Thúy talks to Pamela about her grandmother’s invention of condos, how fear paralyzes the mind and body, and the eternal gratitude she feels for her parents - and people of Granby, Quebec.

Until the age of ten, Kim lived a relatively privileged life in Saigon. But when the war in Vietnam ended, the Communists took over and her family decided there was no alternative but to flee. They boarded a wooden boat and made it to Malaysia where they lived in a refugee camp before moving to Quebec.

Kim went on to study linguistics and law, opened a restaurant, and became one of Canada’s most beloved authors. Her debut novel, Ru, won many prizes and awards including the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and Canada Reads, and was adapted to a film that premiered this September at TIFF. Ru was followed by three more novels, Man, Vi, and Em, as well as a children’s picture book, a cookbook, and contributions to non-fiction.

Hear Kim’s incredible story in this sweeping conversation that spans the years from her life in Vietnam up to the present day.

Baharan Baniahmadi talks to Pamela about growing up in Tehran, navigating a duplicitous life, and how her mother’s last words were a plea for her to leave the country.

Just four years after moving to Quebec, Baharan published Prophetess and won the 2022 QWF Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction. In lyrical prose, she captures the story of a young girl who witnesses a terrible crime against her sister. The girl goes into shock, becomes mute, and develops strange physical reactions to men as she begins to recognize - then later act on - the oppression in this world.

Listen to find out more about Baharan’s journey and why she is writing her next book in French.

Sean Michaels talks with Pamela about starting the mp3 blog Said the Gramophone, why writing fiction is not a mercenary job, and how winning the Scotiabank Giller Prize changed his life.

Sean emigrated from Scotland at the age of five, grew up in Ottawa, and moved to Montreal to study at McGill University. While still a student, he created Said the Gramophone, an mp3 music blog that would later be rated by Time Magazine as one of the top 25 blogs in the world. After spending years on a novel that was never published, he wrote Us Conductors and in 2014 won the biggest literary prize in Canada. He claimed it was lucky and went on to write a novel about luck, The Wagers, while writing columns for the Guardian and The Globe and Mail and the occasional article for Rolling Stone.

Find out more in our conversation and learn about his latest novel, Do You Remember Being Born?, in which a poet collaborates with AI.

Mikhail Iossel talks with Pamela about growing up in the former Soviet Union, becoming an underground writer in a KGB-monitored group, and the lasting damage of the Trump presidency on the reputation of America.

Mikhail was born in Leningrad in the ‘50s. The son of a prominent scientist, his application for leaving his country was refused and his education all but wasted when he quit his engineering job to become a security guard at an amusement park. At the age of 30, he finally made it to the US just before the collapse of the Communist Bloc. Despite his rudimentary English, he was accepted to study Creative Writing at the University of New Hampshire and before long, his short stories were published in literary journals and he assembled his first collection, Every Hunter Wants to Know. Today he is a professor at Concordia University and a contributor to magazines like the New Yorker. He is also a founder and Creative Director of the Summer Literary Seminars international program where friends such as George Saunders and Francine Prose have acted as faculty.

Listen to here to our lively and fascinating conversation.