Ep. 6 - Alicia Elliott

KWF Podcast

Today Tricia chats with Alicia Elliott, writer and editor, about her "deliciously dark and disturbing" stories, how identity is not a hard-and-fast concept, how to seprate politics and art, her own personal story of becoming a writer, and more.

Show Notes

• Do we need to feel uncomfortable when writing? When reading?
• What is considered correct, normal, comfortable? What happens when you only write about and with these boundaries?
• What are we casting out, especially in language?
• What is failure for Alicia, and how did it shape her as a writer today?
• How did Alicia deal with rejection?
• What's behind the curtain?

Book and Author References

And Then She Fell by Alicia Elliott A Mind Spread Out On the Ground by Alicia Elliott Tanya Talaga, journalist and author The Wizard of Oz, 1939 film Episode 5 of this podcast, featuring Adrian Michael Kelly

About Alicia Elliott

Alicia Elliott is a Mohawk writer and editor living in Brantford, Ontario. She has written for The Globe and Mail, CBC, Hazlitt and many others. She's had numerous essays nominated for National Magazine Awards, winning Gold in 2017 and an honorable mention in 2020. Her short fiction was selected for Best American Short Stories 2018 (by Roxane Gay), Best Canadian Stories 2018 and Journey Prize Stories 30. Alicia was chosen by Tanya Talaga as the 2018 recipient of the RBC Taylor Emerging Writer Award. Her first book, A Mind Spread Out On The Ground, was a national bestseller in Canada. It was also nominated for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction and won the Forest of Reading Evergreen Award.

Alicia's next book, And Then She Fell, is out now!

Show Transcript

A complete transcript of this episode will be available soon.

Acknowledgement

This episode was recorded and produced on the traditional homeland of the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and the Huron-Wendat First Nations.