Laurie Petrou

Words:

There are so many incredible female writers and I tend towards those in a way I never did when I was younger. I lean towards female authors, but that doesn’t necessarily mean female characters. Female authors, BIPOC authors and gender binary, gender queer authors are featured in stories in a way they never have before, but I think it’s a drop in the ocean and we have a lot more to do.

Winning the Half the World Global Literati Award for ‘Sister of Mine’, which was just a manuscript at the time, was a life changing moment for me. There's a study where the majority of literary awards are awarded to stories, not necessarily by men, but about them as though their stories are more interesting and Sister of Mine is about the inner lives of women, by a woman. After I won that award, Harper Collins bought the book.

Publishing is so white. It’s nice to see agencies and publishers looking for own voices in books as part of their criteria. I think making a concerted effort to diversify, what still is a biased industry, has started. I have students in a class I’m teaching, of colour and from different backgrounds, writing stories about their own lives. I hope those stories will be capitalised upon and I hope they happen. I think there’s an appetite for difference, from both the publishing industry and from readers, that unfortunately and frustratingly hasn’t been in the past.

I grew up in the suburbs outside of Toronto, but now I live in a small town called Grimsby, Ontario. I went to school for fine art, I was always an artist. In school that’s what I was known for; it was kind of my thing. I then studied painting at Queens University, it was a really small programme in an Ivy League setting; they only accepted 30 people a year. It was really great and so much informed the art school in my book, Stargazer. I became an interactive web designer, I found that soul sucking. In the meantime, I was showing my art in small galleries in Toronto.

I was always writing. At Queens, I wrote for the literary magazine. I was always writing poetry and short stories when I was doing my masters. I had a handful of short stories, so I sent them to a small press in Toronto. A friend had been doing some painting for book covers and told me I should send them to Pedlar Press. They said, “get in touch when you have enough for a book.” I wrote for another year until I had a ‘books worth’ and it was their first Pedlar book of short stories. I didn’t really know what that meant! It was in the Top 100 Books for the Globe and Mail newspaper, which is a huge deal here. It had good reviews and things started to happen from there!

I’ve had good luck my whole life. I carried on at school, I had two babies and this full-time job being a professor, I didn’t even know I would get an office. I just feel like in all steps of my life, I’ve fallen into it and figured it out. I really feel like I fell ass backwards into every piece of good fortune I’ve had. Sometimes it’s okay to have no plan. I just kept doing my thing and Ryerson supported it. Everyone has been supportive of my creative pursuits and never pushed me into a corner; I’m an anti-academic when it comes to that. After I finished my PhD, I stopped doing any academic writing and it’s been Full steam ahead with fiction ever since. The university tried to tell me not to, but I kept doing it anyway!

I do read my reviews and I defy anyone that tells me they don’t. I’ve been doing it so long that rejections don’t bother me and neither do reviews, I usually just flip the bird to the computer screen and then I move on! If a complaint is consistently said, then I address it in my next book. You let the sting wear off and think, ‘okay, is there something I can learn from this’. Good Reads is a home for readers, not writers. It’s a safe place for readers to talk about how they feel, so it’s not my space and don’t write reviews as a reader. I know what it’s like to have book reviews, so it’s not the sort of thing I engage in as a reader.

My favourite authors have to be Heather O’Neill, Madeline Miller, Zadie Smith, Elena Ferrante, there’s so many, I need my bookshelf behind me right now! When I’m in a slump, I’ll take one of my favourite books, open it anywhere and read a few lines, that helps.

I’m a total J.D Salinger apologist, those books meant so much to me. My brother gave me a staple copy of The Catcher in The Rye. I fell in love. It was the first time I saw this informal, colloquial, youthful narrator in a way other books didn’t, it felt so relatable. I loved Margaret Atwood in high school too. Those books were such an open window to stories of really brave women doing wonderful and daring things, but Salinger had a young person’s voice. I read everything he wrote, and I became obsessed. I wrote hundreds of letters off into the ether.

*SPOILER* A book that made me cry… All Quiet on the Western Front. HE DIES! The narrator dies and that was so heart-breaking for me. He came back from war and was a different person. He was broken. I don’t usually cry when I’m reading but sometimes, I’ll read books and they’ll be too hard to read. Everyone said I’d bawl reading ‘A Little Life’, I was getting through it and I thought ‘I don’t know if I can read this!’ I can’t think of any other books I’ve cried at, which is not true to life, I cry all the time!

I did so much research into taxidermy for a book I was writing. I became obsessed, even though I have a squeamish stomach. I was watching videos and documentaries; I became friendly with this taxidermist who works in LA. She’s so glamorous and beautiful and works in Hollywood and does taxidermy. So, if it’s something like that, then yes, I’ll go deep. I’ll never write a book about a place if you don’t know the place. Readers love Stargazer because of the location and they want to go to Canada. People love books that take place in one particular place in the world, things don’t have to be everywhere. It’s less relatable.

I reached out to Taylor Jenkins Reid and sent her a copy of Stargazer. She put it on her best summer reads on Instagram and if I didn’t have the nerve to send it wouldn’t have happened. Having the courage to reach out is important. People who apply to the same contests to keep in contact with are important. None of my best friends are authors which is kind of a good thing, being part of those communities, not as a distraction to your own work, you can create beautiful friendships.

You have to be okay with failing. No one’s talking about all the rejections or bad emails from agents. Read other people’s work and connect with other writers. Stick to your guns, don’t shoot your mouth off, be easy to get along with and work hard.

I’m on my 10th draft of a novel. It’s a brother-sister allegory of grief, taking a road trip to bury their mother. I never consider myself a thriller writer. I write suspense, kind of, but I was pigeon-holed into this genre that I don’t really read, or consider myself a writer of. We lost a friend in a terrible tragedy in a random act of violence a year ago and I don’t know if I can ever write about murder in the same way. It has impacted the way I see murder and death because I’ve experienced it in my family and friend group.

I’ve had my share of rejections, you can’t go back, so once you’ve been rejected by a publisher it’s back to the drawing board. I’m a very tenacious person, I’ve been so full of despair but I don’t feel like that anymore. So many things you don’t expect will happen if you keep going with your books. I’m an artist, I’ve always wanted to create art, so I kept doing it. I never considered not writing, that was never an option for me. It makes me happy.