First, I need to clarify that my last name is Sanford Blades. Please don’t call me Blades or shelve my book under “B”.

I am grateful to live and write on the traditional territory of the lək̓ʷəŋən people–-now known as the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations (Victoria, BC). I was born in Treaty 6 territory, the homeland of the Michif Piyii (Métis) and Inuit people and traditional territory of the Nêhiyaw-Askiy (Plains Cree), Dene, Nakota Sioux, Anishnaabe, and Niitsitapi (Edmonton, AB). Though I am drawn to the ocean and dream of living in a cabin in the woods on Galiano Island, Edmonton holds a giant place in my heart and will always be home.

I began taking my writing seriously upon my first publication, a short story titled “Lost and Found,” in Island Writer, the literary journal of the Victoria Writers’ Society, in 2009. Since then, I’ve had stories published in literary magazines across Canada, as well as in the United States and in Ireland. In 2016, I earned my MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Victoria, with Lorna Jackson as my supervisor. My debut novel, Fake It So Real, was published in October, 2020 by Nightwood Editions.

When I’m not writing, I spend my time working as an editorial assistant for an academic psychology journal, Theory & Psychology; teaching academic writing at Royal Roads University; selling books at Books & Shenanigans, and raising my three beautiful boys. I also sit on the fiction board of The Malahat Review and run the Wild Prose Reading Series.

I’ve now finished a second novel manuscript, GIRL ON PAPER, and am looking for an agent/publisher for it. It’s a novel told in prose and zines and it’s about adoption, riot grrrl, mothers, daughters, and being an eighteen-year-old girl. It’s set in Edmonton in the mid-90s. You can have a taste of it (Chapter 6: Copycat) in The Masters Review’s New Voices section here.

I’m currently at work on a third novel manuscript about teenage girls and climate grief.

Official bio: Susan Sanford Blades was born and raised in Treaty 6 territory and now lives on the traditional territory of the lək̓ʷəŋən  people, now known as the Esquimalt and Songhees Nations (Victoria, Canada). Her debut novel, Fake It So Real, won the 2021 ReLit Award in the novel category and was a finalist for the 2021 BC and Yukon Book Prizes’ Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Her short fiction has been anthologized in The Journey Prize Reader: The Best of Canada’s New Writers and has been published in literary magazines across Canada as well as in the United States and Ireland. Her fiction has most recently been published in Gulf Coast, The Malahat Review and The Masters Review.