“Why I wrote Late September,” by Amy Mattes

It’d been a dream of mine to write a novel since I was a child. Writing has always been how I process life. Journals upon journals stacked up over my adolescence and emerging adulthood. It was a compelling force of scrap poetry and moments captured in time. It might sound dramatic, but writing a novel was something I just knew I needed to do, though back then I didn’t yet have the story that would become my debut.

I began writing Late September at a writing retreat in Costa Rica in 2012 and it parallels a lot of my own lived experience. At 19 I, much in the same way as my main character, hopped a Greyhound bus to Montreal with a backpack and skateboard. I remember writing a list of what I wanted to accomplish by making this grand departure. I wanted to skateboard, I wanted to write, I wanted to write about skateboarding and meet girls who did the same. And sure enough, as my time in the City of Saints progressed, I met girls who skated, and we made one of the first all girl skate videos in North America in 2001. I started writing product reviews and other tidbits for a local skateboarding magazine and all the while the thump of creating a novel lived in my chest, waiting. My coming-of-age story was coming to life, but I needed to live it before I could write it. It wasn’t complete until 2018. My novel is fiction, but there are warped and embellished elements of my real life and the lives of those I’ve observed and met.

I always wanted to pursue traditional publishing so from there it took me a few more years and quite a few heartfelt rejections to gain an agent (Carlyn Forde, of Transatlantic Agency) and then a book deal. That’s when the magic began, and a team of people adopted my book as their own and helped make it the best version it could be.

Late September is about the pilgrimage of identity, how we can try to create new personas, but we can’t leave behind who we once were. It is about the power and naivete of youth, how we at once feel invincible and invisible on the quest to learn to love ourselves. The setting of Montreal as the seasons change mimics those of Ines, a grief stricken girl seeking change and healing. 

Amy Mattes loves PNW rainy days powered by too much coffee and writing to epic movie scores. She has a vintage suitcase full of old journals and a heart shaped rock collection. She is inspired by the grit and beauty of human connection, often drawing story out of struggles with identity, sexuality, grief and addiction. She holds an Anti-Oppressive Social Work Degree from the University of Victoria and is currently enrolled in the Bachelor of Arts School of Creative Writing at Vancouver Island University. Amy is represented by Carolyn Forde of Transatlantic Agency and is currently writing her second novel and raising a child