Samantha Garner’s first adult literary sci-fi novel, The Quiet is Loud, was published by Invisible Publishing in 2021. It has since been shortlisted for the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize and was a Loan Stars May 2021 Top 10 Pick. This novel is about Freya, a “veker,” a person with enhanced mental abilities, who lives in a society that is hostile to people like her. Interwoven with themes of Filipino-Canadian and mixed-race identity, fantastical elements from Norse and Filipino mythology, and tarot card symbolism, this book is about family, identity, and belonging.

Tarot plays a big role in this book and it seems to me you know quite a lot about tarot just based on Freya’s observations in the book. What role does tarot play in your life, both personally and creatively?

I’d been interested in tarot for a long time before writing the book, and I knew a little bit about how to do readings and interpret the cards. But in writing the book, I felt I really needed to understand Freya’s world better. I learned more about tarot, and got better at interpreting cards and organizing readings to help me answer certain questions. A writer friend of mine, Teri Vlassopoulos, gave me a book specifically about how creatives can use tarot to better understand their own work, and that helped me a lot too. I did a lot of tarot readings while writing The Quiet is Loud, both to help me work through questions about the plot and just personally. It helped me to see the world as Freya would.

I read on your blog that you wrote this novel during NaNoWriMo, is that right? You said you had a minimum daily word count of 1667 words. You wrote a blog post about how you got the word count done, but can you tell me now a bit more about what you did after that first draft was finished? How long did the editing process take before you had something to send to your agent or out for publication?

I wrote the vast majority of The Quiet is Loud during NaNoWriMo, and had just a handful of chapters to write after the month was over. I started editing as soon as I was finished the first draft. That took me a year. When I had a draft I felt was solid, I started querying agents with it, and after about six months I signed with Kelvin Kong at K2 Literary. Within a year of that I got my book deal with Invisible Publishing. So from the end of the first draft to the book deal, it was about two and a half years!

Your novel tells the story of a world in which paradextrous people, known as vekers, who have special powers are persecuted. How did the idea for this novel come to you? And how did you come up with the various special powers that some of the characters in your novel have (e.g., clairvoyant dreams, remembering everything they’ve ever read, being able to feel someone else’s emotions)?

It’s always hard for me to pinpoint the various inspirations for this novel, but the character of Freya came to me first. She emerged out of a couple of short stories: one called “Sorry Every Day” which actually featured early versions of Mary, Mary’s mother Judith, and Freya’s father Brian (though Freya herself wasn’t there); as well as a story in which a woman has a nightmare of her dead mother. Neither of these stories featured the paradextrous element, but I think at this point in my brain they bumped up against a childhood memory of reading X-Men comics with my brother and inventing useless superpowers.

I didn’t consciously draw on those childhood examples when developing the special powers, but to me it seemed realistic that not every person with abilities could successfully wield them in battle against a Big Bad. Sometimes they would be banal. Sometimes they would even be harmful to the person who had them. Following on from this idea, I wanted the powers themselves to be theoretically possible. I tried to make them focused on certain tweaks to our mental capacities—that meant no energy beams from the eyes, no flying, and so on. My list of possibilities necessarily shrank with that limitation, but it was fun to let my imagination take something like empathy and think “what if?” about it.

A large theme in this book is identity. Not only does Freya belong to a persecuted group because of her skill (vekers), but she also juggles her part-Norwegian, part-Filipino background with being Canadian—feeling “too Filipino to be Canadian and too Canadian to be Filipino.” What did you want to explore in terms of the importance of identity and belonging in this book?

I have always felt Too X to be Y and Too Y to be X myself, in more ways than just my mixed-race identity. That feeling has informed many things about the way I live my life and relate to other people. In fact you could safely say that identity and belonging are probably the main preoccupations of my life! With The Quiet is Loud I wanted to show many dimensions of belonging, and how they intersect with identity, how one often informs the other, and how the level of comfort in both can change the course of an entire life.

Following from that, most of Freya’s connection to her roots is through food—her father’s kare-kare, the bibinka (a coconut milk and rice flour Filipino Christmas cake), her mother’s pickled herring. Tell me a bit more about this connection to one’s roots through food.

To me, food is often the most accessible and immediate way to connect with a culture. It can also be highly personal, with favourite foods I turn to over and over (as I’m sure many people can relate to!). Growing up in a country that neither of my parents were from, I felt most connected to my different cultures through their food. With food, there’s no feeling of missing out on context or language, which are things I often worried about when trying to approach my cultures in more overt ways. I gave Freya this same sort of tether to her respective cultures as her feelings about identity and belonging are quite similar to my own.

What are you working on now?   

I recently finished a new fantasy novel called Seeker of the Lost Song that takes place in a culture with elements inspired both by medieval Finland and pre-colonial Philippines. The main character, Elis, lives in an empire where her people’s collective history, stories, and language are suppressed by those in power. She feels called to investigate a faraway rumour about strange magical happenings, which may be related to the disturbing memories she’s been having that are decidedly not her own.

I had been working on this novel in some form for four years, but once things aligned it burst out of me in just four months. Almost as soon as the first draft was finished, I started working on a new novel which is feeling like a sequel to me. It’s pretty exciting!

What would be your #1 piece of advice about the business side of writing (agents, publishers, publicity, etc.) to an emerging author?

Protect your energy! The business and promotional side of writing is often not where writers feel comfortable, and it can feel overwhelming even when it’s exciting. Personally, I have social anxiety that means author events wipe me out the next day, even if (and when) I look forward to them and enjoy them at the time. It was difficult to notice that energy drain at first, and I was quite hard on myself about it. I felt somehow ungrateful. But after a while I learned to accept that the anxiety will happen to some degree and it signifies nothing about my capability or my professionalism. I do my best at the time, and allow for a quiet day afterwards as much as I can.

Thank you, Samantha! And now, here is The Quiet is Loud Playlist!!

I wrote The Quiet is Loud often in silence, but other times while listening to my trusty “Chill Writing Music” playlist. It’s a mix of electronic, lyric-less music that sets a certain mood without distracting me. Some highlights: “Distant Dream” and “Utopian Façade” from John Carpenter’s Lost Themes II album; the Tron: Legacy soundtrack; and “Hallucid” and “Phony,” a couple of songs from the soundtrack to the video game Tetrisphere. I’ve never actually played the game, but I have a nostalgic soft spot for ‘90s techno so I couldn’t resist.

Samantha Garner is the author of the literary sci-fi novel The Quiet is Loud, published by Invisible Publishing in 2021. Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in Broken Pencil, Sundog Lit, Kiss Machine, The Fiddlehead, Storychord, WhiskeyPaper, and The Quarantine Review. She lives and writes in the Toronto area. Continually searching for new ways to share a story, Samantha has also created several handmade books and zines, and has been blogging since the Geocities glory days of the late ’90s. You can read more about her at samanthagarner.ca.