Eliza Robertson is a super-talented author who I met when I worked at The Malahat Review while she was doing her undergraduate degree in writing at UVic. She’s gone on to receive a PhD, to win or be shortlisted for almost every writing award under the sun, and to be reviewed in places like the New York Times and The Guardian. She’s published a book of short fiction, Wallflowers, a novel, Demi-Gods, and her true crime book, I Got A Name: The Murder of Krystal Senyk, is out later this month.

Your writing career kind of took off when you were an undergraduate writing student at UVic and all of a sudden you’d won like every literary magazine’s fiction contest! You were in the Journey Prize Anthology twice and won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize all before you even had a book published. I’m sure I’m missing something, too. How do you think winning these prizes helped you in ultimately scoring a great agent and book deal for your debut? Do you think it’s important for emerging writers to enter their work in contests in order to get noticed?

It was vital for me. The publishing industry is pretty opportunistic. The moment you win a contest or prize, there’s a perception of momentum around you, which makes your work more attractive to agents and publishers. My agent submitted my story collection to publishers when she did because I had just won the Commonwealth Short Story prize. And I got my agent initially because my editor-to-be had emailed out of the blue to read more of my work. One of her authors — a judge of a contest I had won a couple years earlier — had sent her my story. So absolutely, these contests made a difference for me. And absolutely writers should submit their work as often as possible. (Of course, it helps if you actually read the journals and understand what kind of work they publish.)

I’m wondering if you have any tips on time management. You work on the CHANI astrology app  as well as teaching at McGill and writing. How do you manage your life in order to carve out writing time among all the other work that you do?

There was only one semester where I had to overlap my work at CHANI with McGill teaching, and I did not rest often. Never mind write! I’m not sure my answer will be really helpful, because I have a pretty poor work/life balance. I don’t know if it’s by design or by habit, but I definitely spend much of most days working. I also don’t have any other human beings dependent on me, so I have the luxury to be self-focused in that way. But I’m not doing a very good job of keeping up my writing time. This past year, my spare hours were spent editing (and editing and editing) my upcoming nonfiction book. When I am able to focus on new writing, I’ll start my day pretty early. But I find it hard to concentrate if I don’t have a solid chunk of 4-5 hours at my disposal. So unless I work 12-13 hours every day, it’s tricky. A lot of it falls to weekends. My social life suffers. I’m still trying to figure it all out.

Your two books of fiction (Wallflowers and Demi-gods) were shortlisted for the 2016 Canadian Authors Association Emerging Writer Award and won the 2018 Quebec Writers’ Federation Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction respectively. How do you feel about book awards and the credibility they give to an author or even just how they help a book to be noticed by the reading public?

As much as editors and agents can be opportunistic, the same can be said for booksellers and readers. I don’t mean this as a criticism. People perceive shortlists as helpful funnels and filters. There are so many books published each year—how do you know what to read? Books that win major prizes are marketed most insistently because there’s already energy behind them. It’s more likely that the money going into marketing won’t be wasted. That said, not all prizes have an equal share of media attention or prestige…

You’ve been reviewed by some impressive publications: the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and the Guardian, to name a few, and I’m sure those reviews helped your books to be noticed, read, and taken seriously by readers. Do you have any thoughts on the dwindling state of book reviewing in Canada?

I’m really grateful for those reviews. I do think they help books get taken seriously. The dwindling state of literary criticism in Canada makes me sad and a bit worried. Book endorsements already come from who you know much of the time (though not all the time—sometimes you get lucky, or a good book finds its way into celebrated hands). Reviews can help a book get taken seriously if you don’t already have an engine of famous writer friends around you. And anyway, I think cultures that take literature seriously enough to discuss books, to devote page space to them, is a signal of health. But I’m biased.

Your latest book, I Got A Name: The Murder of Krystal Senyk (Penguin, 2023) is a true crime book, which is a bit of a divergence from the two books of literary fiction you’ve published. Can you tell me the story of how you decided to write this book and also what the process was like, how long did it take you, and what was it like to write a work on nonfiction as opposed to fiction?

Writing this book was hands-down the hardest and most humbling experience I’ve ever had. To be clear, I never really meant to write a true crime book. Krystal Senyk had been a colleague of my childhood neighbour in Victoria. One day in 2015, that neighbour left an envelope on my doorstep with my name written on it. Inside were pages of writing that had been taken from Krystal’s work computer after she was murdered in 1992. It was not clear why my neighbour decided to give me these pages, except apparently my name kept “popping into her head.” When I read what happened to Krystal, I couldn’t stop thinking about her. So while I didn’t seek out this story, I said yes to it.

As far as what the process was like: terrifying. I can be socially anxious at the best of times, so it was daunting to cold-call Krystal’s family and talk about what happened. It’s also a very different thing to write about someone else’s trauma, someone else’s grief. I wrote this book, but it’s not my story. That’s still a tension I wrestle with. I will say, my research collaboration with former journalist Myles Dolphin was invaluable. He lived in the Yukon at the time, while I was in Montreal, so he was able to talk to certain people in person as well as spend time in the archives. And it was simply a relief to have someone to confide in about all this.

What are your thoughts on Goodreads? Do you think authors should ignore it, worry about it, engage with it? Do you ever use it to decide whether or not to read a book?

I wish I be more effective at using tools like this. I tend to avoid reviews unless someone sends them to me, and the same goes for comments on Amazon or Goodreads. I just don’t want to know. It’s probably helpful to engage with it, like other forms of social media, which I mostly avoid at the moment. I never use Goodreads to decide whether or not to read a book, but that doesn’t mean it’s not useful.

How do you deal with the deflating side of being an author—not being mentioned on lists of books “we’re anticipating,” not being on awards lists, negative reviews, etc.?

My last answer might be telling: avoidance? I do try to avoid reading online comments and reviews. If I know a negative review is out there, I will read it, but I won’t scour the internet for it in the first place. That sounds punishing. I also think that a sign of a good book is that it inspires diverse opinions. If everyone likes something, or is too scared to say otherwise, it feels like the literary equivalent of “highly palatable” food items. Corn pops or something. There’s nothing wrong with highly palatable literature, but I know it’s not what I write much of the time. So I guess I don’t expect everyone to love it? But rejection still sucks. Being a writer is demoralizing. It helps me to have a career outside writing as well — at least then I have a distraction, and the sense that not all my eggs are in one basket.

What would be your number one piece of advice for an emerging author (a) creatively and (b) about the business side of writing?

Creatively, I think it’s important to feed your writing brain with a diverse diet (more food metaphors, sorry!). I do really recommend reading indie literary journals, because often they contain some of the freshest and most interesting work out there. More so than major publishing, to be frank. I also recommend reading outside your genre — poetry, fiction, non-fiction, plays, whatever — as well as outside literature all together. I suspect studying math or psychology or geology (or any subject) would be rich for diversifying your reservoir of what you can pull from. For the same reasons, I don’t think it’s necessary to pursue the academic track and (try to) obtain a teaching job. Those positions are hard to come by, as we all know, and I think it can help our writing and our mental health if we’re doing something totally outside the writing world. That’s been true for me anyway.

And finally, what are you working on now?

I am very slowly working a new novel. I wrote a whole draft of it before I started working full-time, but now I’m dismantling it and reworking substantial sections. It’s a little early to divulge details, but it involve biomimetic architecture and the fertile mess of human bodies.

Eliza Robertson’s 2014 debut story collection, Wallflowers, was shortlisted for the East Anglia Book Award, the Danuta Gleed Short Story Prize, and selected as a New York Times Editor's Choice. Her critically acclaimed first novel, Demi-Gods, was a Globe & Mail and National Post book of the year and the winner of the 2018 QWF Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize. She studied creative writing at the University of Victoria and the University of East Anglia, where she received the Man Booker Scholarship and Curtis Brown Prize. In addition to being shortlisted for the CBC Short Story Prize and Journey Prize, Eliza’s stories have won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, Elizabeth Jolley Prize, and 3Macs carte blanche Prize. Her literary non-fiction book, I Got a Name, is forthcoming with Hamish Hamilton Canada in May 2023.