"Writing's my playground. So I feel very free. I feel, you know, we're in a world where there's not a lot of freedom. I feel like I'm free on the page."

In this episode, Carrianne Leung challenges established ideas about craft and teaching, and shares how her writing aims to show the complexity and fullness of being human. She discusses:

• How her work as a sociologist intersects with her work as a fiction writer in its concerns
  with the narratives we tell ourselves and how she’s rethinking the traditional writer’s
  workshop 0:45
• The development of her first novel, The Wondrous Woo and magic realism as a political
  choice 5:03
• Moving beyond stereotypes about multiculturalism in her story collection That Time I Loved You  9:32
• How cross-stitching helped keep her creative and connected during the pandemic 15:00
• Imagining the apocalypse through the eyes of a raccoon in her new novel The After 18:26 
• Asking a group of middle school students to pinpoint the moment when they no longer felt like children and the care that fostered between participants. 21:02

You can find Carrianne ’s work here: The Wondrous Woo https://www.inanna.ca/product/wondrous-woo/That Time I Loved You https://www.harpercollins.ca/9781443452861/that-time-i-loved-you/

The music you heard on this episode was composed by Amadeo Ventura. You can hear more of his music at amadeoventura.weebly.com.

Visit TNQ.ca to access more of Carrianne Leung’s writing and teaching tips, including web extras about mentorship and cultural appropriation. If you like our podcast, please leave a review — it really helps other listeners find our show! Thank you!

Guest bio:

Carrianne Leung is a fiction writer and educator. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology and Equity Studies from OISE/University of Toronto. Her debut novel, The Wondrous Woo, published by Inanna Publications was shortlisted for the 2014 Toronto Book Awards. Her collection of linked stories, That Time I Loved You, was released in 2018 by HarperCollins and in 2019 in the US by Liveright Publishing. It received starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews, and was named as one of the Best Books of 2018 by CBC, That Time I Loved You was shortlisted for the Toronto Book Awards 2019, long listed for Canada Reads 2019 and was awarded the Danuta Gleed Literary Award 2019. Leung’s work has also appeared in the Puritan, Ricepaper, the Globe and Mail, Room, Prairie Fire and Open Book Ontario. Her third book titled, The After, will be released by Harper Collins Canada in 2022. She is currently faculty at the MFA program at the University of Guelph, where she teaches a course called “Decolonial Fiction.” Recommended reading: Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping by Matthew Salesses The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How To Decolonize the Creative Classroom by Felicia Rose Chavez