Carleigh Baker

My guest on this episode is Carleigh Baker. Carleigh’s debut story collection, Bad Endings, published by Anvil Press in 2017, won the City of Vancouver Book Award, and was also a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Emerging Indigenous Voices Award for fiction. Foreword magazine said, about Bad Endings, “Baker is a skillful, sensitive writer with an uncanny gift for subtle, dark humor and the ability to assume the viewpoint of her characters […] There is no judgment or condemnation in these stories, but a tender, deep savoring of the quirks that make us human.”

 

Carleigh and I talk about how winning a major award was both a shock and the occasion for some private head-swelling, about the experience (so far) of moving from a small independent press to McClelland & Stewart, and about how she keeps forgetting the very lessons she emphasizes when she is teaching creative writing.

 

Carleigh Baker: carleighbaker.com

Music: "simple-hearted thing" by Alex Lukashevsky. Used with permission.

Contact Nathan Whitlock at nathanwhitlock.ca/contact