“We get to the places we get to the way we do:” An Interview with Suzette Mayr

Abstract

Suzette Mayr is the author of five novels including her most recent book, Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall. Her fourth novel, Monoceros, won the ReLit Award and the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize, was longlisted for the 2011 Giller Prize, and nominated for a Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction and the Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction. Monoceros was also included on The Globe and Mail’s 100 Best Books of 2011. Her novels have also been nominated for the regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Henry Kreisel Award for Best First Book. She has done inter-disciplinary work with Calgary theatre company Theatre Junction and visual artists Lisa Brawn and Geoff Hunter. She was also a writer-in-residence at the University of Calgary and at Widener University, Pennsylvania. She is a former president of the Writers’ Guild of Alberta and teaches Creative Writing at the University of Calgary.

Among other things, this interview touches on Mayr’s interest in the supernatural; what it means to be a prairie writer; her most recent novel, Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall; the tensions between academia and art; and writing during a global pandemic.