Karen Quevillon
Over the past decade, my short fiction, nonfiction, and poetry has been published in a variety of North American literary journals, including Grain Magazine, Geist Magazine, FreeFall, In/Words, Obra/Artifact, The Fieldstone Review, Woven Tale Press, and many others. I’m a contributor to the volume When All Else Fails: Motherhood in Precarious Times and the League of Canadian Poets’ collection Heartland: Poems for the Love of Trees. My debut novel, The Parasol Flower, hit the shelves in 2020.
Born and raised in a small town in Ontario, Canada, I grew up running through the woods and escaping into the book worlds created by authors like L.M. Montgomery, Monica Hughes, and Richard Adams. I wrote short stories at a young age, but the joy of writing fiction did not seem “serious” enough to pursue as a career.
Instead, I wrote lots of essays, eventually earning a PhD in Philosophy from Northwestern University in Chicago. While researching my dissertation in Paris, I binge-read English novels to counteract my feelings of isolation. It occurred to me the problems I was analyzing in my academic work—the making of gendered and sexualized identities within networks of social and political power—might be more richly explored and encountered through story. Time spent as a foreigner also gave me a new awareness and appreciation for my mother tongue.
Returning to Canada, I started a family, and gave up on a tenure-track job in the academy. I began freelancing as a copywriter while teaching college writing, literature, and humanities courses on a part-time basis. I also started writing a novel. Creative writing, however impractical it was, turned out to be something that I had to do. It was either my purpose in life, or else a serious addiction.
I enjoy writing in different genres and breaking writing rules, such as ‘write what you know’ and ‘write every day.’ I’m fascinated by what we commonly refer to as the imagination, and how the practices of reading and writing relate to one’s sense of self. When I’m not at my desk I can usually be found walking in the woods.
My deepest gratitude goes to my two inspirational children.