Thank you both for joining me – I thought we could talk more broadly about writing and publishing in NL. You’ve both recently published books – Jen, can you tell us about yours?

Jen Winsor. So, my book is called Ship Moms. It’s a collection of stories from women who worked on cruise ships and got pregnant whilst working on cruise ships. There are ten stories in the book, one of which is mine. And not only is it about women getting pregnant on cruise ships, but it’s also a bit of a glimpse into what it is like to work on a cruise ship, and all the fun and fascinating and scandalous things that happened. People are very curious because it is a very unique and bizarre workplace and workplace culture.

Jay McGrath. Am I allowed to ask a question?

Absolutely, yes.

JM. I’m curious about how you managed like to get other folks to share their stories. Or were these people that you would have known, had relationships with?

JW. No, I knew none of them. I put a random callout on social media, and I also was in a lot of different Facebook groups that were just for crew. So I just spread the word online, and I asked my cruise ship friends to spread it as well. And I got about 100 women. But really, it’s just a drop in the bucket of how many women are out there in this situation. I’m administrator on this Facebook group that’s called Royal Moms, and it’s just moms from Royal Caribbean alone. And I think there’s 3,000 women on that page alone. They’ll post a picture and it’ll be like: Here’s our baby. I’m from Australia, Dad’s from Italy. We conceived in Bahamas, and now we live in Jamaica. I just thought it was so adorable, and just made me make get my wheels turning, like, my God, think of all the stories that are out there.

JM. And so how did you get from 100 to 10?

JW. it wasn’t easy. Frankly, I wanted to pick the most compelling stories, the ones that I thought were going to really entice a reader. Some of them are a little sad, some of them are happy. I wanted to have a mixture.

JM. And geographically? Where are they from?

JW. All over. Australia, United States, Italy, South Africa; I’m the only Canadian.

JM. And I know I’m simplifying, but was the majority of it positive versus negative?

JW. The sad statistic is that the majority of women who get pregnant while working on cruise ships, they never see the fathers ever again. And [the father’s] families don’t know that these babies exist. I am, luckily, very, very luckily, the exception to the rule to that.

JM. I wonder how the stats from broader society would line up from, I guess, situations that kind of play out the cruise ships.

JW. I think it must be much higher just because of the way people are coming from all over to be in that place at that time. And then the whole nature of the work is taking you everywhere. It is also a very sad statistic that a lot of the men have families back home. They have their own wives, kids. They go on board, and they have these relationships. But they don’t want to disrupt their family back home, so they just kind of disappear.

Jay, Ship Moms is Jen’s first book, a memoir, but Hurricane House is fiction and not just your second novel but the latest in what you’re perceiving as an interlinked series.

JM. I’ve been calling it the Beckford Universe. Because the first book does take place in Beckford.

And when you were writing We’d Rather Fight Than Eat, did you know there was going to be at least one more book? 


JM. Oh, that’s a good question. I knew I wanted to tell a broader story. I don’t know if I had it blocked out that well. My publisher said, well, listen, we’ll support whichever direction you want to go. We also think it’s a good idea for you to show range early on. And so I had this other story in my mind. You know, Hurricane Fiona meets House of Hate. It’s essentially what I was trying to accomplish. With me, a situation will come, and then very quickly after the characters will come. Nowhere near fully developed. And then I’ll just kind of go from there. So I had a hurricane story. And I wanted to tell a story about generational trauma. I ultimately enjoy consuming stories about people in isolation. I think there’s always going to be an aspect for me, and the stuff I publish, of people who are isolated, for whatever reason. In the first book [WRFTE], they’re isolated by a societal collapse; in the second by a really bad hurricane. At some point I also realized that some of the people in the second story are going to fit into the first.

Are you keeping a concordance of your characters and in timelines?

JM. In my brain. The next one is going to be a murder mystery. And it’s going to take place at a wake service, and the reason that there’s not a lot of people at a wake service is because some of their broader family are caught up in a hurricane. It happens sort of simultaneously as the second book is happening.

You mentioned Percy Janes‘ House of Hate.

JM. House of Hate, for me, and I don’t know if it was high school or it was my undergrad at university, but House of Hate was the novel that I read that I went, oh, we can do this here. Like, we can tell this kind of a story. here.

I’d like to ask you about your writing processes now.

JW. It took me eight years. Eight years. ‘Cause I’ve never done this before, I have no writing history, no credits. I won a writing contest in grade four, and got published in The Telegram. That’s it. So that impresses me so much, Jay, that you can do a book in two years. And not only that, I have, almost this sense of intimidation with fiction writers, because how do you come up with all that amazing stuff?

JM. I’m not saying I do it well.

JW. I just find it so impressive.

JM. To me, to write a nonfiction story, one of the things that comes to my mind is it’s an increased vulnerability. There’s a fair chunk of me in the two books I have out. But I can say, hey, this is just a novel.

JW. You are right, because it is very vulnerable, and, I really didn’t anticipate to put all the stuff in there that I put in there, because there’s a lot of things in there that are not flattering. It’s a lot. It’s been a lot for my parents to read, and some close friends and family, a lot of people learn things about me that they didn’t know. The feedback from people, and how to process people’s processing of it has been very interesting for sure.

JM. Did you find, based on some of the things that you had just said, was there some time during the process that you went, oh, I’m going to need to be more vulnerable? I’m just wondering your plan, your original vision of it.

JW. My original vision is not at all the book. My original vision was fluffy. And it just went in a different kind of direction. I found the writing process very therapeutic. Keeping journals was something I always did, and the book even starts with a journal entry, word for word. But then throughout the writing process, I was writing other things that were going on. And it’s a real humbling experience to be reading your protagonist on the page and being like, my protagonist is a hot mess. And it’s hard when it’s yourself. But these women shared their lives with me. And they opened up to me and told me things that weren’t so flattering, too. So, I just felt I needed to also put myself out there as much as they did.

JM. I don’t know if I’ve ever, or will ever start out with the idea of, this will be fluffy, was that the word?

JW. Fluffy.

JM. I always have a dark side to the stuff I want to write because that’s also something I’m interested in. You try to have your fictional characters feel as real as possible, but there’s something in me and in the process where, when I’m working on a character, trying to get the words down, then you turn the volume all the way up. I’m not big on dividing characters up into heroes and villains, because I just don’t think life works that way. But I think you read Hurricane House and go, okay, well, the villain is obviously the mother. But you textualize it. The other characters give her a backstory. Really, it’s about choices. Is she evil? I think she’s made some choices that have ultimately led her to this particular place. And if she’d been better equipped at different times in her life she could have made different choices. And then her kids come along, and arguably they make better choices. I’m not big on characters that are just heroes and villains. Like are any of us? I’m off track, Joan, I apologize.

No worries, this is a conversation about writing.

JM. I’m also not big on a question of which genre [a book is]. Is life a genre? One chapter is a comedy, the next chapter is, I don’t know, a horror story.

Do you write every day?

JM. No. No. I try to. I’d like to, but, like, I know I’ve said this to you before, I bes tired. I’d like to write a night, but a lot of times now, by 10 or 10:30, or 9:30, probably a more accurate time for me when I would start writing, I could write, or … I could sleep. Because I bes tired.

When you do write, do you tend to write a lot quickly? I mean, you’re obviously doing something.

JM. Yes, absolutely. But I also believe that there’s no such thing as good writing. It’s only good editing. There’s times where you’re chasing words. And you can’t get down fast enough. Like the dinner scene in HH. But I wouldn’t say that first draft of that was good. It was only going back the second time, the third time, however many times. I’m not a good writer. I feel like I can make it good when I go back.

And Jen what about your process? Were you working on it every day, or how did that happen? 


JW. Certainly not every day. It was it was a slow burn. There were times I was working on it a lot, and then there was times that it was put right to the side and I wasn’t thinking about it at all. It was ebbs and flows. But once I had the publishing deal, and, you know, okay, this is actually happening, then I put a big push on, and I actually went to my great-grandparents’ house on Fogo Island, and spent an entire week there by myself. and treated it as a bit of a writing retreat. Told all the family, no one’s allowed to show up and chat with me, because you’ll distract me.

JM. So, I have a bit of a funny story with mine. Because I worked on WRFTE for a while. I’d work chapters through some of the creative writing courses at MUN, and then I had a manuscript, but it was sitting there. I was sitting on it, and it was during COVID. And cameos were big at the time. And my sister … my sister knew how much, growing up, I idolized Bret the Hitman Hart. Big wrestling fan, growing up. And so for my birthday, she got me a cameo from Bret Hart. But the angle was, he was wishing me happy birthday, and congratulating me on having a book – which I didn’t have. My sister’s clever like this, right? As soon as I finished watching, I was like, one of my childhood heroes thinks I have a book, and I don’t have a book. So that day, I submitted it to four local publishers. And a year and a bit later I got an email from Flanker.

Check back next week for part 2 of NQ’s conversation with Winsor and McGrath.