Liz Harmer is a Canadian writer, editor & teacher living in California. Her second novel, Strange Loops, a “propulsive, darkly gripping novel about the power and paradoxes of human longing, faith, trauma, and taboo” was released with Knopf Canada in 2023. Her first novel, The Amateurs, a speculative novel of technological rapture, came out in 2018. After receiving starred reviews in PW and Q&Q, The Amateurs was a finalist with the Amazon First Novel Award.

Before your first novel, The Amateurs (Vintage, 2019) came out, you’d been a finalist for the Journey Prize and you’d been included in Best Canadian Stories. After it was published, The Amateurs was a finalist for the Amazon First Novel Award. What role do you think these awards played in your success in finding an agent/publisher for your first novel, and in your first novel’s success? How do you feel generally about the importance of awards on a book’s or on an author’s success?

I know that the awards question is a fraught one in Canada, and that the industry (so I hear) seems to depend on them. I got advice early in my career that the path to publishing a novel was to get your stories published by major journals and then from there to have them nominated for a Journey Prize—oh, sure, I thought, no problem! So instead of crossing my fingers or giving up I just tried to have a bunch of irons in the fire, which meant submitting all over, to contests and to journals and hoped the odds would be in my favour. Getting a story nominated for the Journey Prize had been something I had long hoped for, but it didn’t happen until after my novel was already published, and then I had the weird experience of going to the Writers’ Trust Awards where my story was nominated but my novel wasn’t. I think these kinds of experiences should give you a sense of humour about yourself, and they helped me learn to be gracious (to myself and to others!) in both the wins and the losses. Doubtless, though, contest-wins had a huge impact on my career—they helped me break in, as my first major publications came about because of contests rather than regular submissions, and I did suddenly have attention on my work. It helped me feel better about my writing just when I needed that, and it gave me a whole world of other writers, which I’d been longing for, even though sometimes we might derisively call that networking. Having sat on juries myself, now, I am able to say the obvious—that whether or not you get a nomination or win an award depends on a swirl of weird factors. And as for the idea of what “success” might mean—well, I have far, far too many thoughts…

The process was totally different, too: The Amateurs has four main parts that leap frog one to the next. Strange Loops I wrote in this looping structure, so I was more often writing and rewriting and I moved into the next loop I was working on, whereas the parts of The Amateurs felt more like discrete elements. I think both took the same amount of time to write, though Loops felt faster—it felt like a ride I’d strapped myself to. I also wrote another novel that wouldn’t quite work in between those two, and it didn’t quite work partly because I couldn’t quite crack the structure.

You’re at work on a memoir now, too. Can you tell me a bit about it? Are you exploring the same themes that you do in your fiction writing, and if so, how does writing about them in a non-fictional form differ? Is it easier, harder, or just different?

Yes—and my memoir is done and resting in the way that I’m told bread dough should rest? The themes are similar. My personal obsessions come out of the major content of the memoir: madness, religious belief, and romantic love. My agent tells me the memoir is also about womanhood … so it’s not surprising to find these themes in my fiction, too, though maybe they are harder to see. I find that most of my fiction ends up fascinated by the question of what it means to touch something beyond the self, the prison of the self (if I may be dramatic about it).

You have several “day jobs,” I think—teaching writing at Chapman University in California, you’re an editor for Tab Poetry Journal, a program coordinator for the national media awards foundation, a publicist for Biblioasis, and a mother. How do you manage your time – or how do you ensure you take the necessary time to write between your other obligations?

Your new novel, Strange Loops (Vintage, 2023) just came out in January. How did the writing of this book differ from your experience writing your first novel? Was it any easier/faster the second time around?

The experience of writing these two books was completely different. Writing The Amateurs was more often an intellectual puzzle, and a great deal of fun. I was inventing companies and products and going around pushing people into portals. Writing Strange Loops was brutally intense and emotionally heavy; I felt sort of compelled, in the psychological (or maybe neurological) sense, to write it.

My list of jobs is ever-changing—all of this has changed since I last updated my bio: I’ve moved into a temporary full-time teaching position and I’m going to try to limit myself to only teaching and writing for just this year. I have a lot of responsibilities and expenses, and therefore I’m always having to work a lot. I’m always hoping for some windfall or secure job to rescue me. And I have three children!

But it is hard for me not to write. I start to get very unsettled when I haven’t been writing or thinking about a new project. I’ve not been finding it easy to manage my time, especially for the past few years, and I couldn’t tell you exactly how I manage to get writing done. I’m not precious about writing time, and I don’t have the luxury of a set writing schedule right now, and sometimes I’ll look at what I’ve managed to complete in a time that seemed to me creatively barren, and even I don’t know how it happened. I think it’s that if you are in a habit of writing (as life?) then the pages pile up.

On this topic, how do you feel that teaching writing—having to think about it and explain it to others as a craft, to understand and explain why a student’s writing is or is not working—has affected your own writing?

I love teaching writing. Every time I put a new class together it gives me the chance to do the things I miss doing from my early years of teaching myself how to write—taking stories and poems apart to understand them, or reading new pieces with an eye to learning something, or even getting new pieces written based on prompts I’ve assigned.

You’re a Canadian writer living in California. Do you ever feel left out of the Canadian literary scene or do you think this has only been a positive – like maybe you actually sell books in the States as well as in Canada?

I’m told it’s a positive. It forced me to meet American writers, forced me to find community here, and I’m glad I did. But I would prefer to live in Canada and hope I can make that happen soon. I don’t feel left out exactly, and I still feel like I’m a Canadian writer as well as strongly connected to my Canadian writing community, including the bookstores from my hometown of Hamilton. Recently an American writer friend asked me when I was going to stop calling myself a “Canadian writer living in California,” and I was aghast!

What are your thoughts on Goodreads? Do you think authors should ignore it, worry about it, engage with it? Do you ever use it to decide whether or not to read a book?

I never use it to decide whether to read a book. I, like many, take comfort in the fact that some of the best books I’ve ever read get many one-star reviews from users on the internet. When I worked in libraries, I remember being taught something called readers’ advisory. People read for all kinds of different reasons. Maybe one person reads for spectacular sentences, whereas someone else hates that sort of “self-indulgence.” Some people want to escape or feel better; others want to be harrowed and destroyed.

It’s amazing to think about your own book meeting someone you’ve never met who is bringing with them all the things that are currently obsessing, plaguing, irritating, fascinating them. I love the messiness of that. But I would never prescribe anything to anyone, except to say that no, I don’t go on Goodreads anymore. I did it with The Amateurs, and it was miserable, and I don’t want to feel that way again. You can get lost that way. It’s no way to live.

How do you deal with the deflating side of being an author—not being mentioned on lists of books “we’re anticipating,” not being on awards lists, negative reviews, etc.?

I get deflated and move on. My goals for my career have changed, and the deflation is far less than it once was. I have a strategy of having extremely low expectations for my work’s success in the world while having all the hope and optimism that writing requires. I think it’s some kind of detachment I’ve cultivated to survive all this pain. I’ll always write. I love to write.

What would be your number one piece of advice for an emerging author (a) creatively and (b) about the business side of writing?

All the best advice has already been given, but…

Creatively: Read everything. Read poetry even if you never write it—it will make your syntax and vocabulary more interesting. Read from many genres and time periods and diversely among authors with different cultural and class and sexuality and racial backgrounds from yourself. Let your mind wander. Give yourself prompts. Try writing that essay as a story, or that story as a poem. I have a million craft books but reading and writing are the main two things you must keep doing.

Business-wise: The main thing is don’t be an asshole. For me this means learning to graciously accept critique, to enjoy the successes of others (you hope others will be happy for you when it’s your turn!) as well as learning from your envy (it was because of some molten envy I had for someone that I realized the kind of writer I wanted to be). It means not acting like you are entitled to the time and attention of others. If you want to be in this career for the long haul, you don’t want people in the publishing industry to hear your name and think ugh, that guy’s the worst.

And finally, are you working on anything new now (other than your memoir)?

Why, thank you for asking! And thanks so much for this interview. I’m currently finishing edits on a novel, putting together what I think might be a book of poetry on the loss of faith in God as well as the end of my long marriage, and I’ve just started another new novel. Soon I’ll fix up the memoir, too.