“All my characters come from some small or large part of myself”: An Interview with Hollay Ghadery

All Lit Up: Congrats on your upcoming short story collection, Widow Fantasies. Can you tell our readers a little of what to expect from your book? 

Hollay Ghadery: Thank you! Readers can expect short (really short fiction) that loosely circles the ways in which fantasies can help us learn more about ourselves—and not always things we want to learn, or are ready to discover. Some of the stories are flash fiction. I don’t think there is a story that extends much beyond 1,500 words. Most of the stories are set in domestic spheres, and all have something to do with the lives of girls and women.

ALU: Early reviews of your book are spectacular with lots of praise for your vibrant language, and for your expertly crafted characters. Some reviewers like author Kathryn Mockler have said you distill “the scope of an entire relationship or, in some cases, an entire lifetime into a single scene.” Can you tell us a little about your approach to writing scenes? 

HG: I’m floored by the early responses. And delighted and grateful, of course. Most scenes start with me hyper-focusing on one thing: an orange glint of Kubota tractor in the sun, cornfields reflected in the eyes of a cat looking out a window, the fringe on a patio blanket blowing in the wind, or the way a father carries his baby. Then the story moves outward from there. I look around and see what else I notice in the scene that’s emerging in my head, and what I am noticing (and what I am not) tells me about where the story is going and who is telling the story.

ALU: What about character? Where do you get your inspiration from? What’s your approach to writing characters in general?

HG: All my characters come from some small or large part of myself. I’d like to say that I create these people out of thin air but all of the characters in Widow Fantasies are rooted in who I am. Or who I wish I was. People who know me might see me more clearly in some characters than others (for example, in the first story, where a mother grows inordinately attached to a goldfish or the story about the women who has a nub on the end of her tongue surgically removed), but I am in them all, as self-absorbed as that may be. 

ALU: You have quite the resume of work, from memoir to poetry to fiction. And we hear you’ve got a novel coming out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, a children’s book with Guernica Editions in 2027. As a multi-genre writer, can you talk a bit about what it’s like switching between forms? How do the genres overlap or inform each other?

HG: My brain is more poetry-inclined: the way I see and feel the world in fragments and shards and slants. So I suppose all my projects start as seeds of various poems that either changed or didn’t change into something else. But poetry informs everything.

I work by honouring this feeling and let the project turn into whatever it wants. The processes on the whole isn’t as magical as it may seem. That initial flash of inspiration can feel a little magical I suppose, but the rest of it is just grunt work: me writing and writing until I can see more clearly what I felt in the beginning. I have tried to force certain feelings into forms they didn’t belong in (my memoir Fuse was originally a novella) but the output of that method has proved somewhat disastrous so I tend not force form anymore. 

Switching between forms is easy in this respect: the form cannot exist as fully as I hope in any other form than it ends up being. I also read and have read widely, across form and genre, so I am continuously immersed in different forms. I am naturally curious and want to explore what I can do with these forms. In the case of Widow Fantasies, I was writing it with four young children and much like women who are subjected to the brunt of the emotional and physical labour in heteronormative domestic partnerships don’t have a lot of time to fantasize, I didn’t have time to write longer stories with more involved plots. So the form of these stories was informed by my life at the time. But I wanted the stories to exist as fully as I was existing, the form (the stories) reflecting the content (how I was experiencing existence). 

ALU: What do you hope readers take from your writing in general?

HG: I hope readers stay curious: about themselves and their world. To embrace our multitudes and try never to lose sight in the humanity of others. 

ALU: Have you read any books lately you can’t stop thinking about?

HG: This is a tough one. I am going to go with the one that comes to mind immediately because it has such a staggering ending: A Simple Carpenter by Dave Margoshes, which is a novel about a man who wakes up on a ship with no memory of who he is or how he got there. But he can understand every language spoken and speak it, miraculously. He is also immediately adept at several skilled tasks and while he just thinks he is lucky, the people around him begin to think he is the Messiah. The story is laced with magic realism and set in the 1980s in the Middle East. The tensions there echo the same tensions that persist there now. I recommend this book to everyone (and want people to talk with me about that ending!). It is such a gorgeous examination of humanity, hope, and who we are without our memory. 

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Hollay Ghadery is a multi-genre writer living in rural Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph and her poetry, short stories, and personal essays have appeared in literary journals and magazines around the world, including The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead. The Antigonish Review, Today’s Parent, and CBC Parents. Fuse, her acclaimed memoir of mixed-race identity and mental illness, was published by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her debut collection of poetry, Rebellion Box, was released with Radiant Press in April 2023 and in 2022, its title poem won The New Quarterly’s Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Prize. Hollay’s short-fiction collection, Widow Fantasies, is due out with Gordon Hill Press in 2024. Her debut novel is forthcoming with Palimpsest Press in spring 2026 and her children’s book with Guernica Editions in 2027.

Widow Fantasies is available here on All Lit Up.