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Women Asking Women: Angela Antle & Susan Grundy
In this conversation, authors Angela Antle (The Saltbox Olive, Breakwater Books) and Susan Grundy (Black Creek, Inanna Publications) reflect on the intersections of history, memory, and art in their work. Through discussions of ancestry, visual storytelling, and creative evolution, they explore how fiction can both uncover the past and imagine more just futures.
In honour of Women’s History Month, we asked women writers from across the country to pair up and interview each other about their process, their inspirations, and everything in between.
Interview: Angela Antle & Susan Grundy
SUSAN GRUNDY: Following your impressive career as a visual artist, documentarian and journalist, I’m curious to learn what prompted you to turn to fiction? How did you experience the process of writing The Saltbox Olive compared to your past projects? Were there new or unexpected challenges?
ANGELA ANTLE: Thanks, Susan, that’s very kind. I’ve always been “medium agnostic”—but as a keen fiction reader and co-host of the Writers at Woody Point Literary Festival, I was nervous…okay, terrified to start writing fiction. That is, until I took a Memorial University creative writing course from Lisa Moore. She’s an incredibly passionate and generous—life-changing—teacher and mentor. The writing exercises and class discussions about that rich, liminal space between non-fiction and fiction freed me from whatever constraints I’d placed upon myself. Eventually, I found a quote from the Icelandic writer Haldor Laxness that helped me get on with it: “The closer you try to approach history through facts, the deeper you sink into fiction.”
There were many challenges. So little is written about the 166th, but there are thousands of photographs of the Allied campaign in Italy, and they guided me when the going got rough. Those rich and textured images also inspired the character of Barbara Kerr, who was modelled on Canada’s Karen Hermiston, our only female war photographer. Another little-known story.
There were also several serendipitous meetings with children of the 166th, and one former member, Reverend Wesley Oake who remembered my great uncles. They were all so generous with photographs, letters, journals, stories, and one shared a mimeographed hand-drawn map that became the tale’s scaffold.
ANGELA: Photographs—and daguerreotypes play a role in your novel—what do those mediums reveal that the written record cannot?
SUSAN: “The Picture-Superiority Effect” theory developed by Canadian psychologist Allan Paivio suggests that visuals (pictures) are stored in two ways in our memory—as an image and as a word or phrase describing the image. Words, on the other hand, are stored only as a word itself, thereby requiring more cognitive effort to remember. The pictures and images that run through Black Creek—old photographs and mystical visions—evoke disturbing ancestral pain memories that Kate eventually embraces, leading her to a more peaceful place.
SUSAN: One of the descriptions of your book mentions how “the past can ripple outward for generations”—a phenomenon I strongly relate to with my ancestry and one that I wrote about. My understanding is that you have a family connection to the history of the 166th Royal Newfoundland Field Regiment that inspired The Saltbox Olive. Did your writing exploration into history, through the journey of your character Caroline Fisher, have an influence on you in the present?
ANGELA: In answer to the last question. Yes. Writing this story helped me make sense of the world’s turn to authoritarianism and how, like in the 1940s, it will be up to ordinary people to resist.
I chose the verb “ripple” because the older I get, the more I’m tuned into the linked circularity of time. The Saltbox Olive doesn’t follow a straight arrow or a single male war hero. Instead, I overlapped the stories and temporality using what I understand of Ursula LeGuin’s Carrier Bag Theory. Although the tale revolves around my great uncles’ time in Italy, it intersects with the lives of other historical and contemporary characters.
Initially, I started writing to search for the answers to why the surviving uncle burned his deceased brother’s wartime letters. But I learned so much more than the possible reasons behind that act of erasure. I now have a much better understanding of the bravery of regular people, especially the Italian women who got involved in the partisan movement, who took on society’s limits and risked the violence of Nazi occupiers to resist Fascism and claim a more equitable life. They were fighting for a new Italy, yet many were forced back into limited domestic roles when the war was over. It’s a story that, sadly, still plays out in so many locales.
ANGELA: Did you have any serendipitous moments that influenced Black Creek or the writing journey?
SUSAN: After my mother passed away in Montreal (a grueling ordeal in every way) I organized a respite trip to Toronto with my twenty-two-year old daughter. On our last day, we visited Prospect Cemetery on St. Clair Avenue West. A stifling July afternoon and hungover from our mother-daughter silliness at the Drake Hotel the night before, we eventually located my grandmother’s grave. (She died a month before I was born.) I emptied the jar of my mother’s ashes I’d been lugging around in my tote and smoothed out a crumpled piece of paper with an ancestral clearing I’d scribbled down during our train journey to Toronto: We honour our mothers, our grandmothers and our sisters. We release and let go of the sadness, pain, anguish and all fear…My daughter grabbed my hand and squeezed tight as I spoke, struck by the intensity of the message. Mother and daughter standing over mother and daughter; a powerful moment I will never forget. I started my research for Black Creek soon after.
ANGELA: Your protagonist Kate is an architect and well-versed in design history. You write with such skill about contemporary and past building techniques, did you study architecture?
SUSAN: I wish I had studied architecture! Next lifetime. Meanwhile, I derive enormous pleasure from admiring the shape and design of buildings, old and new. Not sure, but maybe this passion was passed down from my Stong male ancestors; my great-great-great grandfather’s impressive grain barn at The Village of Black Creek being a living example, as well as his son’s farmhouse and barn still standing on York University’s Keele campus. Unfortunately, the barn is boarded up, empty. I’m increasingly concerned that the building will fall victim to demotion by neglect. The university is not responding to my inquiries…
SUSAN: Thank you for writing The Saltbox Olive, a big little-known story that feels hugely important to share in Newfoundland and everywhere. Do you have another book in mind?
ANGELA: Thank you. Currently. I’m writing a speculative podcast called The Hag Islands set in a post-oil, North Atlantic Archipelago. It’s part of my Environmental Humanities PhD on petrocultures, podcasting, disinformation, and climate justice. I’m using the arts-based method of research-creation to challenge listeners to imagine how futures—without oil—can be better and more just. When I finish the PhD, I plan to develop the story into a novel.
ANGELA: Did you travel back to Rotterdam or trace the route of your Huguenot ancestors? Or is that fiction?
SUSAN: Not fiction. My farming ancestors fled religious persecution in France and settled in the Palatinate near Darmstadt, Germany. A series of severe winters killed their crops, forcing them to move again, this time to avoid starvation. They floated on log rafts down the Rhine River to Rotterdam where they used their wagon building and silk weaving skills to earn enough wages to afford the North Atlantic passage to Philadelphia. Not exactly a luxury cruise.
ANGELA: What spurred the writing of this book at this time in your life?
SUSAN: The opening chapter of Black Creek—Kate’s deathwatch in her mother’s hospital room—reflects my personal experience, with the important exception that unlike Kate, I was already aware of the ancestral pain my mother carried from her female lineage. I felt an urgent need to break the cycle, not only for myself, but for my daughter. (It was too late for my sister who has struggled with a serious mental illness since adolescence.) I dove into my Stong family research, touring the log cabin and barn at The Village at Black Creek, exploring the boarded up farmhouse on York campus, sorting through family archives at the university library, studying key events in Toronto history and imagining the impact on the six generations of Stong woman before me. Shortly after I’d finished a first draft of the manuscript, my daughter presented me with two different photographs of the same scene mounted in a single frame, one of herself posing on a canal bridge in Amsterdam and another of my mother twenty years earlier on the same bridge. Interesting that my daughter stands in full sunlight while my mother is blurred in shadow. Had I broken the cycle? My answer is yes!
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Angela Antle is a writer, artist, and documentary maker based in St. John’s, Newfoundland. Antle’s writing has appeared in Riddle Fence, Newfoundland Quarterly, and CBC.ca. As a journalist, Angela has rowed a dory through the Narrows, covered the subculture of Florida’s Spring Break, taken bumpy komatik rides on the coast of Labrador, hitchhiked from France to Newfoundland on a fishing boat, interviewed a Prime Minister on Broadway, and recorded Ron Hynes singing “Sonny’s Dream” in Ireland. She is an interdisciplinary PhD candidate at Memorial University, a member of Norway’s Empowered Futures Energy School, and was recently named the 2025 Rachel Carson Writer in Residence at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.
Inspired by the “pure vida” while living in Costa Rica, Susan Grundy veered from her thirty-year career in marketing to writing stories about the weight of emotional distress and how to step into an easier way of being. After her short fiction appeared in the Danforth Review and Montréal Writes, Susan dove into Mad Sisters, a highly personalized account of her caregiving journey for an older sister diagnosed with schizophrenia at the age of thirteen. She recently completed a second novel (Black Creek, literary fiction) about an architect who breaks free from a painful ancestral cycle in her female lineage. When not at her desk, Susan can be found walking in nature towards a café. She divides her time between Montreal and London.
Many thanks to Angela and Susan for a rich conversation about ancestry, memory, and the creative forces that shape their stories.
Order The Saltbox Olive here and Black Creek here, or from your local bookseller.
Stay tuned for our final Women Asking Women conversation between Brit Griffin and Mackenzie Nolan on Wednesday.
