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Women Asking Women: Joanna Cockerline & Steffi Tad-y
In today’s Women Asking Women, Giller-nominee Joanna Cockerline (Still, The Porcupine’s Quill) and poet Steffi Tad-y (Notes from the Ward, Gordon Hill Press) explore how writing can be an act of care: a way to honour resilience and hold space for hope.
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: Joanna Cockerline & Steffi Tad-y
STEFFI TAD-Y: How does teaching, mentorship, and community shape your artistic practice?Â
JOANNA COCKERLINE: Community is a huge part of Still. The novel was partially inspired by the strength, resiliency, and sense of mutual care in the community I have come to know through street outreach and is dedicated to them. While the novel does not tell the story of any single person, the spirit of the book was ignited by the sense of community among people who may have little but do have each other. Still has a strong sense of hope rooted in community, friendship, and connection.
JOANNA: What formal techniques (or their disruptions) are important for you as you express your ideas, emotions, or vision?
STEFFI: I rely on stream of consciousness a lot. A word moves into a new direction and I follow where the thread leads.Â
STEFFI: If you could wave a magic wand and have anyone in the world, alive or dead, read Still and receive feedback from them, who would they be?Â
JOANNA: If anyone alive or dead could read Still, I would be honoured and thrilled to have Toni Morrison read it, as I have so much respect for her as a writer and thinker. Her way with language, the emotional depth of her characters, and her ability to write about struggle with such eloquence are inspiration for my own writing.Â
STEFFI: First sentence or last sentence of a novel?
JOANNA: While a strong first sentence can capture a reader’s attention, I feel the last sentence of a novel has such power to stay in a reader’s mind and really linger, ruminate, and grow. The last line of Still hopefully brings the novel together in a meaningful way that embodies the essence of the book.
JOANNA: What interventions, differences, or connections do you most hope to make with your writing?
STEFFI: When I was sick and recovering from psychosis, I couldn’t read long texts. What I was able to read though were phrases stacked one after the other, like on a list or a short poem. Epigraphs too. I would open and choose a phrase or word to focus my mind on. This practice helped me in my recovery and what I hope my book, Notes from the Ward, can also offer. I hope it offers a line or a word to someone who’s also struggling. I wish for them not to feel alone.Â
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Steffi Tad-y is a disabled artist and writer from Manila. She is also the author of From the Shoreline and Notes from the Ward published by Gordon Hill Press. Receiving support from the Canada Council for the Arts and the BC Arts Council, Steffi’s poems often reflect on kinship, diasporic geographies, and formations of the mind. She lives in Toronto.
Joanna Cockerline is a a CBC Literary Awards prizewinner who has been published in national and international journals and magazines such as Room, The Fiddlehead, En Route, and International Human Rights Arts. She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2022. A long-time street outreach volunteer with an organization that won the City of Kelowna Volunteer Organization of the Year Award, Joanna has recently co-founded a street outreach organization dedicated to the unhoused community and, particularly, street-level sex workers.
Joanna lives with her family in the traditional, unceded Syilx Okanagan Territory of Kelowna, BC, where she teaches literature, communications, and creative writing at the University of British Columbia (UBC) Okanagan. Her novel, Still, was longlisted for the Giller.
Many thanks to Joanna and Steffi for their conversation on writing and community.
Order Still here and Notes from the Ward here, or from your local bookseller.
Next up on Women Asking Women is Michelle Berry and Terry Kirk. Stay tuned for their discussion on Friday.
