Women Asking Women: Rebecca Morris & Nadia Staikos

REBECCA MORRIS: What inspired you to include magic in Until they Sleep? Why was it important for you use fairy tale traditions to tell this story?

NADIA STAIKOS: I’ve always loved fairy tales. As a kid, I’d covet any collections I could get my hands on—the older and more obscure and darker, the better. I’m drawn to their universality, the endless metaphor, the lessons and warnings hidden in the impossible. It’s not a conscious process, but when I go back and read things I’ve written, it’s clear to me that I write in order to process things I’ve been through or am scared of or have struggled with. There’s something about a fairy tale lens that creates a safe distance to explore feelings. It’s not so much “this is what happened to me,” but more “this is what could happen to anyone.”

I’m reading Sour Cherry by Natalia Theodoridou right now and am absolutely savouring it. There’s a line that says, “What else were fairy tales for, after all, if not for showing you the world as it is and helping you survive it?” That’s it for me, right there. The fairy tale tradition is a way for me to try to figure out the world, to try to make terrible things make sense, and to fix the seemingly unfixable. It’s like having a magic wand.

It’s also really fun. I love reading things with an element of the fantastical, and I love to write that way myself. It feels completely creative, and that’s where I get into a flow state. My first draft (if I can even call the mess that it was a draft) sounded a lot like this: And what if this happened? And then something like this? And imagine if something like this happened? It clearly takes a lot of revision to turn my ramblings into a cohesive story, but the rambling is joyful. I thought of so many elements of my book just as I’d be drifting off to sleep at night, shaking myself awake to jot things down before they were gone forever.

I also drew from family stories for inspiration for Until They Sleep. The stories my dad tells about his childhood have always felt like magic. I was raised in the suburbs of small-town Ontario, while he roamed mountainsides in Greece. I played in soccer leagues, while he got punished for tying balls of rags together to kick around with his brothers. I had a goldfish; he had a goat that his family eventually ate. The way his stories make me feel, that’s what I wanted to make readers feel.

NADIA: When I started writing the words that eventually became my book, I had no idea what I was starting. It wasn’t even meant to be a story at first, just reflections on the passage of time, and how life often takes us places that are completely unexpected. Did Other Maps start out as a short story or something else, or did you always have a novel in mind? How did you approach writing it, after being so accustomed to shorter forms? And now that you’re on the other side, do you feel like you learned any lessons for future projects?

REBECCA: I knew I wanted Other Maps to be a novel. I knew I had big ideas to explore, and I wanted the breadth of canvas available in a novel. Actually, though, I began working on this novel years before writing any short stories. My early drafts were very messy and disjointed, and I really struggled to balance the stories of my two main characters. When I started writing short fiction, I started paying a lot more attention to structure, pacing and character arcs, as well as the nitty-gritty details of word choice and chapter length. Eventually, I gave every chapter of Other Maps its own internal story arc, which provided more momentum to the book as a whole.

There was a lot of trial and error in my writing process. I had to learn how to tell this particular story, but I also had to discover what kind of writer I am and what writing strategies work for me. I learned that I like to write long, then cut down/distill my narrative; one of my drafts was 140, 000 words long and the published book is literally half that size. There were whole character arcs and subplots that I removed, so I learned the hard way not to polish any scenes until I’m certain they’re staying in the final book. I also learned to trust the reader more, that I don’t have to spell everything out to make a point.

I’m currently working on a second novel and I’m much more confident that I’ll be able to see this project through, that it will reach the standard I’m looking for. I get stuck a lot less. I still make wrong turns in terms of characters and story structure, but I catch and correct them a lot faster.

REBECCA: Your characters inhabit a world where ideas of sin and goodness are used to define women’s lives. How do your characters reject or redefine these concepts? How much do you think these concepts impact the lives of women and non-binary people in the real world?

NADIA: For me, the ideas of sin and goodness have a lot to do with desire and expectations, and the feelings that come up when the things I desire are the opposite of what I feel is expected of me. I grew up with a lot of shame stemming from struggles with gender-based expectations that I’ve only recently started to untangle. Puberty felt horrendous, but I was too ashamed to talk about it. Through the characters in Until They Sleep, I was able to explore some of that horror, and the ripple effects of stigma and silence. Which aspects of ourselves do we accept, and what do we do with the parts we cannot? How does our own guilt inform the way we treat others? Throughout the book, there are different characters coping with these struggles in different ways.

This meant a lot of wrestling with the consequences of conformity. Frona wants to fit in so desperately that she deludes herself and lives a lie. This plays out to the extreme for Frona and her loved ones, but the message is simple: If you pretend to be someone else in an effort to fit in, you prevent yourself and those you love from living authentic lives. Though many decades have passed since the time when Frona lived, we unfortunately still live in a society that doesn’t make it easy for people to live authentically.

I was thinking a lot about my grandmother while I was writing this book, and what it must have been like to come of age and move through most of her life in small Greek villages at that point in history. It’s a given, in a patriarchal world, that she would have felt shame and guilt about many things. I have a lot more privilege in my life than she did, but I know what it is to grapple with those types of feelings. It felt safer to examine how someone else might have fared in a stricter and more conservative time and place than to mirror my own experience too closely. But, the struggle is always there: Bodies are bodies, and humans are humans, and the world we live in has much room for improvement.

NADIA: The twists and turns in Other Maps keep the reader on their toes. Did you know how everything was going to play out when you set out to write it, or did some of Anna’s and Helen’s decisions come as surprises to you as you wrote? 

REBECCA: Almost everything I wrote was a surprise! I started Other Maps as a character study of Helen, which included very descriptive passages of her meticulous makeup routine. Then I started to wonder: why is she so obsessed with makeup? Oh, she’s covering up a port wine birthmark across her face. That was key to understanding her character. Then her old friend Anna burst onto the scene, angry and forceful and a completely different person than Helen remembered from high school, and I had to write a whole first draft to understand why Anna was so angry, that there was an assault buried in this narrative.

At times, writing Other Maps felt like listening to a conversation between my characters. Anna and Helen always felt like fully-realized people in my head, but it took many drafts for me to understand them and capture their stories. Then, as I worked on this book, there were times when a character grabbed the reins and steered the narrative in an unexpected direction, sped up the action or said the things I’d expected they would keep silent. It was important for me to show how characters influenced each other over the course of the book, that they all made “bad” decisions as well as good ones. People are messy! And writing is always more exciting when characters come to life and start to tell their own stories.

REBECCA: I’m fascinated with the ways that having children influences the lives of artists. Do you write differently since having children? How do you balance your writing practice with motherhood?

NADIA: Becoming a mother is what brought me back to a writing practice. I filled notebook upon notebook with stories when I was a kid. I pored over song lyrics and wrote reams of terrible poetry as a teenager. Then, as a twenty-something, I didn’t really write at all. Even though I remained a voracious reader, and even though I was always “writing” in my head and would have been thrilled to have written something, I didn’t write. Whenever a school assignment had any sort of creative writing element, I was so happy, yet I didn’t think to do it on my own time. Not until I became a mother.

It really hit me then, this yearning to create with words again. Becoming a parent is a shocking change—in many ways, but for me, I was most affected by the lack of time and space to be alone with my thoughts. Yet, surprisingly, having less free time helped me to focus and be more deliberate about how I spent it. I didn’t spend much time apart from my then six-month-old, but I arranged for a window of time to attend an evening writing class every week. Feeling like I had no time to write made me want it even more, and so I grabbed it when I could. It turned out to be a powerful motivator. When my kids were very small, that meant grabbing time during naps or preschool sessions. When they started school, I set an alarm for fifteen minutes before I had to pick them up in the afternoon, taking a break from work to squeeze in as many words as I could. That’s how I wrote a lot of this book.

NADIA: Why did you choose to set your novel in 2004? The world has changed so drastically since then, and I’m so curious about the choices that authors make about setting. Was it to be before the MeToo movement, or before the prevalence of cell phones, or was it because it’s a time when you knew Guelph really well, or when you were at an age in your own life that you felt like you wanted to explore through fiction? 

REBECCA: Those were all factors in my choice to set the story in 2004. My very first draft did incorporate cellphones and Facebook; it was set in 2009, which was when I started writing Other Maps. Very quickly, though, I changed my mind and moved the narrative earlier. Letting my characters use the internet for research was too easy, and I was more interested in exploring the connections between people in a small city like Guelph, the way information is passed through memories, rumours, and relationships. I also wanted to capture the sensory resonance of print materials like newspapers, yearbooks, and Polaroids.

I graduated from high school in 1995, so I pulled a lot of details from my Gen-X youth when describing Guelph in the 1990s and early 2000s. I wanted to examine the conflicting and hidden messages given to girls in that time about “acceptable” appearance and behaviour. There was a lot of victim-blaming around sexual assault, a lot of suppression, isolation and shame. Other Maps explores the after-effects of rape on a character who spends half the book denying that she was even assaulted. The MeToo movement has exposed many of the misunderstandings around sexual assault, but we still have this myth of the “perfect victim” as the only one who deserves society’s sympathy or justice. In some ways, things haven’t changed that much from 2004. We still have a long way to go.

Originally from Guelph, Rebecca Morris lives in Montreal. She earned an M.A. in French from Dalhousie, had three children in three years and taught high school before turning to writing full time. Rebecca’s short stories have won several awards, including the Malahat Review Open Season Award and the Humber Literary Review Emerging Writers Fiction contest. She is a Banff Centre alumna, recipient of a Canada Council Arts grant and an active member of the Quebec Writers’ Federation, where she has taught workshops on short fiction and narrative structure. Other Maps is her first novel.

Nadia Staikos (she/they) lives in Toronto with her two children. Their work has previously appeared in Barrelhouse, Poets & Writers, Lost Balloon, Montréal Writes, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions. She is former Prose Editor at Chestnut Review and works for United for Literacy, a national literacy charity. Her debut novel, Until They Sleep, was published by Guernica Editions in 2025.