[00:00:01.140] – Rachel Thompson
Hi writers, and welcome back to Write, Publish, and Shine. Today I’m in conversation with Carrianne Leung, the author of That Time I Loved You and Wonderland Road. We talk about her writing process for Wonderland Road, how she persisted, returning to the question that first made the book necessary: how do we live even as all is lost? And that is also an underpinning of our conversation: how do we write when all feels lost? Carrianne makes a striking case that despair can be as generative as hope, and writing amid public grief and resistance, including her observations as someone really outspoken online, comes up. And I had to ask her also about writing place, as she’s known a bit for writing— a lot for writing about Scarborough suburbia and building neighbourhoods and communities in her writing. Plus, she’s someone I look up to when I look at setting in writing and has taught me a lot about place-based writing. I hope this conversation offers you company for persisting with your writing and to keep writing without looking away from the brutality of the world, maybe even using despair as a generative fire for your writing. Here is my conversation with Carrianne Leung.

[00:01:11.040]
Welcome, Carrianne, to the Write, Publish, and Shine podcast. Thank you so much for being here.

[00:01:16.250] – Carrianne Leung
Thanks so much for having me, Rachel.

[00:01:18.490] – Rachel Thompson
I’d love to begin with kind of situating our guests. So would you give listeners a snapshot of your life as a writer right now? And you can take that in any direction you want to, but it’s also like, where are you calling in from? What are you working on? What’s on your desk today? All of those are possible answers.

[00:01:35.450] – Carrianne Leung
I am in Toronto right now at my home. It’s late August, so I am planning for going back to teach. I teach at the University of Guelph in creative writing. So it’s kind of mayhem always at this time of year where I’m trying to get my head around getting all my course syllabus ready and what I’m gonna do this year. So that’s kind of what my writer life is right now, in teaching mode, gearing up for the big September.

[00:02:06.020] – Rachel Thompson
Is there, within that, I guess maybe there’s not a lot of opportunity to touch your own writing, but is there a small specific thing that you’ve been noticing that’s been feeding your writing or keeping you close to the work?

[00:02:17.680] – Carrianne Leung
Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that a lot. So I had just launched my most recent novel in April, Wonderland Road, and I’m not sure what’s next really this summer. I have been trying to discover my love for writing again. I think I’ve lost it a little bit. I don’t know if I’ve lost it. I think it’s just like, I don’t know what to write next. Nothing is calling to me. I’ve been very much thinking about my purpose as a writer, what my intentions are as a writer. So I’ve been doing just very little things. I started a Substack. So I’ve just been writing when I’ve wanted to, and it’s mostly been just memories of family members. So just really trying to love it again the way I used to. I think I might be a little burnt out. So that idea of like writing, and especially the rigorous work of writing a novel, has left me feeling a little bit just really tired, just really tired and tired of words and language. And I think we can talk about some of that maybe later on too. But just like, I’ve been quite saddened by the failure of language to really describe the things I wanna describe and how I’ve been feeling.

[00:03:33.350]
So I’m trying to find it again and not forcing myself. I’ve just been really like just lying down, taking naps a lot, to tell you the truth, this summer and not forcing it. But the times in which I have written, it’s been really nice. It’s been very nice to be free to write and wander with my writing instead of writing in a project.

[00:03:53.860] – Rachel Thompson
Yeah, and that project took a lot out of you as well, was my sense of it. And also just the times we were writing in. And these are all things I definitely wanna cover in more detail. So I know Wonderland Road went through many lives, and you’ve described the original question as something like how to live even as all is lost. I’m wondering now, going through the process of writing and publishing the book and launching it in April, where that question is for you now.

[00:04:22.030] – Carrianne Leung
I think I approach writing a long project like a novel like I would approach research. It starts with a question for me. And so the writing is my walking through what the question is and its possible answers. And I guess like writing this book, and you know, because I worked with you towards the end of it, I was quite frustrated because it— I had written so many versions of the book and I couldn’t quite find the story. So yeah, I think at the end of it all, I still have the question. The question is still there. I didn’t think that the book was to answer the questions, but just to kind of like throw all the balls up in the air and hope that readers can find something that resonates for them in terms of what does it mean to live in this time? What does it mean to ask questions when our lives and, you know, crises are so precarious and we have such instability. And what happens when we feel that kind of anxiety and grief about the world? I just wanted to articulate that feeling. And of course, like most of us writers, we just want to know that there’s connection out there, right?

[00:05:35.870]
That if we get read, that there is an echo back, that this is also something that others feel and that the book creates a space in order to maybe talk about it.

[00:05:48.280] – Rachel Thompson
Yeah, because the book is circling like climate loss and possible futures. As you’re writing it, I guess I’m kind of— because you talked about how we worked together and talked a bit about it while you were working on it, but I’m thinking about hope. I think that was one of the concerns that you had while writing the book, and I happened to have a little insight because you kindly trusted me with that. But just thinking about hope and how you write toward possibility without making hope feel too trite or glossy? And maybe the answer is even in what you just said too, which is that you didn’t go toward answers, but towards presenting the question.

[00:06:25.010] – Carrianne Leung
Yeah. The hope to me is not some kind of thing that necessarily gets handed to us, but hope as a practice. And I wanted the book to maybe talk about the characters having to practice hope in order to live. And I think also, like, since I’ve been thinking about it, I was asked to speak at Stratford recently. They were staging Waiting for Godot and Death of a Salesman, and they were thinking about like existentialism and themes like that. And I think that was why I was invited. I think they thought somehow that my novel touches on existentialism. So it made me kind of have to think about that. And I realized that as I was writing the book, I wanted to make a case that despair is also as generative as hope, that it’s okay for us to feel despair is actually a very natural reaction to things that we’re witnessing, including genocide, and that despair doesn’t necessarily foreclose action and something happening. So despair is as legitimate and as generative creatively as hope is. And so I think that is one of the main things that I learned in writing the book. I think in writing the novel, I really wrestled with the idea of it being framed as a dystopia or apocalypse.

[00:07:45.930]
I mean, I don’t know. I think we live a dystopia and it’s not fiction. And I think that dystopia is often drawn from realism. And also, I just think that in terms of apocalypse, that there are people who have lived several apocalypses. Apocalypses is an ongoing thing. It’s not an event. And so I didn’t want to, like, sensationalize and make a spectacle of what this moment is or what the novel is trying to say. And I think that because of these kinds of genre conventions, there’s an expectation that it’s very plot-driven, that there’s this— a lot of scrambling to, like, survive the world. But I wanted to instead go really quiet and to look at these characters’ lives, which are quite ordinary. They’re living in an extraordinary time, but they’re very ordinary. And they carry all the things that we are all carrying. We are carrying, like, you know, grief. We are carrying joy. We want relationships. We want to be loved. We fall in love, we die, we give birth. Life is happening, even as, you know, maybe life is being threatened or in peril. So those were kinds of the things that I wanted to hold all in one space in the novel.

[00:08:58.060]
And maybe as I’m talking about it, maybe that’s why it was so hard to write it.

[00:09:01.580] – Rachel Thompson
It was a lot.

[00:09:02.240] – Carrianne Leung
It was a lot.

[00:09:03.260] – Rachel Thompson
It was holding a lot. I want to turn to a very specific craft question because in the novel, there are 2 really, for me, really vital points of view that I really appreciated, and they’re young people, children really. And I guess a child character is someone who senses more than they can fully understand the circumstances that they’re in, I guess. Can you talk about how you approach those young voices?

[00:09:30.710] – Carrianne Leung
Yeah, I really love writing children, and I often write them in first person. I feel like a disservice to write children as a third person because then it just kind of, for lack of a better word, I don’t want to infantilize children because I think that— I feel like children have voices. I want to treat characters with a lot of respect. And so, I like writing children because they know so much, they see so much, but they’re not usually going to use the words in which adults use to describe what is going on because their sense of meaning-making might be different than how we understand it. That gives you a lot of creative choices in terms of how you write. And so with Wonderland Road, I just follow voices. I just follow the character to tell me who they are. And I think one of the things that’s really important is to really get a sense of how old your child is. Because I think if you don’t know children and you try to write children, you may write them too young or too old for whatever your age is. So I think to be really kind of understanding particular moments in childhood and their development and what they might be aware of and how they make sense of things, I think is really important.

[00:10:44.230]
And I think writing in first person means also like they’re pretty precocious kids. Like they know a lot, they have a lot of words, right? It’d be hard to write like a child who’s maybe like pre-verbal, like a baby. I don’t know, you could, but from a first person point of view, it would be, you know, there’d be lots of style choices that you have to choose. So yeah, I really love writing about children. And then in Wonderland Road specifically, I want to write about what it means to be young and in a time where— the sense of a future is not clear, even if there is a future. And I think that a lot of young people are growing up with that kind of sensibility, and it’s very hard on them. And I have a child, like he’s not a child anymore, he’s 18, but he carries a lot of that anxiety. And as a parent, I don’t want to lie, but I also don’t want to give into a sense of inevitability that things are gonna be really, really horrible. So I really wanted to think about that head on. There’s a child, Jing, who is 11, and then there’s also a young adult, Julian.

[00:11:52.760]
What is happening to young people and how is it that they are still like young and hopeful and excited and also full of fear? So that was why those choices were made.

[00:12:06.900] – Rachel Thompson
I’m just nodding because of what you’re saying about young people, because I really sense that when I interact with family members, both in my household and outside my household, that sense of the weight of everything going on now is on them too, but it’s also kind of the normal for them as well. It’s hard to imagine that extremeness of that, let’s say, now anyway.

[00:12:28.700] – Carrianne Leung
Absolutely. And I feel very fortunate that I get to teach undergraduate students because I think it’s important, especially in creative writing. I teach a course actually called Fiction in the Anthropocene. Or Anthropocene. I never know how to pronounce that word.

[00:12:43.550] – Rachel Thompson
Me neither.

[00:12:44.130] – Carrianne Leung
But I want to open the space to, you know, what we do as writers is we give language to the experience, and we need to talk about this. I think that there’s an incredible amount of denial and political amnesia that happens. And I do think that, you know, language is a site of this struggle and this contestation. So I want to like really open it up and talk to students. And there’s a lot of vulnerability that happens when we do that. I mean, we as like older people or as mentors, like we really need to help them do that even though we’re like scared shitless about being, right? And I guess everything I’ve learned about writing this book is that it is a lot better when we share this pain of being human right now. It’s just so much better to share the pain. Otherwise it is too much to bear. And we can’t affect much change alone, but I think that to know that there are more of us than not, and that there is more than this kind of helplessness, I think is really important.

[00:13:49.710] – Rachel Thompson
Yeah. And I love talking with you about this because it’s real, but also really kind of like, okay, what are we going to do now too? And, you know, because we’ve spoken to, I’ve been for a long time now circling this idea of rest and unrest and the tension between what restores us and what is like pushing us into action, I guess. And I’m wondering, where do you see rest and unrest in your writing life right now?

[00:14:15.470] – Carrianne Leung
For me right now, I’m not sure whether I’ll write another book in my writing life. Like, if something moves me to, if something calls me to, if a story chooses me, then I will. But I don’t see the sense of writing if I have nothing to say. I feel very lucky that I get to also be a teacher because I feel that that’s become very important to me in terms of my purpose. And that to me is as creative and as purposeful as the writing. And so like, I find like creating joy and creating community is as important as naming all the heavy stuff. And, you know, I think that it’s from that that we need to find our restoration and our repair of ourselves and our world. As I’m going back into the classroom, there’s a lot around AI and a lot of anxiety about AI, but I also feel like maybe AI will give me an opportunity to talk about things around how do we fight to stay human, for example, right? If we kind of think of this as everything is presenting itself as a way to ask and have conversations about these really foundational things that I think we really need to talk about, that’s a good thing.

[00:15:36.480] – Rachel Thompson
Yeah.

[00:15:36.970] – Carrianne Leung
I feel very burnt out, as I was saying to you before. And I think that, you know, I don’t like using the word burnt out necessarily because it kind of evades the kind of conditions that make us burnt out. And because I’m a sociologist, I’m always thinking of the context in which we live and produce and create. I think there are reasons why I feel so incredibly drained and the need to take care of myself in order to be well for myself and to be well for other people.

[00:16:05.480] – Rachel Thompson
You do a lot of visible work online around resistance and grief and paying attention when it comes to genocide or polycrises. My question that I had as written was, what has that visibility asked of you as a writer and a person? But also hearing that you’re feeling pretty burned out probably is part of the answer already to that question.

[00:16:25.900] – Carrianne Leung
Yeah, I went to school for a really, really long time. Like, I have a PhD in sociology and equity studies. I’ve been thinking about a lot of these polycrises for a long time. I have the ability to talk about them and to present something publicly. And so I do. I feel like it’s my responsibility to, if I can, then I should. It makes me feel very vulnerable most of the time, but it’s like, again, I feel very much like called to play my part. And if I can, and I can articulate what is happening, the way in which I see it, I wanna do that. Where the burnout comes from and the depletion comes from is silence. I sometimes feel like I don’t get the bounce back. Like I don’t know how I’m being read. It’s not a conversation. And maybe social media is never structured like that. It’s not a conversation. It’s a platform. It’s a digital corporate platform. And maybe that’s part of the problem. But it’s like, it is one platform in which I have access to that we have access to be connected in these ways. But it is, it’s the silence.

[00:17:35.960]
It’s the everyday kind of callousness, indifference, and cruelty that has been just really painful. And I think for me, that has the most impact on being depleted.

[00:17:48.940] – Rachel Thompson
And I’m also thinking about how I’m not really on social media a lot of the time, but whenever I am, I’m always really uplifted by what you’re posting. So it’s like, note to self, tell Carrianne that more often because I really am pleased that there’s something, um, I guess I kind of see, oh, this is how you can do this. This is how you can talk to this, speak to this, and put words around this.

[00:18:10.600] – Carrianne Leung
Thank you for that. I’m glad. Like, I often don’t know what’s happening in what I post, but I do get private messages from people saying that it helps them kind of think about these things in a way that’s containable and understandable and that we can learn. Because like, again, it’s like if I did all this thinking, then I should somehow communicate it.

[00:18:34.920] – Rachel Thompson
So I want to also talk about a piece that fits into this theme, but also with the craft question, because you’re primarily a novelist, but you wrote this short piece, a hermit crab essay, I guess would be the genre that I would categorize it under. It’s up to you. You told me though. But During the Genocide (A list) is in Send My Love to Anyone, and it uses the list as its form. How did you choose that form and what did it make possible with that writing?

[00:19:03.000] – Carrianne Leung
I think, you know, in feeling again, in speaking about the genocide specifically, there’s this sense of like what to do, what is to be done. And so I think the list, the to-do list, was kind of my way of thinking about how I can talk about just the insanity of this time, of this like relative incredible peace and privilege that I have that I can think about what to get at the grocery store today and what meals I want to make while incredible, unthinkable kinds of violence and mass violence is happening in the world and the ways in which we are all tied to it in some form or another. So the list was kind of a way of like, this is my everyday life, this is my positioning, and this is the complete disconnect of not knowing how to deal with this, how to think about it, how to feel about it. And again, it’s like our everyday life is also an everyday erasure of the suffering of other people, even as our lives are made possible because of the suffering of other people, right? That connect-disconnect, and it’s an unbearable kind of gap to live.

[00:20:23.150]
And so that was why the list was to kind of say the to-do list as well as the kind of like huge gaps between our realities and what we understand and what we feel, but the need to just go on regular life.

[00:20:38.630] – Rachel Thompson
I also would be remiss, I think, interviewing you if I didn’t talk about place and community, in particular suburbia, Scarborough. That Time I Loved You moves— your novel, That Time I Loved You, moves through 1970s Scarborough and the private lives behind ordinary-looking homes. I know you’ve talked about this a lot, but I’m just wondering also if you would wanna share with listeners here today what keeps pulling you back to suburbia as a literary landscape.

[00:21:06.110] – Carrianne Leung
I guess I’m so shaped by my growing up in a suburb, right? And I think particularly, I don’t know, not all suburbs are like that. I think Toronto suburbs are quite interesting in that now, not the Scarborough I grew up in, but the Scarborough now is where most racialized people live, right? Like Scarborough is incredibly multiracial and multicultural, multilingual. And so they’re fascinating places. And I think I’m really shaped by them because I think even though the city and the metropolis is seen as the centre of the universe. I feel like there’s something that’s really cool about being off the radar and people just, like, generating life in these rich ways without having the spotlight on them. Although Scarborough has such a spotlight in recent years, it’s as if it’s been discovered. So, yeah, I think that in Wonderland Road, it’s like, it is also a suburb in which it is located, even though, like, geography has shifted because of huge collapses politically, economically, and socially.

[00:22:08.110] – Rachel Thompson
Mm-hmm.

[00:22:08.880] – Carrianne Leung
It’s still a suburb and it’s still a suburb of racialized people. As when we think about, oh my God, it’s the end of the world, it also is giving them incredible relief that they don’t have the kind of surveillance that they’d been under while things were intact. And they’re not under like the boot of, you know, an employer. So there’s kind of like actually some liberation around what happens. And I think it’s particularly interesting in a place like a racialized suburb. Ethnoburbs, as they call them. So yeah, that’s why. And it’s funny because I never like said Wonderland Road was Scarborough or even a suburb of Toronto or Toronto, but I just noticed I was invited to Word on the Street and I was placed in a Toronto panel. I’m like, oh, okay.

[00:22:57.750] – Rachel Thompson
I think the way you write place is something I’d love to hear a bit more about. Like, how do you build a neighbourhood that feels so alive? And this is like specifically a craft question. Like, what are the craft things that you do to kind of make place hold, like you’re mentioning, racialized people, like those dynamics, class, migration, family dynamics, all those things? Tell us your secrets is what I was saying.

[00:23:23.250] – Carrianne Leung
I know, but you see, I think it comes from being a sociologist, right? And when I think about setting and I think about worldbuilding, it is all of those things that make a world. And it’s really incredibly important to me. Character has to exist in a world, and the world allows us to see what’s possible and what limits them. And I think if we thought about characters in that way, as inextricably tied to the world they live in, I think we write richer worlds and richer characters, for example. And I also think when writing a neighbourhood or a community, in writing, there’s no minor characters. You have to think about all characters as being incredibly multidimensional and rich. And even if it means, like, they don’t get much space on the page, there must be certain details that you include about minor characters that make them worthy of that detail and that mention and that part in the story. So yeah, those are the kinds of things that I think about a lot.

[00:24:21.840] – Rachel Thompson
Yeah. And all these characters come from a place too. And how does the place inform who they are?

[00:24:27.290] – Carrianne Leung
Yes.

[00:24:28.110] – Rachel Thompson
I’m just remembering that the first time we ever spoke was because I asked you to provide a lesson on character and setting.

[00:24:34.010] – Carrianne Leung
So I’ve been asking you this question for a long time. Yeah.

[00:24:36.810] – Rachel Thompson
I love that. Many, many years ago.

[00:24:38.830] – Carrianne Leung
I don’t see any real passion about setting, and I’m super passionate about setting. And I always remind students to never forget, even if that setting is just one room, for example, right? That one room is also a whole world that has constituted that room. So I do really like doing exercises and thinking about setting. Yeah.

[00:25:00.590] – Rachel Thompson
And I think the lesson here is if you’re writing something and it feels like it’s just in a nowhere space, think about where it is and what’s happening there, what has happened there, what will happen there, all those things. And I’m sure this is all stuff that you, you gave me in that workshop many years ago. So thank you.

[00:25:18.140] – Carrianne Leung
I don’t remember. I’d like to see that workshop again now.

[00:25:21.270] – Rachel Thompson
Embodied it. I’ve absorbed it. Speaking of lessons, I was wondering if you would be willing to do a short reading, and then maybe we could do a generative imitative prompt that invites readers to apply a technique or concept to their own writing from your work.

[00:25:37.710] – Carrianne Leung
So the setup, this is one of my characters, Pauline, and Pauline is leaving the city, and she’s walking out of the city towards where she grew up, which is the suburb. And things have become very tense and very— the violence is kind of rising in the city, and she’s not able to afford food anymore, so she’s leaving. Pauline could see the vapour from her breath as she walked. The cans of food in her bag bounced hard against her back. As she moved farther from the core, the streets became emptier. Here and there, fires burned in steel drums, circled by small groups of people, some stamping their feet to stay warm, heads tucked like birds. She was surprised that things looked so bleak the farther she got away from the city. There were spreads of abandoned industrial parks, a scattering of cheap mall outlets, an empty fast food plaza, closed gas stations, storage lockers, repo lots. The lack of cars on the roads and the deathly quiet of the buildings made the place more foreboding. Without people, it looked haunted. It started to snow, and the flakes glittered in the light of the almost full moon.

[00:26:45.660]
Pauline was thankful for some brightness against the bleak black ground. It was so quiet that she thought she could hear each snowflake land on her shoulders. She walked down the centre of the road, avoiding any shadowy places where creatures could hide. 3 or 4 hours into the walk, the dark descended, and Pauline could hardly see in front of her. The streetlights were sporadic. There would be long stretches with no light, and suddenly one or two would flash on. Her body became on high alert, ready to flee or fight at any unexpected sight or sound. She followed the road, knowing it would continue until it hit Wonderland. That was all she needed to know. It was too late to turn back now, even though she was tempted. She knew returning to the city wasn’t a good bet, and up ahead was also a gamble. There was a child she would have to take care of, but that was also a guarantee of food and shelter. She kept moving and tried to block out any thoughts of what was ahead or behind. It was useless and impossible to think about outcomes. She still had a long way to go before reaching the old neighbourhood, and she tried to calm herself.

[00:27:49.740]
One thing at a time, Pauline. They came gradually, alerting her with their sudden movements, first as black shadows against the black night that tripped her eyes and scuttled on the icy concrete. Then they began to appear, no longer afraid of her. They trotted past her feet, paused below her, so she could register their shapes, size, and heft. They were everywhere, suddenly emerging from dark corners, crawling out of sewers, walking leisurely across a road as if on a Sunday stroll. As she walked, she could swear they lined up on the sidewalks, linked arms, and danced like chorus girls. She worried they would form a horde and attack. They left her alone after their initial curiosity about her waned. It had come to this, she thought. Rats had inherited the city. And of course they had.

[00:28:36.230] – Rachel Thompson
Wonderful. Thank you. What I appreciate about the description of place is how much you use lack as well as a description, the lack of the sounds.

[00:28:46.230] – Carrianne Leung
Thank you. I didn’t notice that. Yes.

[00:28:48.960] – Rachel Thompson
So maybe if we were to generate a prompt from that, it’s like describing a place by what’s missing too.

[00:28:54.990] – Carrianne Leung
Yes, that would be really great. What it lacks and what the character would notice its lack, right? And one thing that I always ask students to do is take their characters for a walk. Because I think oftentimes authors use that as a way to show the world, right? Walking and having a body in movement in place is a really good way to show the world. And sometimes I tell them, forget about your character. I want you as the author to go inside your world and walk around. What is it that you notice? Or sometimes I say, send your dog into the world. You know, just like to come through all these different POVs to look at this world and see what is noticed by different perspectives.

[00:29:37.310] – Rachel Thompson
Although all these dogs are going to chase those rats around. Exactly. Maybe it’d be a ghost story.

[00:29:43.380] – Carrianne Leung
That’d be cool.

[00:29:44.840] – Rachel Thompson
Well, I wanted to thank you so much for spending the time with me today. Is there anything else that you want to leave writers with today, especially those writing through this uncertainty, public grief, maybe, or a particularly long revision, it’s another thought I had of people out there thinking of them.

[00:30:04.810] – Carrianne Leung
I think to also remember that being in the world and paying attention is also part of writing. I think that sometimes it’s hard to, especially if we’re writing something that’s really difficult to say, if we’re writing the unsayable, to really take yourself out of the writing once in a while and take a look around and to feel all the feelings and to talk to people you trust and care about. It’s not an individual act. Writing requires a lot and a lot of also support, a lot of others, a lot of relationships.

[00:30:40.610] – Rachel Thompson
So where can listeners find you, read your work, learn more about Wonderland Road and your other books?

[00:30:46.480] – Carrianne Leung
I live on Substack and Instagram mostly now, if you’re thinking about me digitally. And my books are, I guess, available at independent bookstores, hopefully wherever you live.

[00:30:59.340] – Rachel Thompson
Actually, I didn’t realize until you said at the start that you were on Substack, so I will be finding you and connecting with you there as well. But I’ll list all your handles so people can find you in the show notes for this episode.

[00:31:11.390] – Carrianne Leung
Great. Thank you so much, Rachel, for having me.

[00:31:14.930] – Rachel Thompson
That was my conversation with Carrianne Leung. Carrianne’s idea that despair can be as generative as hope really stays with me. Despair does not have to close the work down. It can sharpen our attention to streets, homes, bodies, and neighbourhoods, and to the ordinary ways people keep caring for one another when the world is brutal. The craft invitation I’m taking from this conversation is to let the world of a story press on every character. And I love how Carrianne reminded us that there are no minor characters in a neighbourhood and that we can discover a place through what is missing or by sending another body, even a dog, into it to notice what our usual point of view cannot. I told you that she was really great at place and setting, and she didn’t disappoint in her perspective and what she shared with us here. You can find Carrianne, Wonderland Road, That Time I Loved You, and During the Genocide (A list) through the links in the show notes for this episode. I want to thank you for listening to Write, Publish, and Shine. If this episode helped you write, publish, and shine in any way, or persist and keep on keeping on with the work that has taken some turns, or in spite of some feelings that you’re having, please subscribe.

[00:32:24.340]
And if you have a moment, leave a review, because of course that helps other creative writers find this show, and it is one of the simplest ways to support my work here. This podcast is hosted by me, Rachel Thompson, with sound editing by Adam Linder. To learn more about my work supporting writers, you can visit rachelthompson.co. And sign up for my weekly Writerly Love Letters. I want to acknowledge the El Muzina Bedouin lands in South Sinai, Egypt, where I recorded this episode. A UN Commission of Inquiry and leading human rights organizations have found that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. That’s something I’m acknowledging when I’m acknowledging the lands that I’m on. I continue to call for an end to this genocide and also name there are several genocides happening in the world and stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people and with all people resisting genocide.