Writing and Learning

This post is about learning. And I'm going to front load an end result of learning: the first short story I ever sold is now available to read on Diabolical Plots! Please be as excited as I am about this!!

It's a story called "The Glorious Pursuit of Nominal" and it's about a little sentient maintenance bot repairing a ship, but it's really about what can go wrong when we myopically focus on getting just one thing right. I hope you'll read it!  https://www.diabolicalplots.com/dp-fiction-127a-the-glorious-pursuit-of-nominal-by-lisa-brideau/   (Please comment below if you do!)

2025 has been a year of learning for me, of taking time and space to study the craft of writing and to play and experiment. This is surprisingly hard as there's little external measure of any progress for learning which makes one question if the effort is worth it, or should one be doing something else with the time. But I think it's important to try to let go of the pressure to produce and spend some time cultivating skill and playing, discovering, so that's what I've been focused on this year.

Me at Bread Loaf

And I've been very, very lucky to be supported in this effort by three big organizations: Bread Loaf, Canada Council for the Arts, and Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. 

These are all big names and it means a lot to me that they found something in my work worth supporting. I'm not in the CanLit world - which is mostly based in Toronto (where I am not) and is focused on authors published by Canadian literary presses (which I am not). I'm outside all that, writing more commercial leaning fiction. I happen to think that's where exciting stuff happens - in thoughtful entertainment, stories people want to read that explore serious questions - but the literary world often has a different perspective, values different things. I didn't think they were interested in what I was doing, so it has been a pleasant surprise to find myself included in these residencies and conferences and grants.

Bread Loaf - Environmental Writer's Conference - June 2025, Ripton VT

The Bread Loaf Writing Conference has been going on for 100 years - it's a big deal in the writing world. The Env Writer's Conference is on year 26. I was rejected the first time I applied, but accepted for 2025. (Lesson: you can't let rejection keep you down in writing life.)

This conference was a lovely experience. Time in a rural campus surrounded by writers of all kinds and translators (there's a translator's conference that runs in parallel).

The writers at the conference are all focused on environmental writing in some way - fiction, nonfiction, poetry. The fiction cohort was small which I found interesting - is it harder to be an environmental writer in fiction? What does it mean for a piece of fiction to be environmental? I'm still thinking about this. Environment has to be more than just decoration, but what else is required to call it "environmental writing"?  Have you read novels that you think fit this descriptor well?

Bread Loaf was populated by very kind and friendly and interesting people. The incredible writer, Lydia Millet led the fiction workshop I was part of and the other writers had such varied writing styles it made for super compelling reading and discussions. I learned a tremendous amount. I hiked through fields with many bugs despite my bug phobia. I visited Robert Frost's summer cabin. I ate all the desserts offered to me. I went to morning yoga every day and wrote in the library. I was wowed by the storytelling of Nathaniel Rich and Laura Markham and so many others. (It was a lot of peopling - definitely tiring for the introverts.)

I'm very grateful for the Canada Council for the Arts grant that allowed me to attend this conference.

And, next week I'll be at a science fiction writing residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity - two weeks in a stunning location/facility focusing on scifi writing. Mostly self-directed, but there will be lectures and some discussions with the incredible faculty: Ai Jiang, Premee Mohamed, Amal El-Mohtar. When this residency was announced, my jaw fell on the floor. The Banff Centre was doing SCIENCE FICTION? With those amazing writers??? I've never applied for anything so fast. My jaw fell on the floor again when I got in. I'll report back on this afterwards!

Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity

Looping back to where we started - the short story that was recently published...

I've always been a novel writer. But a writing workshop in 2021 pushed me to try short stories as a way to practice techniques, to play with ideas that weren't novel-length ideas. And it turns out that can be fun, and helpful. And my little bot story popped out. And I sold it! Not to say that things only have value when monetized or when external people validate the work, but those things don't hurt. I've had fun since playing with a few more stories. I'm not leaving novel writing behind, but it's good to have variety in life and multiple ways of learning new tricks.

This is a reminder to myself and maybe helpful to you also: Keep learning. Make space for it even when you really want to just dig into the novel-writing.

There is time enough for all of it.