Michelle Good on finding her voice to tell untold stories
Michelle Good is the author of Five Little Indians, which has been nominated for numerous awards, including the Scotiabank-Giller Prize and the Writers' Trust Award for Fiction, and recently won the Governor General's Award for Fiction, the Amazon First Novel Award and the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize. Good is a Cree writer and a member of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan. After working for Indigenous organizations for twenty-five years she obtained a law degree and advocated for residential school survivors for over fourteen years.
Good earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia while still practising law and managing her own law firm. Her poems, short stories, and essays have been published in magazines and anthologies across Canada. Michelle Good now lives and writes in the southern interior British Columbia.
What is/was the biggest challenge for you as an emerging writer and why?
MG: The most challenging thing was sustaining belief that at this age, in this time, my voice and the story I was compelled to tell, would find its place in the cacophonous world that is the twenty-first century.
What is the best thing you've experienced as an emerging writer?
MG: My voice and story finding its place! The very best thing, in addition to the critical response, is the incredibly moving reader response. So many readers reach out to me expressing not only their dismay at what they don’t know about residential schools, but also that the book has ignited a desire to learn and to contribute to meaningful reconciliation.
What have you learned as an emerging writer that surprised you about editing or publishing that you didn't know previously?
MG: This has been a tremendous learning experience from the moment my editor and I first spoke. I’ve learned that it takes a dedicated publishing team, from editors to publicists, to art, to marketing, to sales, not only to publish a book but to give it its best chance to find a sure foothold.