We love hearing from authors who move between genres, and Nicola Winstanley has some poignant insight into her transition from children’s literature to her first book for adults, Smoke (Wolsak & Wynn) a collection of short stories. Smoke is an unforgettable collection of short stories that is both searing and thought-provoking.

Smoke features a cast of characters across Canada and New Zealand, showing us glimpses into their lives of loss and heartbreak. In these eleven linked stories, Winstanley takes a hard look at intergenerational trauma and their impact on characters from multiple points of view, but her characters are not victims—anything but. Guilt, self-reflection, compassion, and forgiveness are central themes in this collection of stories that help us understand the degree of responsibility we hold toward the events that happen to us in life.

Welcome, Nicola!

Bring home a copy of *Smoke* by Nicola Winstanley.

Q: Can you speak to your move from children’s literature to fiction for adults? Having read your books in both genres, it seems to have come naturally, if a little darkly.

A: When my daughter was born, I desperately clung to writing to keep my head above water, and because I had been working at a children’s publishing house, and because I was now immersed in mothering and children, I ended up writing picture books. But I’ve always thought of myself as a writer for adults, and if you read Smoke, which to put it mildly is not pretty or fun, you will be surprised that I ever wrote for children—except that my first three children’s books have the same core emotions that I have explored in my stories: a deep fear of abandonment; the desperate need to be loved.

It's not surprising that my most popular children’s book is the funny, silly How to Give Your Cat a Bath in Five Easy Steps (brilliantly illustrated by John Martz), because on the other hand, one child said my book The Pirate’s Bed, was the most terrifying thing he had ever read. I thought I had written a jolly pirate book! But reading it again, I could see exactly what he meant. In one of the spreads, the anthropomorphic bed who has been separated from his ship and pirate mates, floats in on inky black sea, lost and alone. Matt James’ illustration underlines the feelings of loss, fear, depression that I was circling in the story without really knowing it at the time. It is a terrifying page—and now, if I read that book aloud to children, I tend to skip it.

I think maybe I was not ready to dig into these feelings at that stage of my life and writing for children was a way of not only of expressing fear and need but of imagining having it met by a loving mother. The pirates’ bed is found and restored by a little boy’s mother, and in A Bed Time Yarn, the gentle, patient mother teaches her child to sleep by using yarn to show that they are always connected.

Writing these picture books prepared me, I think, for writing the autofiction that makes up Smoke, because a loving mother is the absence at the heart of the book and my own life. My own mother died suddenly when I was six and for a long time I floated on an inky black sea, lost and alone, and there was no restoration until much later in my life. And that’s what Smoke is ultimately about: restoration. But you have to read it to the end.

More about Nicola Winstanley:

Nicola Winstanley is a writer for adults and children. She has been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary award is the recipient of the Alvin A. Lee Award for Published Creative Non-Fiction. Nicola’s fiction, poetry and comix have been published in The Windsor Review, Geist, the Dalhousie Review, Grain Magazine, Untethered, and Hamilton Arts and Letters, among others. She holds an MA from the University of Auckland, NZ, and an MFA from UBC. Nicola works at Humber College in Toronto and lives in Hamilton, Ontario.