Author Kim Fahner: How grief gives her a deep understanding of her characters' feelings

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her most recent books include her

sixth book of poetry, The Pollination Field (Turnstone Press, 2025), and her debut

novel, The Donoghue Girl (Latitude 46, 2024). Kim was the fourth Poet Laureate for

the City of Greater Sudbury (2016-18) and is the Chair of The Writers’ Union of

Canada. In 2024, Kim won first place in The Ampersand Review’s Essay Contest for

her essay, “What You Carry.” You can find Kim on many social media platforms, including Threads, Instagram, Substack, and Bluesky. In this interview, Kim explores how she fell in love with reading when she was young, the threat AI poses to writers and the environment, and how grief gives her a deep understanding of her characters' feelings.

Author Kim Fahner

OCW: What life experiences have shaped your writing style?

KF: My parents were readers, so I saw them model the joy of reading as I was growing up. I fell in love with reading fantasy novels when I was a teen, reading Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series, C.S. Lewis’s Narnia stories, and just about anything by Tolkien. I’m a firm believer that, to be a decent writer, you need to read a lot of books in the genre you wish to write.

Author Kim Fahner: How grief gives her a deep understanding of her characters' feelings

In terms of life experiences, I’ve lived through a lot of personal loss, so I’ve learned that grief isn’t easily or quickly resolved, and I think that comes across in all my work—whether in my poems, plays, essays, short stories, or novels.

Rather than run from grief, I’ve marinated in it when it’s arrived in my life, so that I can feel things more deeply. This, I believe, makes me better understand how my characters feel, and perhaps helps me to better fashion pieces of writing that resonate with people who read my work. The depth of grief we experience with a loss is equal to the amount of love we had for a person (or place, or time), and I always think of C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed as being a critical text for me as a person and writer.

Part of what I love about the poems in The Pollination Field is that they speak to how there are cycles in life, and how reinvention is at the core of all loss. What appears to be an ending is often a new beginning—we just can’t see it right away. While the poems in this new collection are about bees, there are metaphors that hint at deeper exploration of how humans, and women particularly, evolve and ‘work’ as we age. How do we survive and then thrive as our lives move forward? I find myself wondering about this often, and I know it’s making its way out in my thinking and writing.

Writing is about looking deeply . . . and eavesdropping

OCW: Can you trace any common themes across your writing?

KF: In all my writing, I’m always trying to get at what’s underneath things, going beyond the superficial aspects in life and exploring what’s there. In my prose work, the characters in a story can be developed if you go inside their minds and figure out how they might work as people.

My first writing mentor, Timothy Findley, once told me that eavesdropping was key to bettering my understanding of subtext and dialogue. He was right. Humans are complex creatures, and we can’t always figure out how they work, but writers love to explore their many facets in writing characters. Across all genres, I’m fascinated by the natural world and how it works alongside the human one, but my poetry best embodies my worries about the climate crisis. Beyond all of that, my belief in feminism is common to all my work. It’s such an intrinsic part of who I am that it weaves itself into my writing.

A love of Canadian writers

OCW: Which authors and/or types of books do you like to read?

KF: I read a great deal of Canadian writing, mostly because I have many friends who are writers. As I get older, and through my work with The Writers’ Union of Canada (TWUC), I’ve met writers more frequently, and I usually find they’re the sorts of folks I like to hang out with. My deepest love is poetry, so I review poetry books by Canadian writers quite often. I write monthly poetry reviews for rob mclennan’s periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics. I find reading and thinking through poetry on a deeper level means that I become a better poet. I also read novels, plays, and creative nonfiction. I don’t read enough of writers outside of Canada, so that’s something I need to explore more. A friend in my book club has given me novels by authors whose work I don’t often know, so I learn from sharing books with her.

Using social media to focus on the arts and profile writers

OCW: Do you use social media to engage readers, writers, or publishers and, if so, which platforms?

KF: Yes, I mostly use my social media platforms to focus on literary and artistic things, but I love taking photographs of places when I’m out hiking in the woods. I also make a point of highlighting the work of fellow writers across Canada, sharing books that I’m reading and reviewing. I’m on Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, Substack, and Facebook. I’m still working out how Substack will play into my creative process as a writer and thinker, so I’m not as much on there just now, but I’d love to start a podcast.

The artistic and environmental threat of AI

OCW: Do you see generative AI as a threat or benefit to writers?

KF: I see artificial intelligence as a threat to writers. I worry about the work that editors do, as well as copy editors and writers, and freelance writers. AI is so often wrong, but it seems to be ‘learning’ as it goes, and growing in leaps and bounds. Part of what I love about reading books is the uniqueness of each writer’s voice, something which is born of their particular thoughts and life experiences. I want to be sure that—as writers—we can protect our work, and our copyright, as much as possible, and that we’re properly compensated for our work.

On an environmental front, I hate that AI increases electricity demand and water consumption. I think that’s one of the things we need to hear more about, to be honest. As a secondary school teacher, I find it worrisome to see students using AI for assignments, and trying to avoid the deep thinking and questioning that comes from being curious. I think the world is moving too quickly and that we’re forgetting the value of thinking things through, of taking time to do various tasks, and of learning as we go.