Local author, Erin Bow, finds her literary inspiration in a garden shed in her backyard in Kitchener.
Bow, who self-classifies as a writer by accident, said that the world of literature and writing was always a passion of hers, but never a dream as a career.
As a kid, Bow liked physics just as much as she loved books. While she was the kid with her nose constantly in a book, she was also the kid who built their own telescope.
“I’m deeply curious about how the world works at a very fundamental level, which is an itch that both literature and science…scratch,” Bow said.
Bow has published six novels, three poetry books and a memoir. Her work won the Newbery Honor in 2024, the 2019 Governor General’s Award for Young People’s Literature, the TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award in 2011 and the CBC Literary Award for poetry in 2001.
Before becoming an author, Bow studied particle physics in university and graduate school for a brief period before switching her focus towards poetry and then fiction.
While Bow did not continue her career path as a physicist, she said that her training as a scientist has served her well as an artist.
“I take science seriously, but it’s not science that generally drives my stories, but rather that scientific training of looking closely and seeing the big implications in small behaviours,” Bow said.
After publishing her first poetry book, Bow said her first glimpse into the fiction world also happened as an accident.
Having just read a Russian fairytale, Bow was inspired by her view from a plane.
“The plane took off from the fog and left this weird shadow on the fog … I thought it was such a fairytale image, this idea of the shadow separating from its caster and becoming an independent thing in the world,” Bow said.
It was on that flight that Bow wrote the first chapter of her first novel. The book, Plain Kate, which is about a girl who sells her shadow, was published in 2012.
“It was an accident because I had been reading a lot of fairytales;, young adult and middle grade fiction and it sort of tumbled out into that format,” Bow said.
Bow credits much of her inspiration to the work she has read in the past.
“I can’t imagine trying to dive into a form as a creator that you don’t also just love as a reader,” Bow said.
From a young age, Bow was particularly drawn to the Lord of the Rings series, and other fantasy novels like A Wizard of Earthsea and The Last Unicorn.
“I think both training yourself to recognize good writing when you see it and to recognize what you like in writing, even learning technical things, [is important],” Bow said.
As for her creative process, Bow said she does her best work in the aforementioned garden shed.
The garden shed provides Bow a space away from other, distracting aspects of life—a quiet space filled with things that ignite her creative process.
In fact, she prefers to write long-hand with a pen and paper or a neo-writer, which is an offline device that allows for a keyboard and requires no internet.
“It’s quiet and the things that surround me are things that are related to my creative process…to have this space where I can come out here and my creativity is out here…it’s a great space,” Bow said.
Bow is coming back to writing after a year focusing on family. Currently, she is working on the second book in a three-part series of kids’ books featuring talking animals—a project she began while taking a break from a longer, science -fiction novel about grief that she also has on-the-go.
“It’s for little kids, and it’s basically just fun and delightful … I still have the big chunky science fiction novel that I would like to return to because I do like it,” Bow said.
“I’m also writing some poetry…I’m generating some stuff for compost pile, and we’ll see what springs out of it,” she said.
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