Practicing My Craft: A Guest Post by Amanda Peters
Our 2023 Discover Prize winner is back, and we couldn’t be more thrilled. Taking you from the past to the present featuring characters young and old, Waiting for the Long Night Moon is a remarkable collection of love, grief, trauma and hope. Read on for an exclusive essay from Amanda Peters on writing Waiting for the Long Night Moon.
Hardcover
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Waiting for the Long Night Moon: Stories
Waiting for the Long Night Moon: Stories
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Hardcover
$24.00
$27.00
In her debut collection of short fiction, Amanda Peters describes the Indigenous experience from an astonishingly wide spectrum in time and place—from contact with the first European settlers, to the forced removal of Indigenous children, to the present-day fight for the right to clean water.
In her debut collection of short fiction, Amanda Peters describes the Indigenous experience from an astonishingly wide spectrum in time and place—from contact with the first European settlers, to the forced removal of Indigenous children, to the present-day fight for the right to clean water.
I’m so pleased that Waiting for the Long Night Moon is going out into the world. To be honest, I never really thought that the short story collection would be published.
I wrote many of these prior to The Berry Pickers and a few while I was writing the novel. I mention in the acknowledgements that I consider these to be my writing ‘training wheels’ because I felt that by writing them, I was practicing my craft. I also was intimidated by the thought of writing a novel, it seemed so daunting.
Having said that, short fiction has its own unique challenges and by trying to tell a complete story in such a condensed way made me really think and consider my writing. It was a great exercise and I’m so pleased that now I get to share them with readers.
The thing that I love the most about the collection is the inspiration behind many of the stories. The Berry Pickers, my debut novel, was inspired by true stories my father told me, but the short stories have so many different people behind them. The Birthing Tree was inspired by my grandmother, who, in the midst of dementia, once mentioned that there was a tree near their house where the Mi’kmaq women used to give birth. I held onto that tidbit for over twenty years before it inspired a story. The story, The Virgin and the Bear was based on a dream I had many years ago that has stuck with me ever since. I was thinking about it one day and said to myself, maybe there is a story there, and there was. The story Tiny Bird and Terrorists came to me when I was watching the news footage of the Standing Rock Protest and The Story of the Crow is a retelling of a story I heard from my Auntie.
Because so many people and their stories inspired the collection, I feel that they are not my stories, they are more communal. I’ve just been fortunate enough to be the one to write them down and share them. I owe many people many thanks for sharing with me, and I’m so proud to share them with all of you.