Liz Harmer

My guest on this episode is Liz Harmer. Liz is a writer, editor, and teacher whose first novel, The Amateurs was published in 2018 by Knopf Canada and was a finalist for the Amazon First Novel Award. In 2019, Liz was a Bread Loaf fellow and the runner-up to the Mitchell Prize in Poetry. She has won a National Magazine Award in Personal Journalism, was a finalist for the Journey Prize, and has been shortlisted for the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her work has also been included in the annual Best Canadian Stories anthology. She currently teaches Creative Writing at Chapman University in California. Her most recent novel, Strange Loops, was published by Knopf Canada in 2023. Author Iain Reid called Strange Loops "Lean and enthralling,” and "a story that burns with intensity and daring."

Liz and I talk about the strangeness of being a Canadian writer in the US, about the occasional conflicts between her literary life and her academic life—but also where those two nourish each other—and about the novel she wrote in the third grade.

Liz Harmer: lizharmer.com

Music: "simple-hearted thing" by Alex Lukashevsky. Used with permission.

Contact Nathan Whitlock at nathanwhitlock.ca/contact