A journey for a writer that grapples with issues of self-alienation and self-discovery can be both emotionally rewarding and exhausting.
For Okanagan College creative writing and English literature instructor Corinna Chong, that journey has been in the works for more than 15 years, culminating with the publication of her new book The Whole Animal.
Chong calls her second book, a series of short stories, semi-biographical as she draws on her many of her lived experiences as a youth and adult to draw inspiration from.
Coming a decade after publication of her first novel, Belinda’s Rings, this new literary effort is an amalgamation of different ideas that formed the genesis for the book.
“It has been awhile since my first book so, yea, I was not sure if I would publish another one. I have been writing (book reviews and short fiction) in journals during that time but to see these stories come together in one book has been pretty amazing for me to see,” Chong said.
“It does make me feel like this is a career for me. Moving forward, I have definite ideas for future books beyond this now.”
Her next project is already in the works, a contemporary family story based in ‘The Badlands’ of Drumheller, Alta., about a brother and sister dealing with repressed feelings and emotionally unpacked secrets.
“The Badlands is a landscape metaphor for unearthing things from the ground up,” Chong said.
The umbrella theme of the short stories within The Whole Animal centres around our fascination with strange effluences, growths and protrusions and the dangerous ways we play with our power to inflict harm on ourselves and others.
Her short story characters wrestle with the complexities for relationships with partners, parents, children and friends as they struggle to find identity, belonging and autonomy.
As someone with a Chinese ethnic background, her experiences growing up among different cultures and issues she faced come out in her writing.
“I am not consciously writing about race but it is still there in me,” she said.
Chong, who moved to Kelowna from Calgary 11 years ago and teaches at both the Kelowna and Vernon OC campuses, added one of The Whole Animal stories does draw directly from an episode in her youth when her family’s home was robbed and the impact that incident imposed on her family.
“Writing can be an exhaustive process but for me it is also energizing at the same time, just in the way I can use writing as a therapy way to express complicated things swimming in my head and make sense of them in some way,” she explained about the process of writing for her.
After growing up in Calgary, Chong began her creative writing career pathway earning a BFA in Visual Art Photography and a BA in English (creative writing) from the University of Calgary and earned her MA in English (creative writing) from the University of New Brunswick.
She won the 2021 CBC Short Story Prize for Kids in Kindergarten, and has served on editorial boards for literary publications including Qwerty and The Fiddlehead.
Chong said book launching events are still in the early stages, with one event already lined up in Kelowna for April 13 at the Sprout Bread Cafe in the city’s Cultural District.
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