Inspiring Individuals: Rowan Helaine

A Conversation with Rowan Helaine

I must admit that a romance novel had never been on my bookshelf, in my home, or even in my hands until I received Brass Tabby (2021) just before Christmas of last year. When I picked up the novel, I couldn’t put it down and breezed through it in just over a week, which is quick for me.

I’m a slow reader. So, sue me!

Anyhow, something about this particular novel—perhaps it’s Enola Fothergill’s badass character introduction or her ability to exist as an independent individual despite her romantic entanglements with the dark and mysterious Grant Harcourt—excited me. I was so excited, in fact, that I reached out to the author, Rowan Helaine, and asked her to virtually sit down and chat with me about her experiences as a writer, character development, and how Brass Tabby is different than the stereotypical romance novel, particularly with its representations of women. To my delight, she agreed.

Because Helaine and I are both writers—of different sorts but writers nonetheless—of course I start off our conversation by inquiring about what inspired her to become a writer in the first place. Spoken like a true writer, she says that “as a very young child, [she remembers] having an overdeveloped internal monologue or inner life” and that she “[doesn’t] remember a time when [she] didn’t want to write something.”

Helaine is not just your average writer, though; she is a writer who creates with the intention of challenging oftentimes problematic representations of gender, specifically within the romance genre. According to Helaine, growing up she was “naturally drawn into the romance genre” but didn’t feel that she—and many women, for that matter—were accurately represented within it. She says: “I’m a happily child-free woman and—I can’t speak for everyone, but for me—I don’t remember a time when I ever wanted children. That’s a personal choice and journey for anyone to make, obviously, but some of the big overarching themes in the genre are big white wedding and babies. So, [with] a lot of people—child-free people, in fact—I’ve seen the common complaint [that] they hate reading romance because [they’ll] get to the epilogue of the story and…there’s always that blissfully pregnant woman or they’re planning their giant white wedding.”

Helaine makes it clear that she “absolutely support[s] a woman’s right to choose what to do with her body, how she wants to live her life, and who she wants to spend her life with” but that the picturesque scene of the white wedding and babies at the end of a stereotypical romance novel “just isn’t for everyone.”

So, noticing that “there’s this dearth of stories in the world—romance stories specifically—geared toward people who might not want that for themselves,” Helaine came to a decision: “I decided that, instead of just reading one hundred pages into a book and then throwing it across the room out of frustration or slapping it shut…I would just write the book I wanted to read. And so, I did.”

I find Helaine’s drive and motivation as a writer inspiring. I tell her so, and she insightfully responds with: “Don’t compromise. Never compromise.” This is a piece of advice I think we can all benefit from regardless of our individual situations.

After Helaine’s initial explanation of why she chose to pursue romance rather than any other genre, she shifts her focus to Enola Fothergill, the protagonist of Brass Tabby, and shares her reasoning behind creating such a character: “Society, at large, makes the mistake of treating women like they are incomplete without a romantic attachment, and it’s so unfortunate because we’re whole human beings regardless of who we’re ‘boning.’” Yes, you read that right. Helaine really used the word boning, and I enjoy and appreciate her choice of words. She continues: “So, it was important to me to write a character who was a fully formed human being with her own life and concerns and who was happy with herself. Maybe not necessarily happy with her economic situation but with herself as a person.”

In addition to creating a fully rounded-out female character, Helaine states that it was also “important…that [Enola] was willing to walk away from [Grant]” because “in so many romance novels, the guy will screw with the girl’s head and jerk her around and—let’s be honest—in real life if a man was jerking you around as hard as some women get jerked around in romance novels, you would lose his phone number and you would be right to.”

Helaine’s last note on Enola is a bit of a “self-revealing moment.” She says: “[Enola] didn’t feel like she was missing out on anything by not having a partner, and it was important to represent that to me because I have been in situations in the past where I have been treated like I’m less because I’m single. And oftentimes I feel like I’m happier single. I have more time for myself. I have more time to focus on my dog and my hobbies and write a whole damn book!” I don’t say it in the present moment, but I completely agree with her on this matter and I’m sure plenty of individuals can honestly say that they, too, have experienced more happiness being single.

Or is that just us?

The final question that I ask Helaine is if she finds it easier to write male or female characters—Enola or Grant—and her response surprises me: “I find it a lot easier to write male characters and I think that’s because, for a huge part of my career, I’ve been working in heavily male environments. It’s been my experience that oftentimes when you’re the only female in a group of men, they’ll come to you with all of their emotional shit because—at least in the cis world—there’s not a lot of safe spaces for men to unburden themselves and feel heard. Whereas, as women, we’re often encouraged to share and cry and all of those things that men are not allowed to do. So, for me, writing men has been easier because I feel like I’ve been given a little bit better insight into the male emotional spectrum.” She then admits that “writing women has been a challenge” for her “partially because, for a huge portion of [her] upbringing, [she] did not have the healthiest relationships with the females around [her].”

However, Helaine now describes herself as a “reformed anti-feminist” and finds “that the society of women and the support of women is invaluable.” Indeed, Brass Tabby is a novel built with feminist bones and held together by a couple critical female friendships. It’s much more than simply a romance novel: it’s a revolution within the genre itself.

And Helaine is just starting her writing career. She tells me that she is currently working on three more books and hopes to complete and publish at least one “in the next year.” Interestingly enough, she says that “at least one of them is outside the [romance] genre.” This leaves me wondering: now that she has revolutionized the romance genre, which genre is next?

Inspiring Individuals: Jenna Brown

A Conversation with Jenna Brown

My phone lights up with a notification that I’ve been tagged in an Instagram story.

When I open the application and look at the story, it’s an image of a Zoom waiting room and it’s captioned: “Get to hang with one of my besties for a bit [insert sobbing emoji] [insert heart emoji].”

Hopping onto the Zoom call, I’m met by a woman who appears to be laughing. When I ask her what she’s laughing about, she responds with “I’m not laughing. I’m crying!”

It’s been around five years since Jenna and I have talked face-to-face (or virtual-face-to-virtual-face), but nothing has changed in the way we converse.

We’re still silly; we’re still serious; we’re still comfortable; and we’re still willing and eager to listen to one another.

Since we last saw each other, the biggest change in Jenna’s life has been becoming a mother. She says “every time I talk somewhere or when I’m in meetings, I always say I’m a mother, that’s the first thing I say.” Motherhood is the “most sacred role” in Jenna’s life, so, of course that’s where I’m going to start with my introduction of Jenna Brown: she’s a mom.

I’ve been good friends with Jenna for eight years now—roommates for two of those years while we were going to university in Kelowna—and motherhood is something she always talked about and wanted for herself. Now that she is a mother, she says “I love being a mom. It’s the best thing in the world,” but also acknowledges that “it’s really hard.”

According to Jenna, one of the most challenging parts of being a mother to two young girls is trying to guide them, but also empower them, at the same time: “I’m trying to do my best to raise empowered little girls. Things that I never knew growing up, I try to share with them at a young age like how to recognize abusive behaviors or making sure they’re setting boundaries. For instance, my mom will be like ‘she has to go hug her uncle’ and I’ll say ‘no she doesn’t have to go, she doesn’t have to do anything.’ I’m trying really hard to make sure that they feel strong enough to stand up for themselves, to tell people when they’re uncomfortable, to tell people when they don’t like something, and just making sure people are respecting that.” She concludes by insisting that she “just wants them to be as liberated as possible.”

Although there are obviously challenges when it comes to raising children, Jenna tends to focus on the joys that come along with motherhood: “My kids teach me so much. They’re really better humans than any adults.” While telling me about her eldest daughter, she says “I could lose my patience and yell at her and then feel so bad, but she’ll forgive me like that without even a second thought.” Jenna admits that her eldest daughter has even taught her how to practice forgiveness and resist holding grudges in her personal relationships, as well.

In addition to her children and partner playing a large role in her life, Jenna also places emphasis upon the role that her community played in shaping her identity. She grew up in Manitoba in the divided community of The Pas and Opaskwayak Cree Nation (OCN)—the community is literally divided by the Saskatchewan River—and she strongly believes that “community is really important” and “not just family.” She explains: “I’m a part of a bigger community here. Everyone knows everyone and it’s not a bad thing. Staying in your community and staying on the rez and helping is powerful. You’re not seen as being unsuccessful if you don’t leave, but I want to stay and make it better; not leave and try and be this thing, success. I want to make this success. I want everyone to be healthy and healing.”

Jenna goes on to say that, although there is a lot of “trauma” and “hurt” around her and the community in which she lives, she believes that it is exactly where she’s supposed to be: “Coming home [from Kelowna]—and I’ve come to this realization a lot more even in the past year and with my new position at the university here—I just have this weird feeling that I was born Cree for a reason; I was born in this place, in this world, for a reason; I was born in this community for a reason.”

Even while discussing her current position as a Project Case Manager for a hands-on IT program aimed at “fill[ing] the gaps and barriers that prevent Northern Indigenous women from obtaining careers in IT,” Jenna still focuses on the community aspect of the program. She is proud of the “community of women” that came together and lifted each other up through the program, as well as the fact that she aided in building “a space where everyone feels safe.”

I jokingly ask Jenna if she would ever move back to Kelowna, but her family and her community are not here, so I already know the answer: “I don’t know if I’d be happy if I was in a city without my family.”

We talk a bit about our time spent together in Kelowna. Jenna says “that was so hard, that part of my life. And I feel so bad. I feel like a tornado aura was brought with me there.”

I didn’t realize it while we were roommates, but Jenna tells me that she was having a very difficult time dealing with depression those years, particularly the second year we lived together: “I would always tell myself that I was actively just trying to ruin my life and I had this idea of train-wrecking my life. That’s what I wanted to do. I was just so destructive. I was in that mindset ‘well, if one thing goes wrong, then everything is going to go wrong and I’m going to be in control of making sure everything goes wrong.”

Following in the quick-to-forgive footsteps of her eldest daughter, Jenna simply says “I had to forgive myself for who I was. I look back and I just want to give that girl a hug.” She urges others to do the same and “not to be hard on yourself” because “all of us are just learning and growing, and that’s the point of life, to just hopefully be a better person, to learn along the way, and to be open to learning.”

The depressive episodes have not ceased entirely, either. Jenna reveals: “It’s something that comes in and out of my life, and the more I learn about it, the more I recognize it at different stages of my life.” She also recently began recognizing symptoms of anxiety in herself: “Anxiety is a new one, like, holy man, I have really bad anxiety. A lot of the things I’ve done my whole life are because of anxiety.”

Jenna tells me that she is not quite sure how she made it through that period of depression in Kelowna. However, she does offer some insight into how she is currently dealing with depression and anxiety, and some advice to others regarding how they might cope with mental health issues, as well: “Read about it. Learn about it. Learn to recognize it. Learn when you are in it.”

When our conversation is over and I shut my laptop, I find myself thinking about the conversations that we had years ago while we were attending university in Kelowna. Just like Jenna said she felt bad for bringing that tornado aura with her to Kelowna, I feel bad for failing to recognize that she was hurting so much at that time.

I’ll take a page out of Jenna’s book, though, and not be too hard on myself.

Maybe I’ll rip a page out of her eldest daughter’s book, too, and just forgive myself. I’m sure—with a mother like Jenna—I’ll be ripping out plenty more pages from that empowered little girl’s book.

And, I mean, just wait until Jenna’s second daughter gets a bit bigger…

Inspiring Individuals: Rina Garcia Chua

A Conversation with Rina Garcia Chua

Green is everywhere here.

Plants roll and melt off shelves and line the windowsills, while two skinny pigs wheek for their afternoon vegetables in Popcorn City.

Popcorn City is what Rina Garcia Chua, a PhD student in her last year of graduate school and currently finishing her dissertation on ecopoetry and migrancy, has named her skinny pig enclosure.

Chua migrated from the Philippines to Canada—Kelowna specifically—approximately five years ago to attend graduate school at the University of British Columbia – Okanagan (UBCO). She applied for graduate school in Interdisciplinary Studies with a specialization in the environmental humanities in 2016, has been actively writing in the fields of ecopoetry and ecocriticism since 2014, and has even edited an anthology of ecopoetry titled Sustaining the Archipelago: An Anthology of Philippine Ecopoetry. She’s also currently working on a collection of poetry titled A Geography of Natural Hazards.

Now we’re sitting at her kitchen table drinking milk tea as she gives me her “less-than-three-minute elevator pitch” of her dissertation: “What I’m doing is an analysis of anthologies of ecological poetry all over the world and looking at the meta-narratives that are missing from the bigger narratives. I’m interested in those meta-narratives—those smaller narratives—because of the stories of migrancy that have built a lot of them.”

When I ask her why she chooses to focus upon ecopoetry rather than say, fiction, she says “we have a saying in writing: a novel is a marriage, a short story is a relationship, poetry is a one-night-stand.” She prefers the short-term, for lack of a better word, commitment that comes with writing poetry. She elaborates further: “It’s easier for me to articulate my feelings, thoughts, and ideas in poems—in a shorter form than in a longer form—because I’m not often comfortable delving into emotions. Poetry seems to be the right fit for me there, but poetry is the hardest to master.”

Chua also reveals to me her original intentions for her dissertation: “The focus on ecopoetry started because I do have an anthology of ecopoetry in the Philippines and I really wanted to branch out from that when I started my PhD. I wanted to do Philippine climate change novels and Canadian climate change novels, but my supervisor insisted that my strength is in ecopoetry. I’m not sure about that even until now.”

There seems to be a common thread in our conversation.

Chua is not afraid of a challenge (or two, or three, maybe four).

I ask her to tell me a bit about her personal journey and the obstacles she has overcome in order to get to this point in her life. The first challenge she discusses is being a single mother at a young age: “I think that was the biggest obstacle, just being judged in a Catholic country—a very strict Catholic country—about your marital status; knowing that it was right for me at that time not to get married but feeling the pressure around me.”

She ascribes much of her drive and high productivity to the fact that she “wanted to prove something to everyone else.”

The second challenge she discusses is migrating to Canada. She tells me “it’s not like what you see in the movies.” Although many of Chua’s friends opted to pursue studies in the United States, she chose to come to Canada to work with her current supervisor at UBCO. She initially thought that the Canadian experience would be very similar to that of the American experience but found that “it’s completely different.” According to Chua, this presents difficulties because “when you’re in the diaspora, you’re linked by your separation from the homeland, but there’s always that tension with Filipino-Americans thinking that their experiences speak for other experiences. Filipino-Americans and Filipino-Canadians get lost in that. So, [Filipino-Canadians] always get forgotten or there’s an assumption that the Canadian experience is the same as the American experience. I think I struggle a lot with that in my scholarship and when I’m within academic circles from home.”

What appears to bring Chua comfort through all of these challenges is teaching others and being within a community that she can serve, and that serves her, as well. Chua says that, while many of her friends pursued nursing as a career path, she decided to pursue teaching. She not only “loves teaching” but asserts “that’s really what energizes me to do the research that I want to do.” After sharing several of her other potential career paths with me, she simply says “I lie to myself if I say I want to do this or I want to do that. In the end, it’s always going to be a form of teaching or another.”

In addition to Chua’s obvious eagerness when it comes to facing a good challenge, there is another common thread that weaves in and out of our conversation: the importance of personal fulfillment and self-nourishment.

While discussing her choice to write upon ecopoetry and migrancy, as well as her desire to teach, Chua says “I have to go with what fulfills me the most and this fulfills me the most because it’s a little bit of everything and that’s kind of how I am: a little bit of everything.”

She does not only speak of fulfillment for herself but urges others to pursue what fulfills them the most, as well: “Pursue what fulfills you—as hard as that sounds—because, in my experience, whenever I pursued what fulfilled me, everything just fell into place weirdly.”

Chua gently reminds us that, yes, we deserve to be doing what we want to do.

We deserve to be doing what makes us happy.

Though Chua encourages others to grab at an opportunity when they have the chance, she advises that one should do so with a cautious hand. Speaking largely to persons of colour, Chua makes this insightful remark: “There are lots of opportunities right now. They’re creating opportunities for us in academia, which is great—that’s what they’re supposed to do—but I think the best thing to do is be as discerning as possible with these opportunities and make sure that you get something out of it. Do not be of service to institutions that will not give you back anything in return. It has to be a reciprocal relationship, even with academia. If they need you in the space, make sure that you get something, as well. We have to nourish ourselves, too, as persons of colour. We can’t just keep giving and be tick boxes on somebody’s diversity report.”

Chua’s final piece of advice aimed specifically at women—including all individuals who identify as women—is that “oftentimes, as women, there’s no end to our energies. We just keep on going because that’s how we are trained in the household: take care of kids, go to work, make dinner, you have to hold the household together. But no. There should be an end to our energy and we should always take the opportunity to nourish that, especially as women when we hold so much emotional, intellectual, and mental labour on our shoulders. Pause and nourish ourselves. You know, do what we want to do and not be defined by what society tells us to do.”

I’ve drank almost an entire mug of milk tea during our conversation.

Chua finished hers about halfway through.

She speaks so fondly of the idea of personal fulfillment and self-nourishment, but I wonder if she realizes her incredible capacity to nourish others, as well, with her hot drinks, stories from home and her journey, her ability to converse in general.

No wonder she wants to be a teacher.

Like she says, she’s made for it.