KAREN CONNELLY: Diaspora Dialogues Mentor in Fiction 2010

by Janice Goveas



Karen Connelly bursts out laughing when I mention how impressed I am with her mastery of three genres: poetry, fiction and non-fiction. "I was writing in all three genres when I was twelve," she says, remarkably not sounding the least bit arrogant. She simply considers herself extremely lucky to have known from such a young age how she wanted to dedicate her life.

Her stunning accomplishments are easily googled. Before she was twenty-five, for example, she had won the Pat Lowther Award for her first book of poetry, The Small Words in My Body, and the Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction for Touch the Dragon: A Thai Journal. Her first novel, The Lizard's Cage, won the Orange Broadband Prize for New Writers. To date she has published nine books.

What won't come across in a google search is how down to earth she is despite those accomplishments. She speaks easily and openly about her life as a backdrop to her writing. She began writing stories and poetry at the age of ten, and makes the observation that poetry is the genre most appropriate to the emotional life of a girl. She went to Thailand when she was seventeen "because I wanted to go somewhere that was as different from Canada as possible. I wanted to go to India, but they were having political problems in the the place where they send exchange students, so I was sent to a village in Thailand, instead, which turned out to be great." Her non-fiction is rooted in the journals she kept on that trip to Thailand. Interestingly, twenty-five years later, she has yet to visit India.

In her early twenties, she became enamoured of Europe, spending time in Spain and France before travelling to and falling in love with Greece, where she owns a house and continues to spend time. She says she speaks Greek the best of the five languages she knows other than English, which include Thai, Spanish and French. She doesn't think her Burmese is fluent enough to count as a language, but she can speak it as well.

Mentoring in the Diaspora Dialogues program is part of a larger piece of her life in which she continuously mentors younger writers and instructs in Creative Writing at Humber College. She lauds the Diaspora Dialogues program for being open, community based and structured in a way that is not limiting to anyone financially or time wise. "Mentorship of younger writers is happening for free by older writers."

When I point out that some of the writers she mentors might in fact be older than she is, she responds: "Ah, but I'm a very old soul."