Moon of the Crusted Snow has arrived

While it’s already been on shelves in many stores for weeks, today is the official publication date for my new novel Moon of the Crusted Snow. I’m very happy to have this story out in the world, and I can’t wait to share it with more and more people as I travel across the land this fall. This book has been a labour of love for many years now, and it’s both a relief and a thrill to have it finished and available to readers everywhere. My sincerest thanks to my wonderful publisher ECW Press for making this dream come true. For those unfamiliar with this latest endeavour of mine, here’s a synopsis:

With winter looming, a small northern Anishinaabe community goes dark. Cut off, people become passive and confused. Panic builds as the food supply dwindles. While the band council and a pocket of community members struggle to maintain order, an unexpected visitor arrives, escaping the crumbling society to the south. Soon after, others follow.
The community leadership loses its grip on power as the visitors manipulate the tired and hungry to take control of the reserve. Tensions rise and, as the months pass, so does the death toll due to sickness and despair. Frustrated by the building chaos, a group of young friends and their families turn to the land and Anishinaabe tradition in hopes of helping their community thrive again. Guided through the chaos by an unlikely leader named Evan Whitesky, they endeavor to restore order while grappling with a grave decision.

In the lead-up to the book’s release, I had the privilege of attending festivals in Eden Mills, Toronto, and Kingston last month to read and discuss it with some great audiences. The response at these events was very overwhelming and heartwarming, and I’m honoured and humbled to be able to share this story in these ways. And this tour is just getting started; I have more events lined up for the rest of the fall.

Here are details for the remainder of those dates:

October 13-14 – Calgary Wordfest
October 18-20 – Vancouver Writers Festival
October 27 – Toronto International Festival of Authors
October 28 – Ottawa International Writers Festival
November 2 – Wordstock Sudbury
November 10 – Parry Sound Books
November 17 – McNally Robinson Winnipeg

And there’ll be more to come in the winter and spring! I’ll post updates here as well as on Facebook and Twitter as more readings and events are confirmed, so please follow those accounts for the latest.

To coincide with the book’s release, I’ve been invited by the great people at Open Book to serve as their Writer In Residence for the month of October. It’s an exciting opportunity to write about the story’s origin, some of its wider themes, my writing and storytelling background, my thoughts and experiences related to publishing and literature in Canada, and more. They kicked off my residency with a fun Q & A, and my first post went up yesterday. I plan to write at least ten more entries before the month’s over, so please visit the Open Book site regularly. Hopefully it’ll inspire me to write more on this here blog 😉

I’ll also likely share more articles and other media connected to the book in the coming months, including both positive and negative reviews in the spirit of balance and accountability (here’s a nice little one from Publisher’s Weekly). Because I spend most of my time on the questioning side of the mic, being interviewed is always a little strange for me, but I’m always happy to have the opportunity to talk about the things I love to do. So hopefully there’ll be some worthwhile insights and interesting anecdotes in those forthcoming articles and interviews.

Having Moon of the Crusted Snow available to the world is a dream come true. I’m very thankful for all the guidance and support I’ve received over the years to get here. The growing interest in this story is truly humbling. It’s an honour to be able to share it with you all. Chi-miigwech!

My new novel is here

If you let your imagination go, some interesting ideas will emerge and float around in your head. They’ll come and go over time, but once in a while one of those ideas really sticks. It firmly plants itself in your psyche, increasingly commanding your attention. If you let your imagination nurture that little idea, it grows and grows until it’s all you contemplate whenever your mind is free.

Eventually that idea gets so big that it can’t stay in your head anymore. You have to unleash it in some form. And then this gestating idea becomes words on a screen. It expands and evolves in that form, and before long it’s something you grow to love and believe in. When it’s fully formed enough, you share it with others to see if it’s something you can nurture even more.

And then you go back to it, and let the idea mature and develop as it should. Sometimes you reshape and recreate it. That can take a really long time. But if you’re patient with yourself and committed to making your creation the best it can be, it eventually becomes ready for the next step. You develop the confidence and passion to share it with strangers, who decide that they want to share it more widely for you.

Then you work with others who also believe in your idea and want to make it beautiful and wonderful. That can also take a long time. But it’s worth the effort and the wait. After a lot of hard work, everyone comes together and decides that what was once a little idea in your head is now ready for the world.

And then you get to hold it in your hands.

Moon of the Crusted Snow

I’m very excited to announce that my next novel, Moon of the Crusted Snow, will be published by ECW Press in the fall of 2018. It’s a post-apocalyptic thriller that takes place in an isolated First Nation in northern Ontario. I posted a story synopsis on my Facebook page that you can read below:

When I started developing this idea a couple of years ago, I originally intended it as a short story. But the more I thought about it, the more it grew. I began writing in September 2015 during the two-week Indigenous Writers Program at the Banff Centre, and I’ve been able to keep a steady writing momentum over the past year thanks to kind grants from the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. My employer, CBC Ottawa, has graciously granted me leaves of absence to accommodate the creation of this novel. And just this fall, ECW acquired the publishing rights. I’m extremely grateful to these organizations for this opportunity.

Moon of the Crusted Snow is a novel about the end of the world as we know it. I described it above very simply as a “post-apocalyptic thriller”, and that’s likely how it will be billed going forward. But it’s much more than a story about the apocalypse and its fallout. It’s about resilience, self-discovery, and renewal. Without giving too much away, an important underlying theme in the story is how one community’s collapse could be another community’s new beginning.

Onaabenii Giizis: Anishinaabemowin term that translates into “crusted snow moon”, which can refer to late March on the calendar

— Waubgeshig Rice (@waub) October 18, 2016

But there is a great deal of darkness through which the characters in the story have to find light. It’s a harrowing struggle through the harshest season. The unwavering desire to survive is what has always drawn me to post-apocalyptic novels, and some of those classic stories inspired me to write my own, but through an Anishinaabe lens. I hope you’re able to read it when it’s published. Stay tuned for more details in the lead-up. Miigwech!