Author Gloria Blizzard, CNFC member, discusses her 2024 book Black Cake, Turtle Soup, and Other Dilemmas (Dundurn Press). Listed in Ms. Magazine‘s July 2024 “Feminist Know-It-All” column and praised by critics for its lyrical prose and insightful exploration of identity, belonging, and the diasporic experience. Blizzard reflects here on the creative process behind her essays in this Q&A with CNFC Chair and President Nancy Dutra.

Gloria Blizzard is an award-winning writer and poet, and a Black Canadian woman of multiple heritages. Her work explores spaces where music, dance, spirit, and culture collide. It has won the Malahat Review’s Open Season Creative Nonfiction Prize, and been nominated for both the Queen Mary Wasafiri Life Writing Prize and the Pushcart prize. Gloria holds a Master of Fine Arts in creative nonfiction from the University of King’s College and lives in Toronto. Her book of essays Black Cake, Turtle Soup, and Other Dilemmas is published by Dundurn Press.

Nancy Dutra is a Toronto-based journalist, essayist, and editor. Her byline has appeared in the Toronto Star, Toronto Life, Words and Music, and Brevity. In her previous life as a singer-songwriter, she released Time Will Tell—an album that charted on the Euro-Americana Roots Music List and received favourable reviews from CBC, Exclaim, Now, and No Depression magazine. She is proud to have graduated with High Distinction from the University of Toronto at the tender age of 42 and is currently completing a Master of Fine Arts in creative nonfiction from University of King’s College. She is the chair of the CNFC’s Marketing and Communications Committee.

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ND: What first drew you to the essay form as a creative nonfiction writer?

GB: My first essay for Canadian Forum, on the shift in social identity when I became a mother. I was discovering the places where our culture excludes mothers, babies and young children. So many environments that up until that time, like music venues, had been like home to me, and were now suddenly off limits. The essay was an opportunity to explore what I call a ‘stuck point’, expand it, tease it apart, look at it and make art with it.

My second essay, I wrote in 2017 for the CBC and that’s where the essay as a form of expression really landed for me. I found a place where I could explore multiple story strands, interweave them and include research into various obsessions – like music.

ND: Are there particular creative nonfiction writers or texts that have shaped your sense of what the essay can do? Did the work of any of these writers give you permission to write in your own voice and style?

GB: The work of Hanif Abdurraqib made me giddy with joy when I first came across his book, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us. His essays on music wove his own personal history and a deep knowledge of the history of American music.

I took a free course at the Toronto Reference Library on memoir with Ayelet Tsabari, who was the writer in residence that year. It inspired me to look more deeply at events and themes in my own life and to look at them with honour, worthy of exploration and expansion. Then I just followed her around, taking courses and finally followed her to University of King’s College.

ND: Your essays are deeply personal yet deeply researched. How do you balance personal memory with research or reflection in your writing?

GB: Research is an exciting aspect of creative nonfiction. The world is large, and for a moment, I get to focus deeply on a small aspect of it, and the tendrils that it might have historically – such as this existence of black cake in the Caribbean and the origin of its ingredients that I explore in my essay, “Black Cake Buddhism”. In 2024, I studied with a wonderful writer, Anastacia Renée, who suggests that writers regularly find small obsessions, research them deeply, for fun, and see where that takes you. The existence of blue frogs, or any such thing can lead you deep into new worlds that are somehow tangentially connected to your own.

ND: What’s your revision process like for an essay? Do you tend to cut heavily, rearrange, or layer in new elements over time?

GB: I find revision and editing the most joyful part of the process. I enjoy the shaping and organizing of ideas, sentences, finding the best word to use. If I’m in the editing stage, it means that I’ve got the ideas down, I have a basic structure, the research is on the page, and I can get to the real work of fine-tuning and shaping, like pottery. I rarely, however, redo the basic structure of a piece. I have experimented with applying a structure at the onset. In my essay, “The Year of Jazz”, I used the structure of a jazz standard. Most often, I write and then see what structure arises and fine-tune it in the editing process.

ND: What was the most challenging part about writing your essay collection?

GB: The most challenging part of the collection was the business that came afterwards. This included negotiating a contract, building an understanding of the release and promotion process and undertaking this new area of authorship. So much of this work has been handed over to writers to manage by the industry. It’s almost a whole other aspect of career that I’m still learning about and trying to integrate and make somehow a natural part of what I do. We covered some of this in my MFA program, as without that preparation, I would have been blindsided. Even with that information, the non-writing aspect of authorship has been challenging.

Promotion does not come to me naturally; however, I’ve learned to embrace it somewhat, and I try to find ways to make it fun for me and engaging for others. A fun collaboration with another artist or a good interviewer with interesting questions can inspire me. I’m enjoying these questions, by the way.

ND: What advice would you give to beginning writers who are unsure they have what it takes to become an author of creative nonfiction?

GB: Make it fun. Work in community. Go to open stages, meet people and try out a paragraph or a poem. I grew into authorship in these spaces, without ever really questioning my place or capacity to do it. I was surrounded by creative people, songwriters and poets, every Wednesday night, for years. I am referring specifically to Fat Albert’s Coffee House, an open stage that existed for decades and that I write about in one of my essays, “Music Notes”. Find out where you enjoy being amongst other artists and go there often. I found a place that filled me up, where I was surrounded by people doing their own art, songs and poems. I never questioned myself as a creative person.

ND: Is there anything else you’d like to share about your book, your writing process, or how you approach promoting your work?

GB: What I’ve discovered is that after the book is out in the world, after writing the book, and the excitement of those first launches in different cities, something else comes to the forefront.

Now, what is most exciting and fulfilling for me is finding out which parts of my book resonate with readers. At every event, someone tells me what part of the book has resonance in their life, or that they identify most with. It is really the most exciting part of my book being in the world right now. I’m off to the UK in October, to do a few readings. One of them will be at the University of Bristol, Britain, and a couple of them are at literary festivals in Wales. I’m looking forward to sharing my work in other countries, in person. What incidents and themes will have resonance there and with whom? What can we talk about? That’s what I’m playing with these days.

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