For Kate Heartfield, being the latest Writer-in-Residence in the University of Ottawa’s English Department is like coming home, since she was a student at the university a quarter-century ago. Now the author of several award-winning novels in addition to short fiction and games, she looks back on her student days as the beginning of her writing career.
“I finished my first novel when I was 19 and I was an undergraduate here at the University of Ottawa. I was in the political science department, but I had taken a few English courses on the side and I always knew that I wanted to be a writer.”
Although it took years for Heartfield to publish a novel, she kept writing fiction while pursuing a journalism career. After doing her Master’s degree in Journalism at Carleton University, she worked at the Ottawa Citizen as a columnist and editorial writer from 2004 to 2015, eventually becoming the newspaper’s opinion editor. Her years in journalism gave her important skills that she uses today in her creative writing.
“I'm not afraid of research, which is really good for a historical fiction writer. So I really like to get into the weeds and find primary sources and, you know, just learn. … The other thing that journalism taught me, I think, is to have a healthy respect for deadlines and to know myself when it comes to doing the work of how long it will take me to reach a deadline. It's not always perfect for me, you know, there have been some times when I've been pushing it and pulling all-nighters, but it has helped me to calibrate my own work and to just understand how I need to pace myself to get there.”
“To get there,” for Heartfield often means working through a fourth or fifth draft, and she’s eager to offer feedback to students on their work to help them through that revision process.
“I have come to love revision over the years, and I appreciate the chance it gives us to really refine our work, which is, I think, something not really particular to fiction, but it's not every art form gets that. Performance art, for example, is a lot more in the moment, and with fiction we typically have the chance to take as long as we want to make sure the performance is the best performance.”
Heartfield is holding office hours twice a week while she’s in residence at the University of Ottawa, and also plans to visit classrooms and get to know students and faculty. As someone whose path in creative writing has been largely self-taught, she’s enjoying helping writers find their own way forward.
“I think if you don't have access to formal programs, there are a lot of ways to be self-taught as a writer. There are more self-taught writers than not, if you look at the canon of literature, or just the field of literature. So for me, it was a lot of reading, reading widely, reading old stuff, new stuff, in and out of the genre that I wanted to write in, and just really trying to learn from writing itself.
The thing that I love about writing fiction is that one never is perfect, you know, it's always a learning experience. And it'll be a learning experience until the day that I die. And that makes it frustrating, but it also makes it fascinating, and that's what keeps me coming back to it.”
Kate Heartfield Biography
Kate Heartfield is the author of several historical fantasy novels, including the Canadian and UK bestseller The Embroidered Book. She has also published interactive fiction, short stories, novellas, and Assassin’s Creed tie-in novels. She has won the Aurora Award for best novel three times, and her work has been shortlisted for the Ottawa Book Award as well as the Nebula, World Fantasy, Crawford, Locus and Sunburst awards. Originally from Manitoba, she moved to Ottawa in 1995 to attend the University of Ottawa, and in 2001 she received a master of journalism degree from Carleton University, where she has taught as a contract instructor in recent years. From 2004 to 2015, Kate was a journalist at the Ottawa Citizen, and was shortlisted for a National Newspaper Award in editorial writing in 2015. She lives on the rural edge of Ottawa with her partner, their son and a black cat named Minerva.