Nowadays and Lonelier

• A debut story collection, much of which is set in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES), arguably Canada’s most impoverished neighborhood, where the author was raised. The stories are grounded in loneliness, isolation, and addiction, yet find their simple yet essential truths in the everyday. Carmella avoids the noble, tragic tropes associated with the DTES; the characters in these stories are complex, complicated, and vividly drawn.
• Carmella is inspired by such strong women writers such as Carmen Maria Machado, Heather O’Neill, Zoe Whittall, Lisa Moore, Eva Crocker, Eden Robinson, and Tanya Tagaq.
• In her own words: “I started writing stories about my childhood in my late twenties when I moved to Newfoundland and realized that no one here could relate to what it meant to grow up in the DTES at the start of the overdose crisis. In my late teens, just after moving out of the DTES, I saw a video recording of artist Rebecca Belmore that awakened me not only to the fact that the things I grew up with were not easy, but that art could interact with addiction and death in meaningful ways. When I had the geographic distance from Vancouver, I found stories about the DTES came to me easily, and then that they weren’t the only things that I wanted to write about. This collection grew out of a need to translate my experiences of loneliness, sadness, poverty and community into what I think are kind of hopeful stories.”
• Nowadays and Lonelier joins other stellar Arsenal fiction titles that reflect the experiences of women and the necessity of dealing with trauma, such as Francesca Ekwuyasi’s Butter Honey Pig Bread and Amber Dawn’s Sodom Road Exit and Sub Rosa.