In this post, we’ll be hearing from Canadian author Merilyn Simonds. She shares with us her inspirations, describes her writing process, and gives us a sneak peek into her next work in progress! Check out her author bio:
Merilyn Simonds is the internationally published author of 22 books, including the novel The Holding, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and the Canadian classic nonfiction novel, The Convict Lover, a finalist for the Governor General’s Award. Among her best-selling nonfiction is A New Leaf, the story of her gardens north of Kingston, and Gutenberg’s Fingerprint, a meditation on reading, writing, and the future of the printed book. Her most recent book—Woman, Watching, whichwon the Foreword Indies Editor’s Choice Nonfiction Award for 2022—is an innovative memoir/biography of Louise de Kiriline Lawrence, an extraordinary recluse who changed the way we see birds. Simonds memoir, Walking with Beth: Conversations with my 100-Year-Old Friend is forthcoming from Random House Canada in September, 2025.
Louise de Kiriline Lawrence, who is the focus of your novel Woman, Watching: Louise de Kiriline Lawrence and the Songbirds of Pimisi Bay, was a neighbour of yours. For this book, you’ve woven your own memories of Louise into a biographical narrative. How much research did this manuscript require? Were there any parts of the research or writing process that gave you pause?
Woman, Watching is not a novel, although it’s hard to say exactly what it is: not a biography although it is biographical, and not a memoir although there are threads of my own memories and observations through the book. Louise was what we call “a country neighbour” which is not the person next door, as in the city, but anyone within driving distance. We lived on opposite sides of a large lake, and about an hour apart by car. But at a time when writers were thin on the ground in northern Ontario, we were certain writerly neighbors.
The research was fascinating and daunting: it absorbed a couple of years, mostly going through Louise’s 26 boxes of text archives and dozens of boxes of image archives at Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa. Covid intervened, closing the archives, but the archivists arranged to have hundreds of pages of letters reproduced digitally, A close reading of Louises’s vast correspondences—mostly with her mother whom she wrote to every Sunday for 40 years, but also with professional and amateur ornithologists around the world—provided the foundation for the book. I also searched high and low to acquire all of her scientific and popular articles and books, many of which provided first-hand accounts of her field studies of birds, which I reproduced in the book. Unlike most biographies, I was intent on allowing the reader to get to know Louise as I had, through her own voice.
The whole project gave me pause! Louise asked me to be her biographer in 1990 and it took me 30 years and the writing of about 10 other books to find a way to make good on that promise. I am not a scientist by profession or by nature, so the scientific literature she excelled at was often a challenge. I didn’t want to get that wrong. But the biggest challenge came from parts of her life that felt extremely private. How much should I tell? If she were alive and writing a memoir, what would she reveal? It helped to have known Louise: she was forthright, honest, principled. That helped me decide to include even the painful parts.
Beginner writers are often told, “write what you know.” Merilyn, your book, The Lion in the Room Next Door, is a collection of short stories inspired by your own memories. Tell us about the process of writing that collection.
I actually believe that writers need to write what they don’t know. Writing for me is an exploration, whether of another person’s life, Like Louise’s and Beth’s in Walking with Beth, or an exploration of my own memories, not for the facts of them but for what they might mean.
As I was writing The Convict Lover—a process that took eight years—an image would suddenly pop up. The first was a lion walking down a hall. I pushed the image away and returned to Kingston Penitentiary, but the lion kept popping up. I finally stepped away from the prison and wrote the story of the lion in the room next door—there really was a lion in the hotel room next to where my family lived for six months, but no one ever saw it but me, so the story is about memory and what it means. I returned to the convict and the girl who brought him solace, but again and again some image would pop up—a gun, a machete, a Volkswagen van, a dead child—and I would have to write the story in order to clear my imagination for the book at hand. I think that the intense process of imagining the prison and more particularly the life of Peggy, a small-town girl much like me, shook loose significant, unresolved moments in my own life.
A lion is often associated with courage, and writing about real-life experiences certainly takes a tremendous amount of it. At what point did you decide to write memoir and creative non-fiction?
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Pauline Shen 