Jae Waller was once a visual artist who happened to be a pretty decent writer.
One UNBC degree later, where she studied both disciplines on her way to a Bachelor of Fine Arts, she is now a writer who happens to be a pretty decent visual artist.
The Prince George expatriate who now lives in Australia was back in her hometown on Wednesday, where she was close to selling out Books & Company's first shipment of her debut novel just in time to head off to a reading at the university where their stash was expected to be gone by the time her live performance was through.
It was her first live reading from Call Of The Rift - Flight, the first book in her upcoming quintology. It's a fantasy series for mature young adults (mid-teens to high-20s being the target audience) published by ECW Press of Toronto. It is set in a fictitious and stylized version of the B.C. coast in a world of Indigenous characters. None of the Aboriginal cultures depicted in the book are real, none of the characters are versions of actual people, but it is an imagined world set vaguely between Kitimat and Bella Bella (those names are not mentioned in so many words) and inspired by north coast Aboriginal cultures at least as a literary landmark for Waller.
She is not Indigenous herself, but she called in another former UNBC student, Robert Williams of the Haida people, to be her sensitivity consultant, ensuring she was not accidentally appropriating a culture or trampling on long-standing protocols.
"This really is an alternate universe, not a direct representation of real life in northern B.C., but I wanted to have a story set here in this part of the world instead of just being the place used in movies to stand in for other parts of the world," Waller said.
The series is an extension of her classwork at UNBC. She cited professors Rob Budde and Dee Horne for being the catalysts of her writing career, and an assignment for Horne directly spawned this five-book endeavour.
"I originally intended it to be a trilogy, but I found out as I wrote through the first two that I just had so much more to do with this world, so much more to do with these characters. I had to keep going," Waller said. The second in the series is handed in to the publisher for edits, the third one is underway, and books four and five are in the infrastructure phase when the big plot points are already on the map and more being added as the preliminary books reveal their finer details.
"Today is actually the first day I've held the first one in my hand. I hadn't seen it in person until now," she said. The advance copies she had gotten from the publisher in the lead-up to the book launch were not final. That giddy sensation was reserved for her hometown. It's still a strange sensation to see the writing side of her persona leading her career.
"I always thought that graphics would be more lucrative. I never considered that someone from Prince George could get a publishing deal, but there it is, there's my book. I'm an author," she said.
She got her first experience as a mentor on Wednesday afternoon as she addressed students back at her Alma Mater (before UNBC she graduated from DP Todd Secondary School, with Grade 8 spent at Lakewood Jr. Secondary and her elementary years at Highglen). She knows that soon aspiring writers will likely reach out to her for advice and direction. And she has some.
"Read lots. Read widely. Take care of your mental health. There is a misconception that great writing comes from some drunken state or deep in depression, but it's actually been studied and those writers who did that had better sales and better critiques during their periods of mental stability. So get your sleep, eat healthy food, exercise, and it will make you a better writer."
She has fully embraced the scribe's profession as a vocation. She works every day, with the occasional day off, closely mimicking the workday/weekend/holiday cycle utilized by most other professions.
The first fruit of her labour is now on bookstore shelves all over Canada. Call Of The Rift - Flight is getting strong reviews from independent critics and strong early purchase stats. The story tells the tale of an Indigenous warrior woman who has a complex set of adventures as she questions her role in the death of others, be they members of other First Nations in her area or the colonizers who are starting to wander in from faraway lands. These conundrums could have been ripped from the headlines of this region 200 years ago. The book is billed as "a stunning debut" from a Prince George artist who unexpectedly found her written voice down under.
