AACB Chats with Guernica Prize Winner Catherine Black

10/29/2024

On this episode of AACB, we get know the 2023 Guernica Prize for Literary Fiction winner, Catherine Black and the story behind her debut novel Blessed Nowhere.

Get To Know Author Catherine Black

Catherine Black is an Associate Professor at OCAD University, where she was a co-founder of the Creative Writing BFA program. She has published two collections of prose poetry: Lessons of Chaos and Disaster, and Pat Lowther Award-nominated Bewilderness. Her lyric nonfiction novella, A Hard Gold Thread, was nominated for the ReLit Award.

The Story Behind The Book

After the tragic loss of her son, Abby attempts to escape her grief by taking to the open road, only to find herself in Central Mexico in a hotel that’s home to other lost souls.

It’s the late nineties, when it is still possible to disappear, and Abby is at an impasse between self-destruction and dissolution. Just months after the death of her son, in a last-ditch effort to escape her reality, Abby buys a $500 car, tucks a buck knife in her glove box, and makes one impulsive move: she takes an exit south and keeps driving. It’s in a small town in central Mexico that Abby’s physical journey comes to an end, and it’s there amongst other outcasts and expats that Abby might finally choose to see beyond her own grief.