hello everyone my name is Nicole and I'm a book publicist from River Street writing and today we have Susie Krauss here for Inc and insight so Susie if you could tell us about yourself and about your book that would be really lovely hey um so my name is Susie I live in Regina Saskatchewan I grew up in um a little village called Frontier um about five years 5 hours away from here um my book is called I think we've been here before and it's kind of a cozy little story about the end of the world and the end of humanity and how a little rural Farm family deals with that I'm I'm interested to know what kind of inspired you to do this story like was it topical to your current life or um yeah what kind of personal connection do you have to this well it's kind of funny it um lot of people are saying it's kind of topical to all of our current life right now with everything going on in the world but um at the time that I wrote it it was um it was kind of post the initial covid stuff that was going on and there was a lot of um a lot of division you know division yeah and I think that's ramped up a lot now but it was very present in about 2002 when I or 20 2022 when I was writing this yeah um but I was going through a lot of changes in my personal life um just a lot of friendship changes and big life changes and I was having these dreams that kind of went along with it where I was dreaming that the world was ending and a friend of mine told me that when you have dreams about the end of the world it it is usually your subconscious working through a lot of big changes in your life and a lot of things that feel like they're ending um and so those dreams like um when tell people I have this recurring dream that the world is ending people were a lot a lot of people were saying like oh that's kind of a scary dream or that that doesn't sound fun but I actually really liked those dreams and I I could really see that it was my subconscious working through big changes and kind of reassuring me that um that it was going to be okay that the things that were ending were necessary and good um and so I wanted to write a book that kind of reflected that where it's like this big huge disaster where the world does end but um it's okay and everyone understands that it's okay yeah I quite enjoy that and I I actually find there's a really interesting connection between dreams and writing process like I this keeps coming up in different interviews I do and I know it happens for myself as well when you get so entangled in this world it's really interesting how that does manifest it's both a creative thing and also like a processing mechanism going on um in your mind and I'm sure that has to do with like the things that you're working through always come up in your writing right as they come up in your dreams so it's it's a yeah it's an interesting thing to see how it all goes together yeah because writing is an art practice as well right like people do understand that when you're painting oftentimes you're processing and reflecting on your life and your identity but it's the same thing with writing and not everyone thinks about that the same way um in your book you have themes of of humanness and connection and family and kind of talking about all of this I'm wondering if you had any Revelations while writing this about your own family connections Community all that sort of stuff like did anything kind of uncover itself to you while writing this book yeah this this book probably more than like that happens with every book that I've written where I'll just I'll be like thinking about writing it and then I'll be like oh like that really makes something clear to me that I've been wondering about or worrying about orever but this book was especially that way there was so many moments where I was just like um trying to figure out you know how different people would react at the end of the world and you you know you think about how you would react but then you have to start thinking about how other people might react and I think I saw a lot of parallels to the way that um people I knew reacted to co when that kind of at the very beginning of that it really did feel like the world was kind of ending we saw the ways that different people um reacted to that fear and um and to each other's fear and to each other's reactions when other people reacted the way that you wouldn't want them to react you know everything when you're reacting um it feels so common sense your own reaction and it's hard to understand why another person wouldn't have the exact same reaction to a situation as you would um so writing this book I think it just it helped me have a lot more empathy for people who reacted to that differently than I did and I kind of also felt a little bit like oh I wish I could go back and do some things again yeah yeah and just like there are relationships that like I feel were really damaged by that time that I I wish I could have just like not that I would change the way that I reacted to it or my beliefs about it yeah but that I would have had a lot more empathy for other people's reactions and more space for them to react differently even yeah it can be especially esally in a time where that's so emotionally charged and there's politics and everything it can be hard to really like separate the Nuance from your own emotional reactions sometimes and yeah it is one of those things where you can it feels harder to get into someone else's head and and understand that perspective when it feels clear and blatant to you yeah like in my um I put um Irene is the one who just doesn't believe that the world is ending she kind of she gets this letter in the mail from some people who who say this is just a conspiracy it's not it's not actually real and um it was good for me to try and draw a character not not maliciously and not like oh she's so dumb she doesn't you know she see what's happening but to like see how her it's her fear and her love for her son and her husband that like causes her to psychologically block yeah you know reality and things that seem very obvious um it was really good for me to kind of do that ex exercise yeah view the person as having almost A coping mechanism and a a defense rather than trying to uh be abrasive towards other kinds of people yeah that makes sense and I know the story set in Saskatchewan and I'm interested to know if that was like if there was a intentional meaning behind that like I know you live in saskat but not every Prairie writer does that right we sometimes go outside of that so I'm wondering um if that felt important to you or what that decision was about yeah I so when I first started writing I wanted to be published by like a bigger house and so the advice that was always given to me was that you have to set your stories in places that more people are familiar with so that's why like a lot of big books are set in New York or like if you're a Canadian right you're going to set in Toronto or whatever um but I landed at a house in the states that was actually really open to me setting my stories in Saskatchewan I talked to the editor there and she was like I think people like that like there's not a lot of stories set there um so there I was really thankful for that because that's not very common um and so then when I was given that permission I was like this is what I know and I can write characters that feel more authentic like I don't I don't really know how people in New York would react to the end of the world you know um so it was it was fun I was really glad to have be given that mission to write close to home and it it does feel very important to me because there's not a lot of books that here so yeah I quite enjoy that too because it is a part of a bigger thing as well where you get people who don't know anything about saskat and to start knowing stuff right whether it's in that book or that conjures them to do further research um you know people might discourage setting things in lesser known small towns for that non- relatability factor but how are we ever going to get to that point if we don't have more books about it yeah and I'm a person who likes reading outside of my experience so I'm like why wouldn't someone want to read about Saskatchewan right like yeah if I here I would be interested so yeah I mean I feel like even recently I picked up a couple Japanese translations right so there's some things that I have to learn about these different places that they're set cuz I've never heard of it before but that's a discovery process that I think a lot of readers are willing to do because that's also how it is to read right you're discovering things as you're going along that's the gift of reading is seeing other people's view of the world and different places that you wouldn't experience yourself yeah yeah um another note of your book is and with the theme of end of world um mortality and kind of the conversation around death and illness um but having more of this hopeful perspective on it um was that something you to write about because you find that there is more of a lack of that is it out of the um kind of Doom that people were feeling the the overly intense I I don't necessarily want to say negative perception of it obviously mortality is a big conversation but it's one that's constant and it's necessary and people need to to have them um so yeah I'm just wondering what that process was like for you and wanting to write about this and and bring this conversation up yeah I think it's funny like I think every single one of my books that I've ever written deals with death as a main theme um I don't do that on I don't think I do it on purpose I think it's just something that I've like always thought about ever since I was very little like I just have thought about I would lay awake thinking about death and like what happens to you when you die and like um and I think that a lot of people I would like to talk about it a lot and people were like Su that's super morbid and I was like why orbit it's something that happened like it's gonna happen to every single person and um I think writing is the first place where I've ever been allowed to just like have free reign to like think about it talk about it and work through it and then now when people read my book they talk about it with me yeah and like you're so morbid they're like okay well we have to talk about your books yeah so I feel like writing has been a gift to me and that I can finally like think about like actually dying like in this book yeah you know it shows people dying yeah um that was really like I think it's helpy for me to like actually face that and write about that and um and to to think about what it looks like when you know you're going to die um and a theme in the book too is just that like it's kind of funny um to frame it as like these people are so special because they know they're going to die and it's like everyone know like we all know we're all going to die these people are not special their timeline is just very short yeah as far as they know but yeah yeah that makes sense um I think there is a bit of a taboo around it and it is interesting that there is because I feel like death is such a prevalent it has always been a prevalent part of life and the way we look at death and how death happens does change over time um in terms of like our causes but yeah it is something that obviously it's just it's the unknown and we've never as people been good with grappling that um as soon as something is unknown and there's questions it's every single opinion every single um version of overthinking happens do you find that like in writing this book or even just your Writing Practice in general this does kind of flow out of you naturally if they are topics are already thinking about or do you have these moments of um hiccups or tension or writer's block where you have to put it down for a period of time and come back to it or research or whatever yeah this book had a lot of those kinds of hiccups because I it's it started as two separate books there was um the the story line about Nora and Jacob and they meet in Germany and they like they feel that they have met before but they don't know why and there's no way that they possibly could have met before but they're very familiar to each other that was a book that I started writing in like 2020 oh yeah and I had to put it away because I just I like to start a book with just a question that I just don't know the answer to and so the question at the heart of that book was like how why do they feel that they've met before when they couldn't possibly have and why do they feel so familiar to each other and I like wrote half of that book and I was like I can't come up with like a good answer for why they would work so I put it away and then I started writing this other book about this Farm family who finds out the world is ending and I wrote the whole book and it was like I got to the end I was like this doesn't really have like a good I don't know it just doesn't feel compelling to me I've written this whole book it doesn't feel compelling and then I realized that if I um put both books together that the answer to the question of the first book could be answered in the second book yeah um but yeah it was a lot of like I started writing this one and then I put it down and then I started writing this book and then to to like finish this book I had to do a bunch of research um yeah like physics and stuff like that so it was a long time coming then it was a very yeah does it feel good though like now that you have it done you're excited to to get on with the next project yeah it feels very rewarding when it's like okay that was like four years in the making yeah and now it's done and I'm happy with it that's always some that's not always the case sometimes you turn in a book to be published and it's like ah I could have probably given that one three more years but yeah this one I feel like that was I'm happy with it yeah that's so great do you do you have strategy to overcome writer's block yourself or are you just kind of like go with the flow and see how things happen or is it like I've been here before I need to um do these set certain things to kind of get myself out of it yeah I used to have like strategies of like okay I'm gonna like read a book or I'm G to watch a movie or I'm G to set it down for a day or whatever yeah but um lately I feel like I've just been a lot more like trusting that like when when the energy finds me to write it'll come and sometimes it goes away and you have to wait for it to come back and it always comes back yeah it's kind of like trying to fall asleep when you're like when you wake up at 2: in the morning and you're like I have something tomorrow and I need to fall asleep because I'm going to be so tired tomorrow and so you try and fall asleep and you have your strategies and none of them work and you actually will fall asleep so much faster if you just trust that you will fall asleep and you just like don't think about them um I feel like that's writer block too it's like I just have learned that when it when I feel blocked it's like I just have to wait for it to come back and it will and and that it will makes it come faster yeah no I totally agree with that too I feel like when I first started off writing myself I was I I had a lot of anxieties around that like if I was having blockages kind of this like am I ever going to get out of it a bit more intense whereas now even whenever I've written a book and then I've finished writing it I usually don't write for I don't know four to six months afterwards yeah especially with poetry cuz I I specialize with poetry so I'll be writing poems for years and years and then once the collection's done I just stop and it's a little scary sometimes but I'm like I know eventually it's just I'm naturally going to take to the pen and paper and it's going to happen and I'm going to go back into that world but I have to just listen to my body and be like if it wants to stop right now we're letting it stop and it will tell me when we're ready to go again it is so funny how urgent it feels though it's like I every day that I don't write I feel like oh no I'm Miss I'm losing time or what but it's yeah yeah it's probably I mean I think some of it is just when it's a big part of your life and your personality and your identity to be someone who writes and loves writing um not engaging with that feels a little wrong I think something in our brains is like this this isn't right though yeah um as a closing thought I wanted to highlight that your your book talks about Nostalgia and recollection um there's lots of moments of flashback and Deja Vu and uncovered memories and I was just interested to know what sort of feelings and insights you'd like readers to be left with when they finish your book um I think one of my favorite reviews that I've read I do read my reviews I know supposed to but my favorite ones are the ones where people finish reading the book and they just say like this book caused me to like think about how I would react at the end of the world and how I would treat my family what I would say to them um there was one guy who said that he read this book right before he went on a family vacation with his grown children and he SP like the whole vacation he was just thinking about like if this was the last time I got to see them what would I wish I had said and what would I wish I had done and he like did those things on the vacation and it was like this really special time for him and I was like that that is what I would love if people read this book and they just like I don't know just like it caused them to just think about those things and and not to think just like about death and dying but like about living and and how we live when we know that we will die yeah kind of that gratitude for the moment um and not just airplane mode through your life yeah yeah yeah that makes sense I love that thank you for answering and having this interview with me um and thanks to everyone watching if you want to stay up to date with our other author interviews you can subscribe to our Channel um and we'll see you next time bye