I've been putting together a playlist to go with the novel--it's under "My Name is a Knife" at Spotify (if you don't have it, you can download a free version!). Below, I've listed a few of the pieces that have YouTube versions too. 

Some are traditional, some more random, but all of them tie to the book's situations or moods, I think, or were songs I listened to while I was writing. Thanks to my friend Suzy Larsen for some of the Bach suggestions. (Bach is really good for writers.) Also happy to entertain your suggestions.


Hurray for the Riff Raff, Down by the River

Shawnee Pow-Wow Drums

Bach,  Cello Suite #2, Prelude

Bach, Cello Suite #4, Sarabande

Hurray for the Riff Raff, The Body Electric

Bach, Violin Partita #3, Gavotte

Shawnee Stomp Dance

American Revolutionary ballad, All Things are Quite Silent

Couperin, Les Barricades Mysterieuses

​Tanya Tagaq, Nacreous

Buffy Sainte-Marie, Love Charms (Mojo Bijoux)

Here's My Name is a Knife's first newspaper review--thanks, Toronto Star, for this thoughtful reading.  I'm so happy the reviewer saw my characters, especially Rebecca, so clearly, and understood their conflictedness. And it's always nice to be called "vivid" and "disturbing." 

Had fun at the book birthday party for My Name is a Knife last night, an appropriately hot summer evening, as it is when the novel starts. We were at Mosaic Books in Kelowna (the best store!). My smart novelist workshop friends Corinna Chong and Adam Lewis Schroeder read from their latest--that's us posing as a trio below--and I read a little of Dan's and a little of Rebecca's parts in the new novel. I saw some friends I've known most of my life, and some new readers. And cake.

Thanks to Mary Ellen Holland, Corinna Chong, Adam Lewis Schroeder, and Suzy Larsen for photos.

Here is an interview about My Name is a Knife that I did with Katie Heindl for Hazlitt. She had a lot of good and tough questions about my writing process, the history behind the book, and my characters. I'm so proud she calls it "sweeping, tender, and gutting." I hope you get a chance to read it.

 It's publication day for My Name is a Knife, which shares a birthday with David Hasselhoff and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall (so it's a Tuesday's-child-is-full-of-grace, and a Cancer, in the French-World-Cup-winning Year of the Dog, and I don't know what else).  It certainly feels like a strange time for book promotion (Angela Merkel was also born on this day, as it turns out). I've been thinking about parallels with the book's world, another tumultuous and uncertain era. The American Revolution was barely through, the British and French were still present, making and breaking various Indigenous alliances, and the settler push westwards was roiling.

This book is in many ways about people's inner spheres, and these events make the background as Dan returns to Boonesborough to warn of an impending attack by the Shawnee who adopted him.  His mental turmoil mirrors the historical one (and I know a lot of us have been feeling similarly in the last months). His wife Rebecca, who has left the fort with most of her children, is also full of uncertainty about what's happened to Dan, and what's going to happen to her family. Her rage at his lack of consideration for them in his drive to explore is a kind of #MeToo, and writing about the damage to their marriage felt very modern. The novel is in both Rebecca's and Dan's voices; we also get the attitudes of more ferocious settlers, and of some of the Shawnee, like Chief Black Fish, Dan's adoptive father and a powerful leader, and Pompey, their interpreter and a former slave. The roots of now are there. 

Dan and Rebecca are complicated characters who aren't always right, for all their hopes to make things work. Here's Emily Wilson, the brilliant translator of The Odyssey, the story of another legendary figure in a fraught time, and the fallout around him:
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                     I think the capacity of literature to create these rich, complex questions or fault-lines, between what
                     this or that character thinks, and what the whole story might be saying, is one of the biggest reasons
                     why literature matters. It makes us see / feel / be more. 

I hope my book will do that in its small way.