We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Darcie Friesen Hossack. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Darcie below.

Darcie, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. One deeply underappreciated facet of being an entrepreneur or creative is the kind of crazy stuff that happens from time to time. It could be anything from a disgruntled client attacking an employee or waking up to find out a celebrity gave you a shoutout on TikTok – the sudden, unexpected hits (both positive and negative) make the profession both exhilarating and exhausting. Can you share one of your craziest stories?

With at least two generations who have written before me, Mennonite literature and studies have become a sub genre of their own. Finding success within this framework is far from guaranteed but when my first book (Mennonites Don’t Dance) was published, my collection of short stories quickly began to make its way into Mennonite homes and university classrooms, along with gathering a mainstream readership.

At one point, a good friend of mine, also a Mennonite writer, was given permission to offer me the phone number of the Mennonite world’s most celebrated author. Not knowing how I would ever gather the courage to make such a call, I entered the number into my phone and tucked it into a small, over-the-shoulder day pack. My family was visiting from out of town and we were going for a hike. The perfect opportunity to think about what I might say.

A few hours later, reaching into my pack for water, I pulled out my phone and discovered that it had been activated en route. And it had placed a call! Which is how I came to “pack dial” Miriam Toews, author of Women Talking, the film of which went on to win an Academy Award.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Becoming a writer wasn’t so much a decision as a compulsion. Even before I began to understand what kinds of stories I wanted to tell, I always had a pen and scraps of paper to scribble down metaphors (these days, I send myself texts). Those scribbled metaphors, like a beating calf’s heart on a butcher’s table, or pots and pans frozen into the cupboards of an old farm house, eventually became the central themes in my stories.

I now have two books in print, Mennonites Don’t Dance and Stillwater, which is my first novel. Stillwater is set during the Covid-19 pandemic, when a family with a Mennonite mother and Seventh-day Adventist father move to a religious commune/cult to avoid being vaccinated.

My third novel, which is now in the hands of my literary agent, and likely to become a series, is a dystopian, again featuring Mennonites. This time they have taken over what’s left of society after the oceans rise, turning cities into man-made reefs. A biomedical experiment has also decimated the human population and drastically altered women’s reproductive capabilities.

The most gratifying thing about writing has often been after the writing is done and I either hear from or meet people who see themselves and their families in the pages of my stories. Sometimes reading and sharing the books has opened up avenues to conversations and deeper understanding between loved ones, and that is an overwhelmingly humbling experience.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

Just over a dozen years ago, shortly after my first book was published and before I could complete my second, after experiencing decades of undiagnosed adenomyosis, my sacroiliac joints ruptured. Which is to say, my diseased uterus tore apart the posterior joints in my pelvis. For the next two years, no one would know what happened.

I can say that my doctor at the time tried to manage my pain. I can say that he sent me to every possible specialist while tossing diagnostic darts at my chart himself. And I can say that the following years I spent on fentanyl and dilaudid, along with other medications, at doses another physician said he “wouldn’t prescribe to patients in hospice care,” should have ended my life. My brain should have stopped telling my lungs to breathe.

I survived. I survived and eventually found my way to the right doctor, who knew what had happened and slowly began to knit my joints back together with simple injections to promote healing. A gynecologist performed a complete hysterectomy. And, eventually, I found my way back to the novel I’d been forced to abandon.

By this time, the world was a different place and my experiences had made me a different person. And I had no idea whether this new person would know how to write. I needed help to find my way back to the pages I’d written, and hired two-time Giller finalist Gail Anderson Dargatz to mentor me.

With monthly pages and conversations for more than a year, Gail became more than my teacher. She became one of my most cherished friends. Together, Stillwater grew and evolved, becoming a stronger story than I had imagined in the beginning. One of the characters, who had died in the first draft, instead survived her injuries and followed a similar medical path to my own. But only, of course, up to a point. A novel is fiction, after all.

Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?

One of the most rewarding things an author can hope to experience is when a reader reaches out to say your book made a difference in their lives and family.

After touring with Mennonites Don’t Dance, a reader contacted me through my website and blog to say that the stories in my collection had resonated with him. More than that, however, they had provided a way to express to his mother how years of growing up in a community like the ones in the stories, had affected him. His mother then also read the book and was able to understand and empathize with her son in a way she’d never before been able.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://darciefriesenhossack.wordpress.com/
• Instagram: @darciefriesenhossack
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/darciefriesenhossack/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@darciefriesenhossack2480
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/discover/darciewrites

Image Credits

Author photo: by Laurie Griffiths
others: Darcie Friesen Hossack