Earrings by: Savage Rose Designs
Jen Ferguson (she/her) is Métis and white, an activist, a feminist, an auntie, and an accomplice armed with a PhD. She believes writing, teaching and beading are political acts. Her debut YA novel, The Summer of Bitter and Sweet (Heartdrum/HarperCollins) won a 2022 Governor General’s Literary Award and is a 2023 Stonewall Honor Book. Jen’s second YA novel with Heartdrum, Those Pink Mountain Nights, has four starred reviews so far and is a Junior Library Guild Gold Selection.
Hi Jen! Thanks so much for taking the time to answer some questions today! We are so excited to have you! From short fiction to essays, you’ve published a variety of work including two YA novels entitled The Summer of Bitter and Sweet (May 2022) and Those Pink Mountain Nights (September 2023). What draws you to writing for younger audiences?
I struggle with hope. But I also find that it’s untenable to write for teens without also writing hope, writing the world in all its realities, including the fact that there is joy in hard moments, there is joy even when things are categorically the worst. So writing for teens makes me, someone who struggles with hope, search for it.
It’s good for me. But it’s also an honour to write for people who haven’t become stubbornly fixed in their beliefs, people who still care about others and the land, people who are in the process of forming their identities and their values. Teens embrace the messiness of life. Teens embrace change, movement, and remaking the world to be better than it is now. Those things excite me as a storyteller.
Those Pink Mountain Nights tackles heavy topics such as MMIWG2S, capitalism, and grief with empathy, offering incredible insights into the difficulties many young readers experience in real life. What impact do you hope your writing has on audiences? And how does writing impact how you see the world?
I’ve said something like this before but it’s worth repeating: if readers leave Those Pink Mountain Nights being a little bit more able to see the systems that hurt us all, but that as a society we’ve agreed are invisible, if readers leave my books seeing those systems a little more clearly, then I’ve done my job. But also, I hope readers enjoy themselves, step into the minds and hearts of people who think and feel differently than them. I hope readers get angry and also cheer. I hope readers squee at the parts where hardened characters show their soft underbellies to each other.
Your next publication, A Constellation of Minor Bears, is set to release in 2024! Congratulations! What sparked the idea for this book, and can you tell readers a bit about what to expect?
I grew up hiking and canoeing in the backcountry. These are some of my happy places—some of the places where as a teenager I developed myself, where I learned responsibility and spent many uncomfortable, perfect nights under the stars in a tent with good friends. I have always wanted to do a thru-hike: I thought it would be the Appalachian Trail—because I was thinking East coast back then—but a thru-hike takes months and months and so much money. It hasn’t happened for me yet.
The wonderful thing about fiction is you can travel to faraway places, to expensive places in stories with your library card. And I did that. I read so many thru-hike books, mostly nonfiction like Wild by Cheryl Strayed and Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods.
And then I got the chance to write my own.
A Constellation of Minor Bears is about three teens who at the start of the book are struggling to love each other properly. Because it was always planned, Molly, her brother Hank, and their best friend Tray, decide they are going to hike the Pacific Crest Trail the summer after high school even though the three of them are barely talking, and certainly not talking about the things that matter. Molly would rather hike the 4265 kilometres alone. Tray hopes it will mend what’s broken. Hank is recovering from a disabling climbing accident—in the end, he decides not to go at all, until he changes his mind. The trip isn’t what any of them dreamed it would be like: too many things have happened between them and resentment and grief are loud, even in the backcountry. Along the way they meet Brynn, who is vivacious and seems to help them get back to normal. But Brynn is lying about something critical. And when that’s revealed, all the fault lines between Molly, Hank, Tray and Brynn crack open.
Also, there might be bears.
Maybe.
If you could give any piece of advice to emerging writers trying to navigate the publishing industry, what would it be? Were there any memorable words of encouragement that supported you on your journey to publication?
I’ll share two pieces.
One, learn how to be okay with rejection. Learn how to respond to rejection in healthy ways because no matter how big or dreamy your career becomes, you will still have to deal with it—not winning the award, not getting pitched to the big conference, having one of your books outshine all the others, and more. So learn that the industry is subjective, get a great therapist, learn how to respond to rejection in ways that work for you and don’t take a toll on your mental health. For me, when I was querying and I got a rejection, I immediately sent off a new query. I called them revenge queries and honestly they let me giggle a little, let me file the rejection away and move forward. A successful writer, an author with a career, is just someone who didn’t give up when faced with rejection.
Two is related: get yourself a petty DM text chat. It can be with one person you trust or a small group. But please don’t air ALL YOUR THOUGHTS AND FEELS ABOUT THE INDUSTRY on social media. Even when you are right, and nobody is right 100% of the time, you will end up in hot water if you use social media to talk about all the things that hurt. Leave that stuff in the smallish group chat. Later, maybe, it will be time to do some author activism, when you’ve thought it through, when emotions don’t rule, when you’ve considered what speaking up/out will do to your career.
Who are some artists—including but not limited to writers—who have inspired you lately?
I am constantly inspired by Native artists, especially but not limited to bead artists. Some of my absolutely favs are Alexandra Manitopyes and Angel Aubichon at Indi City, Raynie Hunter at Beadiful Vibes, bailey macabre, Reyna Hernandez, Bridgette Hoshont’omba, Michelle Sound, Alicia Elliott, Cherie Dimaline, Billy-Ray Belcourt and Michelle Porter. Check out and support their work.
YOUNG ADULTING 