As a graduate student in English, most of my day-to-day work involves reading books, thinking about them, and every so often going to a meeting to talk about them. For a kid who grew up reading while walking and spending recess indoors shelving library books instead of playing outside, this is a pretty huge privilege. My favorite way to spend my time is pouring over digitized copies of nineteenth-century periodicals and sending the funniest articles in them to our program’s class group chat. I even spent most of my undergraduate years working in the university library, spending time among thousands of books and plucking the ones that interested me off the shelf for the end of my shift.
In 2020, I received my BA Honors in English and History from the University of Alberta, mid-pandemic. One lackluster 45-minute Zoom graduation and one expensive slip of paper later, I had realized that reading, writing, and talking about reading and writing are most of what I want to do with my life, and since it’s difficult to find a stable job in academia, I thought I’d spend as much time doing these things as possible while I could.
As for creative writing, I’ve been doing it most of my life. I spent my childhood penning novels that ranged from epic fantasy to tween romance tales, sending them to friends pasted in the bodies of emails (I hadn’t figured out file attachments yet). In high school, I discovered poetry, hungrily consuming collections by Robert Frost, Carol Ann Duffy, and Emily Dickinson. I stumbled upon playwriting a few years later, in university, watching friends of mine perform in new, local productions. Now, I’ve (mostly) abandoned my roots in fiction, but I’m currently fantasizing about a project that uses oral history and archival research to create a play about queer culture in 1980s Regina, my hometown.
My love for literature is why I’m so excited to work with Sundress Publications: I want to help give writers the support needed to get their stories into the world, and create the kind of books I want to read.
Katherine (Katy) DeCoste is a queer, white settler currently living on the unceded territory of the Lekwungen-speaking peoples and the WSÁNEĆ peoples, where they are pursuing their MA in English at the University of Victoria. In 2020, they received their BA Honours in English and History from the University of Alberta, as the Rutherford Memorial Medalist in English and Dr. John Macdonald Medalist in Arts. You can find their poetry in Barren Magazine, Grain Magazine, The Antigonish Review, and other outlets. In 2020, their play “many hollow mercies” won the Alberta Playwriting Competition Novitiate Prize. When not writing, reading, or answering emails, Katherine can be found playing Dungeons and Dragons, volunteering with food support initiatives, and forcing their friends to eat their baking.
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