Have you ever met Donna Morrissey?

"There's a sense in Donna Morrissey's writing that William Faulkner has met Annie Proulx." Atlantic Books Today, number 26, Fall 1999.

I haven't, at least in any way other than via email. But I have fallen in love with her first book and am starting on her second. What I'm really excited about is that Donna has agreed to be interviewed for this blog.

After Maureen Hull so graciously accepted my invitation to visit here, I got up the nerve to ask Donna. When she replied calling me missy, I had to laugh. It's a term I use all the time.

Her bio on the Houghton Mifflin website is posted as follows:

Donna Morrissey was born in The Beaches, a small village on the northwest coast of Newfoundland that had neither roads nor electricity until the 1960s a place not unlike Haire’s Hollow, which she depicts in Kit’s Law. When she was sixteen, Morrissey left The Beaches and struck out across Canada, working odd jobs from bartending to cooking in oil rig camps to processing fish in fish plants. She went on to earn a degree in social work at Memorial University in St. Johns. It was not until she was in her late thirties that Morrissey began writing short stories, at the urging of a friend, a Jungian analyst, who insisted she was a writer. Eventually she adapted her first two stories into screenplays, which both went on to win the Atlantic Film Festival Award; one aired recently on CBC. Kit’s Law is Morrissey’s first novel, the winner of the Canadian Booksellers Association First-Time Author of the Year Award and shortlisted for many prizes, including the Atlantic Fiction Award and the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award. Morrissey lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

That's all well and fine, but a little out of date.

Since Kit's Law, Donna has gone on to write two more award-winning novels. Downhill Chance winner of the 2003 Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Prize; and Sylvanus Now, winner of the 2006 Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Prize, of the Bookseller's Choice Award, and shortlisted for The Commonwealth Award.

Click here to read an excerpt of Kit's Law.

For an excerpt of Downhill Chance click here.

And for Sylvanus Now, click here.

Now, we don't have a lot of time. Donna is squirreled away working on her next book - and is a wee bit behind on deadline, but has agreed to ponder some questions. So, if there is anything you'd like to ask her, fire away. I'll be sending the questions to her this weekend.

Colleen