Margaret Atwood's her mom. Graeme Gibson's her dad. Here's why first-time author Jess Gibson never asked them for career advice

Writing must have come naturally to you, given the household you grew up in.  

Depending on what type of job one’s parents do, it gives you an idea of what work looks like. And for me, work (looked like) both my parents, sitting in their offices, on typewriters and then computers. So (writing) doesn’t feel like a foreign thing to be doing. There wasn’t a sense of learning how to write. You just sat down and you sat there until you did.

That’s a difficult lesson for many people to learn.

I grew up around lots of different kinds of writers, both successful ones and not successful ones. In my family, people’s worth as a writer was not measured by the degree of success that they achieved. All these writers were all writers, right? In my parents’ relationship, there wasn’t a sense that my mother’s work was more important. (Their) work was equally important.

What did they read to you or suggest that you read?

My mother reads everything. My father had more specific reading tastes. He was very interested in literature in translation. He was also a great enthusiast. So he was very persuasive when he loved something. He was infectiously loving it, and you would love it — you couldn’t help it. His enthusiasm was his superpower.

Both my parents gave me a lot of books to read, but his were more specific and directed. I didn’t realize until I was older that some people didn’t read literature in translation because they didn’t think it was good or as good, or that you weren’t getting the real thing. I never had that understanding. Reading books about places that you’ve never been, or about cultures that are not your own, gives you a way of being inside a voice from there, (which) I think was influential for me.

Your stories have been finished for a while. Why publish them now?

Part of the reason is that I started working seriously in the COVID period, which was also right after my dad died. He was not a person who would have been sitting on a finished book of short stories just because he was having an existential moment. So, I think part of that was also the coincidence of the moment being here. (It) was also that moment in my life where you get somebody’s bravery or their essence or whatever, and so that’s what it brought to me.

We ended up coming up here to Toronto for COVID. We left really fast because they were closing the Canadian border, and my father had just died. I didn’t like the idea of being locked away by a closed border. I have a green card, and my kid has dual citizenship, but my husband is American.

There’s a playfulness, a mischievousness, to these stories. There’s also more than a little darkness.

I like a surprise, myself. I like reading murder mysteries. Sometimes you pick up a book — you’re like, “This is good, but I’m not the real reader.” But that person exists. So if this book finds its reader, I want them to experience … the feeling of delight I sometimes get from things that are a bit mischievous. You know, some people might not find this book funny.

How can they not find it funny? The story “Cushion Cut” — the twists — it’s a page-turner even though it’s a short story.

One of my early readers is an old friend from high school in Toronto called Rosalynn Porter, who moved to the U.K. and worked at Granta, the literary magazine and publishing company. She’s a publisher. At one point, she read a handful of them, and she made a joke about killing off people at the end. So I wrote that story (where there’s a killing) in the middle; I wanted to go against time. It keeps you going. It pleases me that you found them playful and mischievous, because obviously I like that as a reader.

You got a three-book deal. And you’ve now got your first collection of stories out. What comes next? What are you writing now?

Traditionally, readers have been less drawn to short stories, although I don’t know if that’s the case in Canada. I feel like we have a very robust history of short story writers here, and also a pretty robust reading culture. But I waited for a minute after finishing this collection, till I had some other work. So I have two novels, and one of them is finished. There’s a shorter one and a longer one. 

Did you receive any advice from your parents?

My mother’s career is not a typical career. Both my parents started writing and publishing in the ’60s, and it was kind of a different moment. But also, they’re my parents. What you want from your parents is exactly what I got, which is, “This is wonderful!” I didn’t ask for career advice.

I’m sure it can be difficult to follow in the same career as one’s parents. There are a lot of cautionary tales: “Did they only publish me because of my connections …”

I waited a minute before doing this. There’s a perspective that you get when you’re not 25, and I wouldn’t have been able to do this at 25. Occasionally, you see these young, wildly talented young people. I feel like it’s better to have a slower career. People who have been wild successes at 24 years old — that must be very hard, because the expectations have been so high and you’re not quite grown up.

What do you think waiting till this age to really focus on writing brought to the stories, some of which feature rather terrible people?

I don’t know about the actual stories. I was speaking to a German interviewer who said, “But you have so much empathy.” I thought about that comment a little bit, because maybe there is an understanding of flaws as we get older. There’s the complexity of human beings. I’m sure that there is something about being not really young that makes a difference.

I know what it brought to me, which is a sense of perspective. I was joking recently that I have a dead parent and a small child, so the worst thing that’s going to happen to me, the thing I’m most worried about, is not actually a bad review. Not that I don’t care, but things are tempered by a kind of experience.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.