With the theme of connecting people through books, Vancouver Writers Fest returns for its 37th rendition from Oct. 21 to 27. Guest curated by Kim Thúy, the festival celebrates literature through 88 events exploring how books inspire readers in creating compassionate communities.

Korean-Canadian writer Yeji Y. Ham will share her debut novel, The Invisible Hotel, during the Scarily Brilliant: An Evening of Literary Horror panel on Oct. 22 at The Nest. Inspired by her grandfather’s experience of the Korean War, Ham’s novel explores grief, intergenerational trauma and unresolved fear.

“During the war, [my grandfather] endured torture, and he had no choice but to leave his home, leaving behind his mother, wife and four children, whom he never saw again,” she says. “Growing up, I felt this invisible yet grappling tie that binds generations through shared heritage.”

Through the five-year process of writing this novel, Ham found herself connecting with her protagonist’s struggles to understand the shared heritage and trauma inherited from her country’s history. She notes how her own lingering fear of the Korean War resurfaced, resulting in an unplanned Gothic horror narrative.

“Looking back, I do see that those frames are actually really perfect for this book,” she says. “The dark undercurrents of the Korean war, its atrocities, its lingering and pervasive fear of the invisible conflict fit so well in this horror and Gothic framework.”

She highlights the use of space to represent characters’ repressed psychological states as a key gothic element in The Invisible Hotel. Combined with horror details, such as a scene with a bathtub of bones, her protagonist is forced to confront past traumas – even those that may be invisible at first glance. For Ham, unearthing the past is crucial to forming connections through literature.

“I do see writing as an intergenerational bridge,” she says. “It connects the past and the present, and it’s also a place where the voiceless and the people who are forgotten are brought to the surface again.”

One of these uncommon narratives lies in her character Ms. Han, a homesick North Korean escapee struggling to resettle in South Korea. Ham hopes that her work provides readers with a token – be it an image, phrase or sentence – that they can reflect upon.

Deciding to choose

UK-based writer Holly Gramazio brings her debut novel The Husbands to the panels, Romancing the Page, on Oct. 22 at the Revue Stage and Good Reads on Oct. 25 at the Waterfront Theatre. Combining romance and comedy, Gramazio’s debut novel explores decision-making, identity and relationships through an inventive premise – an attic that generates husbands.

“[The Husbands] is about the way our circumstances, friends and partners affect who we are and how hard it is to tell what the core version of ourself is and what it means to share our version with someone,” she says.

Gramazio, who has a background in game design, has long been interested in exploring how characters interact in relationships beyond that initial stage of excitement. While she first played with the theme through game writing, the idea culminated into The Husbands following her curiosity towards the attic’s significance in British culture.

“I ended up setting [the game idea] aside, only to come back to it a few years later with the idea of the attic and this image of someone standing in the landing beneath the attic with the ladder coming down,” she adds, noting that attics are uncommon in her home country of Australia.

For Gramazio, a relationship’s later stages are distinctly different from their beginnings because of their potential rippling effects on one’s direction and identity. While The Husbands contains romance and comedy, she emphasizes that it is not a romantic comedy because it does not follow the genre’s conventional trope of a destined couple. In contrast, the novel investigates the challenges of making a choice when there isn’t a clear correct one.

“Most of the time there are some good options, some bad options, some middle options and probably most of the good options would be fine” she says. “There isn’t a single best way to live your life, but you’ve got to pick anyways.”

Mapping the North

Alison McCreesh, author of the graphic novel Degrees of Separation: A Decade North of 60, will share her stories of the North during The Craft of Graphic Novels panel on Oct. 22 at Waterfront Theatre and the Blending Genres: VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres Award panel on Oct. 26 at The Nest. Drawn from her personal stories of living and traveling around the circumpolar arctic, her graphic novel embodies a surprising turn in genre: that of memoir writing.

“It would never have crossed my mind to write a memoir in the traditional sense, to sit down and, in prose, write a book,” she says, noting that the graphic novel format made it possible to share her stories through humour and anecdotes.

Having grown up in Quebec, McCreesh was first exposed to graphic novels from the Franco-Belgium tradition. In her late teenage and university years, she became more attracted to the genre through works that combined the personal with the informative. Personal narratives, for McCreesh, are channels to exploring places and topics outside of ourselves.

“[Degrees of Separation] is intimate in the sense that these are the stories that are happening to me,” she adds. “But at the same time, bringing together the historical context. You end up touching on themes like colonialism, resource extraction, militarization of the arctic and climate change.”

An example of this blended storytelling is her portrayal of visiting Nunavut’s Resolute Bay, where the Canadian government forcibly relocated Inuit people from Northern Quebec as a military strategy. With awareness of the North’s history and present vulnerability to climate change, McCreesh hopes that readers recognize its diversity – in landscapes, languages, cultures, demographics and even climates.

“Once you are connected to something in a more personal way, it becomes less abstract,” she adds. “If I can get the North and the people who live there slightly more on people’s radar, then that’ll be a win.”

For more information, see: www.writersfest.bc.ca.