Following Feeling to Find Your Structure, with Hollay Ghadery

What if the truest way to write your story is to follow feeling instead of chronology? 

In this episode of The Resilient Writers Radio Show, I’m joined by award-winning Iranian-Canadian author Hollay Ghadery, whose work fearlessly crosses genres: memoir, poetry, flash fiction, and even a novel narrated by a sock puppet.

Hollay’s debut memoir Fuse won the 2023 Canadian Book Club Award for Nonfiction/Memoir, and it’s unlike anything you’ve ever read. Rather than laying out her life in neat order, she trusted her own non-linear way of experiencing memory. 

For Hollay, moments bleed into each other like inkblots on a page, and she honored that in her book. The result? A layered, fragmented form that feels truer than any straight-line telling could.

She also shares how writing changed when she got sober. For years she produced work while living in addiction, but it wasn’t until sobriety that she found the discipline to sit, revise, and shape her words with clarity. Her message is refreshingly down-to-earth: writing isn’t about waiting for a magical state to arrive—it’s about showing up and doing the work, imperfectly but consistently.

Since then, Hollay has released the poetry collection Rebellion Box and the flash-fiction collection Widow Fantasies. And coming in 2026, her debut novel The Unravelling of Ou—a playful, fierce, and absurd meditation on patriarchy, joy, and queer identity, told entirely through the voice of a sock puppet named Ecology Paul. 

As Hollay explains, the puppet narrator was no gimmick: it’s the most honest way she knows to tell this story, bypassing shame and revealing truths we might otherwise hide.

Our conversation also explores the realities of publishing. Hollay loves small presses, where collaboration feels intimate and books are treated as art objects. She talks about the highs and lows of awards season, and why it’s essential to celebrate every win—whether it’s a longlist mention or a kind note from a reader. One of her favorite lessons? “It means something to win, but it doesn’t mean anything not to win.”

Hollay practices what she calls “sympathetic joy”: celebrating other writers’ successes without letting envy creep in. She reminds us that another person’s achievement doesn’t take anything away from our own path. If you stay in your lane, there’s no traffic.

If you need a reminder that your quirks, your feelings, and even your sock puppets belong on the page, this episode is for you. Hollay’s wisdom is equal parts candid, funny, and deeply encouraging.

Transcript

Intro:

Well, hey there, Writer. Welcome to The Resilient Writers Radio Show. I'm your host, Rhonda Douglas. And this is the podcast for writers who want to create and sustain a writing life they love. 

Because let's face it, the writing life has its ups and downs, and we want to not just write, but also to be able to enjoy the process so that we'll spend more time with our butt-in-chair getting those words on the page. 

This podcast is for writers who love books and everything that goes into the making of them. For writers who want to learn and grow in their craft and improve their writing skills. Writers who want to finish their books and get them out into the world so their ideal readers can enjoy them. Writers who want to spend more time in that flow state. 

Writers who want to connect with other writers to celebrate and be in community, in this crazy roller coaster ride, we call the writing life. We are resilient writers. We're writing for the rest of our lives and we're having a good time doing it. So welcome, Writer. I'm so glad you're here. Let's jump right into today's show.

Rhonda:
Well, hey there, Writer. Welcome back to another episode of The Resilient Writers Radio Show. I'm here today with Hollay Ghadery. She's an award-winning Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in rural Ontario on Anishinaabe land. We're going to talk about Fuse, her acclaimed memoir of mixed-race identity and mental illness, which came out in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Book Club Award for Nonfiction/Memoir.

Her debut collection of poetry, Rebellion Box, was released with Radiant Press in April 2023. And her short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released by Gordon Hill Press in 2024—such a great title. And her debut novel, The Unravelling of Ou, will be published by Palimpsest Press—this fall… no, February 2026.

So Hollay is a board member of the League of Canadian Poets, co-chair of the League's BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of the region in which she lives, and a host on the New Books Network. And I'll put all the links to that stuff down below. Welcome, Hollay—so glad you're here.

Hollay:
I am so honored to be talking to you. I love your show.

Rhonda:
Thank you. So I would love to talk first about your memoir, Fuse. Tell me how that book came about. And then tell me how you decided on its form, because it's quite an original—I would describe the form as kind of layered.

Hollay:
I don't think anything was super conscious on my part. It's just the way my brain works. And so the form was more of me honoring feeling over—sometimes I would say continuity, but definitely coherency sometimes—which is why you work with wonderful editors who force your brain into coherency for the sake of the reader.

But I don't experience time chronologically. And when I'm having a feeling—when I'm remembering something—I don't remember chronologically. I'll have a feeling about one event and then it kind of bleeds into everything else. If I just picture an inkblot, it just goes everywhere.

And so there was no way for me to start at the beginning and move to the end. That's just not the way I experience my life. I doubt I'm alone in that, but I know there are people with far more linear ways of thinking. That wasn't me. So that was the form—it felt more true to my experience of how I have lived.

And as far as where it came from, I mean, I've always considered myself a poet first. I never really intended to write this memoir, but I wrote—uh, I shouldn't say horrible, that's terrible—it wasn't horrible, but I wrote my memoir as a fictionalized novella for my MFA—it was my thesis.

And again, I shouldn't say horrible because everyone who liked it was very supportive of me, but it wasn't what I wanted it to be. So I started kind of playing with it and teasing it out and thinking, if I'm going to talk about this, maybe I should just talk about it from my life. I think that would be more important—more powerful to me—than fictionalizing it.

So that's what I did, but I still didn't really think it was going to be a memoir. Eventually I had all these essays, I guess, for lack of a better word—inkblots all over the place—and I was like, okay, I have to maybe make something out of all these blotches. And that's what I did, so it ended up being my debut book—even though I was really trying to shop around a poetry collection, there it was.

Rhonda:
So and then the poetry collection came later.

Hollay:
Yes. A lot of this happened very quickly, and it's not that I'm really a prolific writer—it's just that I was an addict for so long that I wrote in the throes of addiction, but I didn't edit well and arguably I wasn't a really conscientious writer at that point.

So once I got sober about eight years ago, that's when I started to focus on putting this stuff together and realize that writing is not some magical experience or some state you have to wait to enter into—you just do it.

That's it, you just have to sit on your butt and do it, even with poetry. It doesn't mean that what comes out is going to be great all the time, but do it.

And once I stopped romanticizing the process and just got down to it—which was easier to do sober—I had a lot come out quickly, but I'd had the beginnings of everything for like a decade or two beforehand.

Rhonda:
Okay, and then you were working with it from there.

Hollay:
Yeah.

Rhonda:
So how do you make decisions about genre? Because you work across multiple genres. Do you just know—like when something comes to you—“oh yeah, that's going to be poetry” versus “that's going to be prose,” and it just comes in the genre and then you follow it? Or are you making decisions?

Hollay:
I'm not making decisions. It's just kind of, oh, that's a poem, that's a—you know—like it's a robin, that's a blue jay, that's a rock. I'm just pointing at it. I don't really think too much.

I'm sure there's some intrinsic process—my synapses firing and the decision being made. But I grew up reading everything, so it's like recognition. You recognize something; that's about it.

Rhonda:
So going from writing a layered memoir—like a memoir in pieces—and then poetry and short fiction, what was different when you got into writing a novel for the first time?

Hollay:
The way it consumes your entire being. I couldn't be at the zoo with my children without thinking about the novel—and not just the novel: going through the world experiencing it like the protagonist. I just found it all-consuming, which was really exciting but also not helpful for the rest of my life.

And it's such a luxury to be able to repeatedly enter those worlds. I have a super-obsessive, addictive personality. Maybe other people are better at saying, “I'm not going to think about this anymore,” but I certainly didn't.

Rhonda:
 Tell me a little bit about the book—The Unravelling of Ou—am I saying it right? The Unravelling of Ou?

Hollay:
You're right, yeah. It's my prolonged meditation on play as we get older, and about women upholding the patriarchy—the way women put other women down and keep other women down. But also joy and absurdity and how reveling in absurdity is such an antidote to the ills, the hurt, the pain in the world.

And when I say it's an antidote, I don't mean escaping it. I mean embracing the absurdity of our life is a healthy way to keep moving forward. It doesn't mean being apathetic as we move forward.

I embrace the absurdity and that makes me a better activist, for instance—because it helps me filter out the fluff that doesn't matter and focus on what really does.

It's about absurdity clarifying what matters and what doesn't. And it's entirely narrated by a sock puppet—hence the absurdity. The person the puppet’s attached to does not say anything the entire book. It's just a sock, whose name is Ecology Paul, talking to the protagonist. I think at one point they may even address the reader—I can't really remember now; we argued about that a bit.

Yeah, so it starts in Iran and has to do with queer identity as well and how women are taught to hate their bodies, which ties into women upholding the patriarchy and what that does to our identities—and how much hating ourselves stops us from realizing who we are.

Rhonda:
 And did you go in thematically and then find the plot that worked for the theme? Or did you think, “hey, I have this idea for a sock puppet,” and off we go?

Hollay:
 Yeah, the sock puppet. I don't even remember where they came from. Ecology Paul—I feel like I've been living with that puppet most of my life but didn't realize.

Rhonda:
 Oh, okay.

Hollay:
The voice in my head that is Ecology Paul has been there my whole life. Now that voice is attributed to this very silly little puppet with a very good heart—but definitely not infallible.

And I was reading Adele Wiseman’s Old Woman at Play, which is beautiful. I wish somebody would put it back in print; it's beautiful. I got a really old copy.

For people who don't know Old Woman at Play, it's a beautiful book of creativity and womanhood and growing older as a woman. Her mother would make all these very strange—and sometimes creepy—dolls out of bleached fish bones and those netted onion bags; she made hundreds of them.

She’d give them away to people and had them all around her house. It was a response to living through war. It's really powerful. Adele’s full of gorgeous wisdom in that book—how we use play and craft and creation to make sense of our lives.

Thinking about that—I’m not actually a huge puppet person; some creep me out a bit—but I do love a good sock puppet. I'm a mom of four kids, so sock puppets were an easy craft. I can't remember the moment Ecology Paul came to me as they are, but as a form, they've been there most of my life.

Rhonda:
Wow. I love that. I'm looking forward to reading the novel. Let me ask you about publishing. You did a memoir you didn't think would be a memoir—fragmentary; then poetry, short fiction; and now a novel narrated by a sock puppet. How do you think about publishing? When do you start thinking about it? Or are you like, let me finish the art and figure out the market later?

Hollay:
I wish I had a more useful answer. I'd say my first three books were very much, “I'm just going to write what I want and figure out market later.” I don't think you write poetry or flash fiction thinking money bags. Memoir can be lucrative for some people—but usually if you're already famous, which I certainly was not.

And I was truly just writing because I felt like I had to. You see the women around you literally dying because nobody is talking about stuff.

So it was important for me to talk about it. Despite people saying, “oh, this is so brave,” there was not one moment I felt brave or worried about repercussions—it just felt urgent and necessary.

So I absolutely was not thinking about market. I had to do this.

And yes, the act of publishing—taking raw, messy, diary-esque thoughts and crafting a book—matters. I'm sure you've seen this: people with a good story, but basically giving you diary entries. You're like, “This is terrible. Don't do that. Let's try some scenes.”

Rhonda:
Let's try some scenes.

Hollay:
Exactly. I mean, you could make an argument for Anne Frank, but that’s a very special case.

With my novel, I went in thinking: I'm going to write commercial fiction; I'll pay off my mortgage; I'll have a Netflix special. I really tried to write something super commercial—and failed spectacularly.

At one point a big house had the book and said it's too literary, which is fair. And what are you going to do with a book narrated by a sock puppet when the author is immovable that only the sock puppet talks—no omniscient narrator, nothing?

The reason was simple, though I didn't fully understand it until asked why I wouldn't compromise. As someone who lives with comorbid mental illnesses, I’ve often been told—especially when I was an addict—that I wasn't a reliable narrator of my own life. I felt: you cannot tell me my sock is not reliable. Ecology Paul is weird and wonderful and silly and makes mistakes, but is absolutely the best narrator for this situation—most trustworthy about what's actually going on.

You can't get more into somebody's head than giving them a puppet—a conduit without shame. It's the most honest narration. So I was like, “only the sock speaks.”

Eventually the book went back out, and Palimpsest Press took it quickly. They were enthusiastic, which meant everything.

Rhonda:
An enthusiastic publisher is an antidote to every moment of doubt you've ever had. So great.

Hollay:
 I'd rather be a big fish in a little pond than with a multinational where I'm just another book. I don't rely on writing to pay my bills. I work in publishing; I'm aware books get pulped when they don't sell; small presses are crushed for resources. There are benefits to multinationals, but for what I wanted, it wasn't important—to me or to my silly little sock puppet.

Rhonda:
So many great small and medium-sized independent publishers.

Hollay:
Yes.

Rhonda:
They do great books—you know, the book as an object. They work with you on publicity. I love a small press.

Hollay:
Absolutely. Widow Fantasies is really pretty; I remember holding it for the first time. Gordon Hill Press creates books that feel good to hold, and they do their best. Widow Fantasies was long-listed for the Toronto Book Awards. I didn't even know it was submitted. It didn't shortlist; if it had, I'd have been shocked. I celebrated that long listing like I'd won—went out to dinner, finished watching BBC period dramas.

Rhonda:
I love it.

Hollay:
We have to celebrate everything like a win.

Rhonda:
Every tiny little win—you have to party like it's 1999.

Hollay:
If you're waiting for the Booker Prize…

Rhonda:
No, absolutely.

Hollay:
Even if your book is wonderful, it's a small jury of people making decisions. I loved winning the Canadian Book Club Award—so many readers. They might have biases—everyone does—but they don't necessarily know the author.

Rhonda:
There's a joke: awards are completely subjective—until it's your book. Then it's objective. “They picked my book; therefore, truth.”

Hollay:
Gary Barwin once said to me—it means something to win, but it doesn't mean anything not to win.

Rhonda:
Yeah.

Hollay:
Exactly. If you win, great; if you don't, it doesn't mean anything.

Rhonda:
 And fall is the big Canadian award season. Writers with a book out are refreshing feeds for lists. It's sad to put so much attention there when so many great books didn't happen to hit that particular jury.

Hollay:
Exactly. The books I love most—many never won awards. I practice sympathetic joy: being happy for other people's successes. It makes me happier. If you're confident enough, you can be happy for others.

Rhonda:
 Your success doesn't take anything away from me.

Hollay:
Yes. It keeps me balanced. I'm not even going to say humble—women could be less humble sometimes—but balanced. So many people are doing amazing things. Isn't it good that, while others create strife and hate, these people are creating art?

And there's a great phrase I use in publicity: if you stay in your lane, there's no traffic. Keep being you; there's no competition for you.

Rhonda:
Also, in being uniquely us as writers, we create something so specific it's universal—others can see themselves in it.

Hollay:
I love that.

Rhonda:
Everyone who loves a good sock puppet is going to need to read your novel. I'd love to ask about working in book publicity. Does it impact your writing process?

Hollay:
Not in the least. It helps that I work with small presses publishing books that justify listening to my own voice. For instance, Whitney French, a Black futurist, has a novel-in-verse coming out called Syncopation.

Rhonda:
Yes! That's with Wolsak & Wynn, right?

Hollay:
Yeah. I've read a bit—it's gorgeous. Editors are there to make your book better. Reading singular, remarkable literature from small presses reinforces that I'm doing the right thing. I don't need to try anything else. Like I said—commercial fiction? I tried. It did not work out.

Rhonda:
And there's no way to win at writing “to market.” What the market wants now may not be what it wants two years from now when your novel is ready.

Hollay:
Yeah. And I was introduced to the phrase “tastemakers.” Agents and media powerbrokers deciding whose books get attention. It makes me angry. There has to be a more democratic process. I work in an industry where a yes/no can depend on whether someone had lunch or slept well.

Rhonda:
Or if they're reading it on a screen.

Hollay:
Or if they know you personally.

Rhonda:
Yeah.

Hollay:
Community matters, sure. But I could be introducing you to your next favorite book—and because you don't know me and you're hungry, you delete the email. I get it. What's the solution? A big board to discuss everything? That's not sustainable. But I dislike the term “tastemaker”—it gives too much power to one person.

Rhonda:
Yeah.

Hollay:
And these people are in charge of what we consume in arts media. They're making decisions based on tiny descriptions—another reason not to feel bad if your book doesn't make a list. They're doing their best. Would we prefer no lists? Probably not.

Rhonda:
And there’s more opportunity now—independent presses, indie/self-publishing, especially for genre. So much more choice.

Hollay:
There is. Legacy media may be shrinking, but new media is exploding—podcasts, BookTok, BookTube, Bookstagram, Substack. More ways to find our readers in niche digital spaces.

Rhonda:
Totally. I've ruined my book budget. I just—

Hollay:
I'm so glad I get a lot of my books for free.

Rhonda:
That's a nice perk.

Hollay:
If I'm going to interview an author, the publicist or publisher sends me the book. I also buy books—especially children's books. I have four kids.

Rhonda:
So great. Thank you for this conversation—really, really interesting. I'll put links in the show notes to the books that are out. Is the novel available for pre-order yet?

Hollay:
Yeah, it is. I'm doing a slow cover reveal on Instagram right now because the wonderful Katie (Katlyn) Powell, who's a San Antonio artist, actually created a replica of my sock puppet and painted it—and that's the cover. So, Ecology Paul.

Rhonda:
What's your Instagram handle?

Hollay:
It's @hollayghadery—just my name. It'll be fun. I defy people to look at that picture and not feel happy. Or at least a little unsettled. I don't know.

Rhonda:
Or a tiny flash of joy to get us through the rest of the day.

Hollay:
Yeah.

Rhonda:
All right, thanks so much, Hollay. It was great to talk to you.

Hollay:

It was amazing to talk to you. Thank you so much for having me on your show.

Outro:

Thanks so much for hanging out with me today and for listening all the way to the end. I hope you enjoyed today's episode of The Resilient Writers Radio Show. While you're here, I would really appreciate it if you'd consider leaving a rating and review of the show. You can do that in whatever app you're using to listen to the show right now, and it just takes a few minutes. 

Your ratings and reviews tell the podcast algorithm gods that yes, this is a great show, definitely recommend it to other writers. And that will help us reach new listeners who might need a boost in their writing lives today as well. So please take a moment and leave a review. I'd really appreciate it. And I promise to read every single one. Thank you so much.