The Kingston Writers Behind the Fest
The 17th edition of Kingston WritersFest (KWF) is about to kick off! From free events like Literary Trivia Night to the Writers Studio masterclasses, KWF 2025 has something for everyone. We sat down with local authors Ying Lee, Merilyn Simonds, and Jamal Saeed to learn a bit more about some of the names behind this year’s fest.
Ying Lee: Creativity and Crafting Worlds
by Mariam Tirani
Ying Lee has published poetry and fiction, presented a sound installation, and most recently released her first picture book, Mrs. Nobody. With each new project, she encourages readers to think about identity, boundaries, and belonging. In our conversation, Lee discusses her work, the meaning behind it, and her creative process.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How do your personal experiences shape your writing/books?
What I’m going to say to you is not that different from what I think a lot of other creators experience, which is that everything is grist for the mill. Every memory, every time you’re sitting on the bus, listening to someone else have a conversation, every time you have a new experience, whether you are conscious of it or not, I think that’s informing the way you see the world, and then that world comes out in whatever it is you’re making, which, in my case, is fiction or poetry or essays, but for other people, your creative imagination is built on everything that you are, and I think even if you were to try to filter it out, you would be only moderately successful at doing that.
Are there any characters in your books that you connect with most? Why?
There is a little bit of me in many characters, not always the parts that I like. My picture book Mrs. Nobody is about friendship, imagination, and boundaries. I think there’s a bit of me in both characters—the main character, Alice, and her bossy imaginary friend. I think many of us contain that duality. Loving something so deeply, yet it’s not always good for you. It’s about navigating relationships, deciding boundaries, establishing them, communicating them, and insisting on having them respected.
What themes do you find yourself repeatedly exploring in your writing?
I’m very interested in power, and how it plays out at a cultural level. Whether it’s social class, cultural identity, racial identity. Whether it’s major shifts over decades of historical movements, but also very much at the individual level. I feel that I stand on the margins of a larger culture and I think many people feel that way, even people who have lots of cultural power or are close to the locus of power, because of the various kinds of privilege that they have.
I’m also interested in how people on the margins navigate belonging and claim space for themselves, and the experience of being Asian in a culture that is sometimes extremely unsympathetic to the idea of being “other.” My first YA novels, for instance, follow a young woman passing through Victorian London, and how she’s very frightened of anyone discovering her father’s racial identity. So, secrets, power, being on the margins, and navigating relationships are recurring themes in my work.
You have explored a few genres in your time as an author. Are there any genres that you have not tried and would like to?
Absolutely. One of the joys of being a creative person is finding something new. Recently, I was at the Eden Mills Writers Festival teaching a couple of workshops, but then I took a workshop with these two poets who were teaching us how to make chapbooks by hand. I’ve published a chapbook. I’ve read a lot of chapbooks, but to me, they’ve always just been sort of complete physical objects. And for these two poets to pull them apart, give you paper and tools, teach you to make ink, and write with a goose quill pen showed me that it’s not strictly writing.
What do you hope readers take away from your stories?
You know, I don’t really like didactic fiction. I don’t like stories that have a moral and that by the time you finish this book, you will have learned something. I never want to impose that on a reader.
When I think about my favourite books or media, there’s a moment that I carry with me. Or if I really resonate with a character, sometimes they become like a minor voice in my brain for a little while. That’s what I’m hoping for, something that will speak to the reader and that they can take and find a positive or constructive or meaningful way of continuing to connect with it.
Y. S. Lee’s poems have won Contemporary Verse 2’s 2022 Foster Prize and been finalists for various awards in Canada, the US, and Australia. Her first full-length poetry collection, Rebuke the Ghosts (Brick Books), will be published in 2027, while her lyric essay, “Tek tek”, was shortlisted for the 2022 CBC Nonfiction Prize. Ying’s first picture book, Mrs. Nobody (illus. Marie Lafrance), was published earlier this year to starred reviews from School Library Journal and Foreword. Her fiction includes the YA mystery series The Agency, which was translated into six languages. She’s a member of The Villanelles writing group.
Lee will be teaching a masterclass on picture book writing on Sep 19, 2025, as part of Kingston WritersFest. Tickets and more information can be found here.
Merilyn Simonds: From A Vision to A Celebration.
By Malobi Elueme
This year marks the 17th edition of the beloved Kingston WritersFest, and no one is more closely tied to its origins than co-founder Merilyn Simonds.
No stranger to Kingston’s literary scene, Simonds’ career spans over four decades with a body of work that has crossed genres and mediums. And while doing all of that, in 2009, she helped bring a literary festival to Kingston. Ahead of its 17th edition, I had the chance to sit down with Simonds to talk about the festival’s beginnings, its near-end, and the dedicated and creative team behind this year’s revival.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Simonds joins our virtual interview with the comfort of someone who has done this many times. When asked about WritersFest’s beginnings, “It was my vision to create a festival because I was a writer, and I was going to festivals all across the country,” Simonds recalls. “And I thought: why not Kingston? Why don’t we have one? So I contacted a good friend, who is also one of my publishers who had just retired and moved here. And together we created Kingston WritersFest.”
Simonds describes her role as a “starter, a sprinter rather than a marathoner.” Her focus in those early years was simple: get the festival off the ground. It took nearly five years to build the efficiency and financial stability (two years longer than they had planned). Once that was established, she stepped back, leaving a succession of Artistic Directors, Barbara Bell and Aara Macauley, to shape the festival’s creative direction. In those years, KWF established itself as an important part of the Kingston scene, and of the Canadian Literary scene at large.
It was a sad day this past January when the KWF sent out an email announcing the end of the Festival after sixteen years. “I was out of touch…” Simonds says, “off in my corner writing my books. So when I received the same email that everyone else did, it was heartbreaking.”
But then, she sprang into action.
Simonds called up Julie Leclerc, the Chair of the Board, to ask if they really needed to close the Festival and Leclerc confirmed that they did. Simonds thought, “If we declared bankruptcy, then the writers would never be paid and writers are always at the bottom of the totem pole.” And so she called Jan Walter, the Festival’s co-founder, and they decided to set up a campaign to see if they could raise enough money to pay off the debts “so that at least [the Festival] can die with dignity.”
And so they launched a crowdfunding campaign and rallied publishers, booksellers, authors, community members, previous attendees – everybody really. The response was overwhelming. Within 10 days, they raised the money to pay off their debt. By March, a new board and a 17-person volunteer committee had formed to plan and execute the festival. Kingston’s WritersFest was officially back!
“That is a testament to the Festival, more than to us. The Festival is so highly regarded across the country.” About the team, Simonds says “I’m in awe of every single one of them. They are so committed, so creative, and they are working so hard to make this happen.”
The revived WritersFest promises to be a true celebration: 42 writers across 30 events, from Thursday evening to Sunday afternoon. The lineup mixes big-name authors and fresh, emerging voices in the literary scene. Of course, in a thoughtful touch that echoes its 2009 origins, the return wouldn’t be complete without Margaret Atwood, who has known Simonds for nearly forty years and appeared at the very first Festival back in 2009.
Outside of the festival, Simonds continues to chart her own creative path. Her newest book, Walking with Beth, blends memoir and reflection on womanhood across generations. It is available everywhere, and when I promise to buy it, Simonds reminds me to check my local independent bookstores.
WritersFest is back this Thursday, September 18th, and if Simonds and the current festival team have anything to say about it, this year’s may just be the best one yet.
Merilyn Simonds is the internationally published author of 22 books, including the novel The Holding, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and the Canadian classic nonfiction novel, The Convict Lover, a finalist for the Governor General’s Award. Simond’s memoir, Walking with Beth: Conversations with my 100-Year-Old Friend is now available from Random House Canada.
You can catch Merilyn discussing Walking with Beth on September 21 as part of the Kingston WritersFest. More information can be found here.
Jamal Saeed: Writing for Peace
By Mariam Tirani
Syrian writer and artist, Jamal Saeed devoted his life to writing and poetry to advocate for peace and justice. Even during his 12 years as a prisoner of conscience in Syria’s most notorious prison, he continued to write. In our conversation, Saeed reflected on his writing experience, his hopes for humanity, and the influences intertwined in his work.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How do your personal experiences shape your books and writing?
Personal experience is central to creating art and literature. Reading about love is not enough for me to write about love. I have to experience it. Similarly, the poetry we write is a kind of photograph of the poetry we live. Letters are symbols of voices, but feelings are not. They are something else. A good writer is the one who can transform those feelings into letters. The effect of what we experience—pain, happiness, love, hope—is very important in shaping our poetry, music, paintings, and movies.
Are any of the characters in your books based on real people you have met?
Of course, but sometimes I mix many characters together. I feel that this face fits this feeling more than that face. Or I’ll use the behaviour of one, and the inner feeling of another. For example, I wanted to write about a teenager who was our neighbor. She was a smart girl, so lovely, but she behaved in a specific way. It was astonishing. This is why I gave her a kind of madness. She wanted to light the world with many colorful suns. The girl herself didn’t tell me that she wanted to light the world, but I felt it. So, yes, my writings, my poetry, my short stories, and even the novel I’m writing now, have something that depends on real people.
What themes do you find yourself repeatedly exploring in your writing?
People are asking for peace, love, happiness, freedom, justice. For me, I think a lot about the development of ideas and feelings all over the world. I wonder if, 500 years from now, people will feel the same toward flowers, trees, rivers, the other sex, or toward the world and the borders between countries. These borders were drawn through a political process of many wars, of many ugly things, so we think about them differently. Still, the most important things for me are freedom, beauty, and justice.
What is the most difficult part of writing a book for you?
Being your own first reader is difficult because you sympathize with yourself but you must be a hard judge. I feel like a mom sending her daughter to school, combing her hair this way then that way. “No, this is more beautiful. No, this one.”
Then, the minute before you send the book to the publisher is a hard minute. Exactly like when you send your child to school. You want them to be beautiful, smart, well-behaved, ethical, loved by everyone. That is the most difficult thing for me.
What do you hope readers take away from your stories?
I’d like readers to feel that the earth is a good homeland for us. Peace matters, we have to plant hope, even in difficult, ugly circumstances. To feel that we’re going to live once, so let’s live it well. The important thing is to feel, “Wow, I made my neighbor happy, my partner happy, my child happy. I did something for others.” This is a deep happiness. I want my readers to feel beauty, to feel justice, to feel freedom, and the deepest meanings of these words.
Jamal Saeed is a Syrian Canadian author, editor, visual artist, Arabic calligrapher, and translator. He worked in publishing and was co-founder of Friends of Art & Literature, aimed at supporting young Syrian creators. When secret intelligence threatened members, the organization dissolved. Jamal spent 12 years in a Syrian prison as a prisoner of conscience. Jamal landed in Canada with his family as a refugee in 2016.
Jamal Saeed’s Princess Nai and Other Stories and My Sister the Apple Tree will be published in fall 2025. Saeed will be discussing his short stories on Sep 19, 2025as part of Kingston WritersFest. More information about the program and tickets can be found here.
