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Transcript

Intro: Hi and welcome to In the ‘Cosm. I’m your host, Canadian speculative fiction author, Cait Gordon. I’ve started this podcast, so I can chat with authors and other creatives I simply fan girl over. I hope you enjoy diving into my microcosm and feel inspired to seek out the works of these amazing humans.

Cait Gordon: Hi, I’m Cait Gordon, and today the Shakespeare geek in me is over the moon to have Canadian author Sue Taylor-Davidson as my guest. Sue is the author of the historical fiction series To Pluck A Crow, which began with book one, The Hands Behind Shakespeare’s Pen and the latest, Death Stalks the House of Herbert. Sue’s life has been full and happy with a wonderful husband and three great stepchildren, a large extended family, commitment to Aboriginal issues, research jobs, library work, babies, animals, and yes we’re talking cats, editing, NGOs dedicated to education and library development, lots of gardening, knitting, Shakespeare research, reading, art, and writing! WHEW! Her education is diverse, ranging from health studies, theology, Native studies, library science, and early childhood education. Welcome, Sue.

Sue Taylor-Davidson: Oh, thank you, Cait.

Cait Gordon: I must say, I don’t think you’ve done enough with your life. [Sue laughs.]

Cait Gordon: You might want to get a hobby or something. [Laughter]

Sue Taylor-Davidson: Yeah. Well, it’s been busy.

Cait Gordon: It’s been busy, eh?

Sue Taylor-Davidson: Mm hmm!

Cait Gordon: Thank you so much for joining me today in my microcosm. And as I said, and as we’ve heard that you have indeed—you are indeed leading a full life, and you seem to be passionate about many, many things. What are you working on right now?

Sue Taylor-Davidson: With the pandemic, it’s been pretty tough focusing. I find my brain is really not the same. [laughs] And, yeah, this whole year I’ve—one thing I have done a big focus on, I have an aunt who’s in a senior residence, and I call her every day and we play. She’s blind, so we do crosswords on the phone, and I give her the clues and then I tell her how many spaces there are and she has to keep it all in your head.

Cait Gordon: That’s amazing, though. [Laughs]

Sue Taylor-Davidson: She is amazing, she is, and that’s been a big focus because for a while we were like two hours a day on the phone because she was very lonesome, and she couldn’t have any visitors till about September. So, that’s been a big focus for me. My mom’s sister—great aunt, wonderful person. Then I tried to do the research for my book three, which is not going very well, actually, because I’m kind of stuck. Like, I’ve gone through a lot of the websites that I could access from Canada. And we had planned to go over to England and Belgium to follow these trails this year, and of course, that was all cut short. That’s fine; I’d rather be safe than sorry.

Cait Gordon: Right.

Sue Taylor-Davidson: Yeah. And then I have the three Etsy shops that I run: one with my sister and the other two on my own. And that’s been really busy during the pandemic because people are buying things online.

Cait Gordon: Oh, nice.

Sue Taylor-Davidson: Yeah.

Cait Gordon: I mean, you know, I will never use the word lazy to describe you [laughter]. In fact, I think you should go have a lie down after this [more laughter]. But yeah, you know it’s interesting you talking about, um, you know, doing crosswords audibly. Um, you know, with the way things are going now where you can’t be in person and such. We’re learning all different ways to be accommodating to people. So we can still feel connected. So that really resonated with me.

Sue Taylor-Davidson: And you know, um, she’s not very—her hearings going, to so you have to show when you’re talking to her, but her daughter’s got her a technology that she can put these earphones on and hear better through phone and television. So there’s a lot out there to help people who are having some of those kinds of difficulties.

Cait Gordon: Yes, exactly. I’m hard of hearing myself. And so I’ve configured my microphone and my earphones so that I can run a podcast because at the beginning I was saying, “I’m going to run a podcast. I’m hard of hearing. Hey, let’s have fun!” [Sue laughs] Because there are a lot of accommodations out there so we like this.

Sue Taylor-Davidson: Yeah.

Cait Gordon: Okay, I want to talk about words because you arrange the alphabet, and you know that I read The Hands Behind Shakespeare’s Pen, and I gave it this glowing review because I just couldn’t get enough of it.

Sue Taylor-Davidson: Thank you very much.

Cait Gordon: I loved it to bits. The authorship of Shakespeare’s work has often been a topic that’s been explored among scholars, and how did this become an inspiration for you to write this series? And I mean, you mentioned about travel, but if you could expand also on how you’ve done the research for this.

Sue Taylor-Davidson: Sure. Yeah, it was about, 12 years ago, I read a book. No, 11 years ago, by a woman named Robin Williams, like the actor.

Cait Gordon: Oh!

Sue Taylor-Davidson: She, yeah, she wrote a book called Sweet Swan of Avon: Did a Woman Write Shakespeare? And I was fascinated by that book, and I was convinced at the end of it that I wanted to research more and learn more. I hadn’t even really much heard about the authorship question, and I wasn’t a Shakespeare scholar or anything like that, but it was so intriguing that I started getting books. I looked up Shakespeare authorship and found out that she was in this big committee. It’s a trustee committee on Shakespeare authorship; they’ve even started a program at Brunel University on that. You can get your masters in Shakespeare authorship. So, she got her master’s, and it was after writing this book because she had already been doing a lot of research—she’s a very, very brilliant woman—then what happened was, I thought, I gotta go way back here because I don’t even know what the authorship thing is about, so I started reading about other candidates, the Earl of Oxford, Philip Sidney was one, Queen Elizabeth was one. There’s a whole group of them; there’s about 12 that have been nominated as candidates. So, I read something about every one, but I still went back to Mary Sidney Herbert, who was her candidate. So, that was how I kind of got into it, just reading and reading and after a while I started making notes because it was so confusing to keep all these people in the history, because I didn’t know the history of the time. I kept a lot of notes, and I was constantly talking to my husband about it, so finally I said, “Okay, I’m going to just get this straight in my head,” and I made sort of an outline. And my husband suggested, “Why don’t you write a book?” and I said, “Oh there’s no way—that woman’s written the definitive book.” But over a couple of years I said I can’t write a historical fiction book, I’m not trained in that, but I can write—no, I can’t write a true history book, but I can write, maybe I can write a fictional book, bringing in some of the points, so that’s how it got started.

Cait Gordon: Right.

Sue Taylor-Davidson: And it was supposed to be just for my family, originally. And then it got—someone suggested I go to Renaissance, knew Nathan, and I knew Nathan then, and I was talking to Nathan, and there was so much going on, I thought, “Okay, I’ll just I’ll just fix it up as best I can.” But in the meantime, my daughter, my stepdaughter Mary is a graduate of Concordia in the literary—she’s in playwriting, that’s what she did for her [studies]. So, she was a Shakespeare person all her life, and she was constantly walking around with books about Shakespeare, and we would have great discussions. And she was taught at Canterbury by a wonderful, wonderful professor, and he became the editor for me before I passed on my book to Renaissance.

Cait Gordon: That’s amazing!

Sue Taylor-Davidson: Yeah, Mr. Fitzpatrick—they call him Mr. Fitz—and I knew him through the library where I worked because he was a patron. So, one day I got up the courage and said, “I want to submit something I’ve got to a book publisher. Would you read it?” And he spent two months, so when I got it back, it was full of red lines all through [Cait laughs], full, every page, about 500 red lines. He was really seriously looking at it, but he liked it. And I thought, Oh I’m a real—what am I asking him? He loves Shakespeare! He’s gonna think Shakespeare is Shakespeare, so this is going to be a conflict for him. But he was very open, so that’s how it all got started.

Cait Gordon: That’s fantastic. That’s really amazing. I mean I would never have known, like, all the self-doubt and struggles and such that you were experiencing. I, you know, a lot of people know me as a space-opera writer, but I love reading historical fiction, like I love it to bits. And I don’t know if it’s because I have a little bit, that cultural Irish thing where I like learning history through storytelling.

Sue Taylor Davidson: Yes!

Cait Gordon: And one thing I love about historical fiction, is that you can talk about real things but you create this fictitious family in the setting of something real, and does that appeal to you?

Sue Taylor-Davidson: That always has, and I just, you know, I’m Irish, too, so I’ve got that storytelling. My friends say, “You’re such a storyteller; everything you talk about, you have to tell it in the story.” It’s the Irish… it’s the way we were brought up.

Cait Gordon: [Laughs] It’s how we learn! My father could tell you the best story about going to the grocery store.

Sue Taylor-Davidson: Exactly, exactly! [Laughs]

Cait Gordon: This is our people folks; this is what we’re like. [Sue laughs] Um, so, do you want to just say a quick, I mean we know, basically what you did for researching, do you just want to say one or two little things about that first book and just kind of, you know, just so our readers and our listeners know what it’s about?

Sue Taylor-Davidson: Yes. I will, yeah. Well, the first book is called To Pluck a Crow: The Hand Behind Shakespeare’s Pen, and I just introduced Mary Sidney Herbert from the time she’s a young girl within her family context. Every alternate chapter is historical fiction and the other odd numbered chapters are in the present day with two present-day characters who are doing the same research that I did, almost following the footsteps that I did when I researched Mary. One is a librarian named Janek, and he’s Polish, and he lives in Britain in London, and the other is Sarah, who is a graduate doing her master’s in Mary Sidney Herbert and her relationship with her brother Philip. Because over the years I’ve kind of gotten the idea that while Philip was alive, they wrote a body of work together, and that’s been documented, historically, and I think some of it is his work, too, that, that she’s also put forward. Problem was it all got lost in fires, and I bring that up in my book, all of their notes, all of their… which have been annotated in other historical documents that they wrote a lot together. Mary Sidney Herbert had the Wilton circle of writers where she was the only woman surrounded by a group of the men of the times, who wrote, Christopher Marlowe, and a whole bunch of them. She was in the middle of that group, the only woman, which is really interesting to me that she could hold her own, well, she was very strong person and very kind as well. So, I think she had a way with people. So, I traced her life up until… well, there was a little, little clue in this book, which I won’t give away about the papers of Mary Sidney Herbert, and it’s a real historical clue, and it’s real. So, so the papers may still be out there, but I won’t tell how I how I got to that—it’s in the book. Mary’s will is also been lost, but could be found. So, that’s all I can say I guess, without giving away too much.

Cait Gordon: I really loved the—because I also watch a lot of period pieces as well—and I love the transfer between the modern day, the present day, and then going back. I found that you have really captured that Elizabethan culture

Sue Taylor-Davidson: Good, good.

Cait Gordon: It really was good. So, I’m just telling you if you have any self-doubts lingering. It was so masterfully done. I was very impressed with that.

Sue Taylor-Davidson: Thank you very much, and I want to do a shout out here to Robin Williams because I’ve met her since. In all these years… I met her online, she has a Shakespeare reading series, and you can go on on Saturday mornings and read with her and a group of people they do every—they take a play and they go through it line by line, and they discuss it. So, I’ve learned a lot from that group.

Cait Gordon: That’s fantastic. I’m definitely going to be check that out! Um, so that was the first book. Now I just started reading the second book and [laughs] I have to say I’m so grateful that you’ve put a kind of “Last time we saw these people, this is what happened…” Without being too spoilery again, now what is Death Stalks the House of Herbert about?

Sue Taylor-Davidson: Well, it’s about the part of Mary Sidney Herbert’s married life, because I took her up to, well, she was married in the first book—I took her to that but then there’s a whole history of deaths that happened in her family, one after the other within a period of two years, and that’s true. So I had to go through that, and it was really difficult because my own mum died during that time.

Cait Gordon: Oh dear.

Sue Taylor-Davidson: So, mum had been the first book launch, and then [in] the second book, I’m writing about death. And I couldn’t do it. I had to put it away and then the summer after my mum died, she died in July, it was not till about September that I was able to pick up the pen and start going through… And I kept telling my friends, and Nathan was one, I kept saying, “I can’t do this. I can’t write about this. I can’t do this book, and I’m stuck. I can’t do any books now because I’m in the middle of it.” But they all talked me through it, and they told me it’s going to be therapeutic. You do it, you think about it, and Mr. Fitz also helped me a lot with that. Like, he helped me, to tell me if it rang true. And one of my friends at work, who is a really good reader, like really reads everything, she also said (her name is Bridget), she also went through the book, and she would say, you know, “I actually cried at that part.” So, I knew that I was getting authentic because my temptation was to escape, not think about it, not—I didn’t want to be authentic at that point. And I just could do a couple of lines a day some days, and I had to put it away. It was just too many memories, too many questions. And that though helped me in the end, because the book had, I think there were six death in it all together, and she had to go through them all in a really short period of time—her own life was like that.

Cait Gordon: Wow.

Sue Taylor-Davidson: And so for me that was like, I don’t know how she did it—her strength of character. She did take two years completely out of society. Like a recluse at her home in Wilton House. No one saw her—the Queen didn’t bug her, which often they were in their faces, eh? Because these were the lords and ladies of the time. They just let her be, and she just was angry and she was walking and talking and she got really sick. She had a lot of illness at that time and had to be treated. So, that’s sort of the focus of the second book, Death Stalks the House of Herbert because she’s married to Sidney Herbert.

Cait Gordon: Yes.

Sue Taylor-Davidson: She loses her sig—all her significant others except her children.

Cait Gordon: Wow.

 Sue Taylor-Davidson: She’s sort of left with this—and she’s young, because she was young. She married at 15.

Cait Gordon: Yes, yes.

Sue Taylor-Davidson: And it all happened—she’s not an older woman at that point, and she’s on her own, and she’s dealing them with all the properties that her husband owned through being a lord. So, um, that was really—and then the other part of it was like comic relief from the other side in the present day, because this character came into my head named Crick, and I just loved him. [Cait laughs] I don’t know he just got me through it, he got me through it. He was quirky. He was like a steampunk version from a blast from the past. [Cait laughs again] He was um… I don’t know, he was just a real interesting, interesting person, and as I began to meet him in my head, I thought, I really liked this guy! And so had the relief of doing the, the odd number of chapters with him in it because he was a character, and he joked. He reminded me of my cousins from Pembroke, they live in Petawawa, they’re up there. And my cousins, I modelled him a lot, I think, after one of my cousins who’s really, really fun and quirky and if Brad’s ever gonna listen to this he’ll, he’ll probably just laugh. He’ll sit back and laugh and say, “Yeah, I gotta read about this,” because he will see himself, you know?

Cait Gordon: You know, that’s so funny, you know, [puts on serious newscaster voice] for legal reasons, all characters are fictitious and coincidental.

Sue Taylor-Davidson: [Laughs] That’s right. Oh, that’s right. [Both laugh]

Cait Gordon: I mean, you said so much just now; there’s so many things to unpack, you know, creativity during grief. You know, um, I went through something similar, and it’s, you know, even now I’m not going through grief, but I’m nurturing myself through depression. And one of the things I’m doing is this podcast, because I thought, You’re an extrovert, you need to connect. You don’t feel like doing it, do it anyway. And there’s this interesting notion between giving ourselves a little push and then knowing when to sit back. And it’s that balance and I feel that really applies to what you were saying when it comes to grief as well, you know? Some days you can only write a few lines and, you know, even in the disability realm we say, celebrate all those wins. You wrote 50 words, celebrate it as a win, you didn’t write today, celebrate that as a win, you know, it’s all about the balance of self-care.

Sue Taylor-Davidson: I like this.

Cait Gordon: When I wrote my first book I was disabled, alone, and frightened. And then I wrote this disabled character who wasn’t frightened. She knew something was added to her, but she was going to strap on her tall red roller boots [Sue laughs] and go and live.

Sue Taylor-Davidson: That’s great.

Cait Gordon: And she had this fortitude, and she nurtured me, this fictitious character, which I’m wondering if that’s a side of ourselves, taking care of ourselves.

Sue Taylor-Davidson: I agree, I think it is because I think in Crick, I see, like, we all have a good sense of humour in our-my family origin and we do in the family that I’m in now, too.

Cait Gordon: Right.

Sue Taylor-Davidson: But my father was the funniest person, he was hilarious, like, we got a lot of laughter. And I felt like for a few years of my work, quite a few years of my life, I—not being around him as much because I was living in the house, I was out on my own, I lost that sense of humor, because I’m such an introvert, that I had to go—I went too much inside in those days, in the 20s, when I was 20 and early 30s. And I think that it… I think that the character of Crick… It’s almost calling to me: Get that humor back, get it back because it’s, it’s a, it’s a godsend. It’s a lifeline, it’s… if you don’t have it, you don’t experience life in a balanced way. Just like you said.

Cait Gordon: You’re preaching to the choir I’m a humorist, so I dig it! [Laughs]

Sue Taylor-Davidson: You are, you’re great. Like, I don’t have that talent, but I’m trying to develop it.

Cait Gordon: I think you probably do, you know? I think sometimes, you know, like, you can be an introvert, but an introvert really just means that you get energized, when you go out on your own for a little while. You can really love being with people but then you need to kind of build up your energy just by being alone. Right?

Sue Taylor-Davidson: Yeah.

Cait Gordon: I know introverts that are funny as heck, right?

Sue Taylor-Davidson: [Laughs] Well, good!

Cait Gordon: I really don’t think it’s a mutually exclusive thing. And if you created this character that means it’s living within you anyway, right?

Sue Taylor-Davidson: Thank God. Yeah. Yeah I’m glad it’s there because I need, I need the humor, and we all need the humor right now in this year.

Cait Gordon: Yeah, for sure. I like the way you’re exploring grief and then also adding humor because again, going back to kind of the Irish way… This is the Irish show by the way; this is all the Irish show. [Sue laughs] It’s very true in Irish storytelling that they’ll have you weeping one second and then laughing the next second, so I feel it’s very valid to write a story like that. Um, okay so you were mentioning about Robin Williams.

Sue Taylor-Davidson: Yes.

Cait Gordon: And I like to ask people, you know, who they read who they follow, are there, are there any books or series or different things that you’re interested in right now?

Sue Taylor-Davidson: I love mysteries. I love mysteries, and I love Ann Cleeves work, and I like Vera the character, Vera Stanhope, the one she created. I’ve been reading through her things and doing a lot of watching of the Vera series on TV, because it’s based on her books. I like Native writers a lot. You know, Tom King—my husband I went to—he [Tom King] was some giving a presentation at Wabano Centre last year, just before the pandemic hit. In February, it was around Valentine’s Day. And he did about his latest book and it was with Shelagh Rogers, did the interview with them and their life. So, we got to see him. I loved him. I love his humor, I love his seriousness, and so you know lately, one of the books I was reading… I’ll probably forget the name so I wrote it down here. Oh, it was about Bingo. [Cait exclaims in surprise] It was called…oh! Nobody Cries At Bingo.

Cait Gordon: [Laughs] I love it! I love the title!

Sue Taylor-Davidson: I love the title, I just finished that one. It’s about life on a reservation or a reserve and about people’s sense of humor, through difficulties, so that was great.

Cait Gordon: I’m sorry, what was the author’s, what was the author?

Sue Taylor-Davidson: The author is… just one second….

Cait Gordon: Sorry, ’cause I was laughing because I love the title so much. [Laughter]

Sue Taylor-Davidson: Her name is Dawn Dumont, D-U-M-O-N-T , Nobody Cries At Bingo. She’s Canadian from Manitoba.

Cait Gordon: Fantastic!

Sue Taylor-Davidson: Yeah, really, really great book. And then I love Tony Black who is a serious mystery writer from Scotland and he keeps—he writes it like it is. He’s very dark, but he’s also very redemptive. So, you know I have these people that I like that are kind of—some are more on the, you know, like, for me, what I think about when I think of mystery was the whole Agatha Christie thing where she never showed a dead body for very long, eh? There was the body in the library, everybody walked around it, but they didn’t talk about any gory details. But nowadays, mystery writers do, they’re more forensic oriented, you know, so Tony Black is forensic oriented. [Cait laughs] It’s not for the weak of heart but, and I had to put it like slap it shut few times, but he is a person that I so admire his writing. I wrote to him on his webpage and I said, I can’t get it, I can’t, I can’t tell you how your writing affected me it was so cathartic in a certain way. Yeah, he’s an amazing writer.

Cait Gordon: So mystery is a big thing with you, as well, I mean you’d like the historical component, but you also like the mystery component.

Sue Taylor-Davidson: Yeah, I like research and mystery to me, solving a mystery, whether it be a crime or an identity, whose identity or a missing person, it’s all in the detail and research is all in the details. For me, the most exciting part of writing is research. I just love it. I could spend hours tracing down a little clue till the nth degree to see if I can find or a name of a person. How did that person connect with this one? I’ve done that; I’ve spent—that’s why it took 10 years for me to write the first book. I couldn’t write anything because I was tracing all these people and trying to figure out how they interacted and what did this clue mean and what did he mean when he said he left it here, I gotta go to that place. I literally went on Google Earth, like I’m in a car and drove the Carisbrooke Castle for my first book. That’s how I did it. I’ve never been to Carisbrooke Castle, but I went inside the castle. You can do that! They’ve got an online site where you can walk around like a person in the castle. It’s like, I’ve never been there but nowadays you don’t even have to be at the place, you can Google Earth it and drive along and get there.

Cait Gordon: [Laughs] That’s amazing! You know, it’s so funny because I was just I was chatting with my own mother the other day and saying that it’s so nice to be an author during the time of the internet and all these apps and stuff. I mean you’re, you’re just explain it right there. You just saved yourself a lot of money on a plane ticket. [Laughter]

Sue Taylor-Davidson: Well, I’m going to go to Spa next in Belgium because Spa in Belgium features in the third book, and I can’t get there. We can’t go to Belgium, so I’m going to go on the train. I mean, in my head, and I’m going to try and follow the tracks; I’m going to do the whole Google Earth thing. I mean what you see on the side of the roads. And I’m going to go in—I’ve already done it I’ve gone into the Spa it’s called Spa the little place right the name of the village. I’ve gone in and down the roads and looked at the buildings already, so I have a sense of what it’s like there because I’ve never been. And that’s got a feature and that’s—I need to look at historical buildings there in order to write about them, because some of them are still standing that were there and Mary Sidney Herbert’s day, and she went. She spent two and a half years in Belgium and around France in her later years, so that’s part of this mystery in the third book.

Cait Gordon: That’s fantastic on so many levels, like, 1) you could do it safely during a pandemic. But like, I’m just like people like myself that you know it’s-it’s-it … Travel is hard for me physically because of my disability, but if I just want to go and explore, there’s—that’s the way I can explore. It’s so true whenever you read tales where someone’s on a train, you always, you always know what they’re looking at and the fact that you can actually use technology… People won’t know the difference! [Laughs] That’s what’s so amazing about it.

Sue Taylor-Davidson: No, they won’t know. They won’t, and people have filmed their train trips and put them up on YouTube, like, you have to search a lot but you find things when you really do the… That’s where the research comes in, it’s kind of exciting finding things.

Cait Gordon: Yeah. You You seem to be totally enjoying yourself when you do the research.

Sue Taylor-Davidson: I love it.

Cait Gordon: Okay, so this is my last question, and it’s my favorite. Tell us a fun fact about you.

Sue Taylor-Davidson: I thought about this, and one fun fact would be that… When I was a kid I wanted to be a detective, that was one, and I also wanted to be an astronaut. I put my hand up in grade eight and I said, they said what do you want to be. And, you know, from, I didn’t want to say it because I thought everyone’s gonna laugh at me and finally she says, “Sue, what do you want to be when you leave here? What are you going to study?” I said, “I want to be an astronaut.” Everyone burst out laughing, the whole place because I was the shyest kid in the class and I wasn’t really—I barely spoke. And here I am [laughs] thinking about shooting off into outer space but, you know, really I wanted to be a detective, that was one of the big things, that, or a sheep farmer because I love my knitting.

Cait Gordon: [Laughs] You know, you know, when I first went to Ireland, I saw this um—sorry, I was in a cab, and I saw these beautiful like emerald-green [hills]… it is true, it really is emerald-green in Ireland, full of sheep, full of sheep. And when I, when I called my husband. I said to him, “There’s sheep here!” And I’m thinking there’s nothing wrong with you, for your vocation desire. You were just in the wrong country. I hope there’s still a chance for you to become a space detective because…

Sue Taylor-Davidson: [Laughs]

Cait Gordon: Or you can be an astronaut and raise sheep, too.

Sue Taylor-Davidson: [Laughs]

Cait Gordon: I always say if you’re younger than dead [Sue bursts out laughing], you can do anything!

Sue Taylor-Davidson: I love it. I’m gonna remember that I love that.

Cait Gordon: Okay, thank you so much for joining us.

Sue Taylor-Davidson: Oh, it’s all— my thanks to you. Thank you.

Cait Gordon: It was fun. Folks, you can find Sue’s books at pressesrenaissancepress.ca that’s P-R-E-S-S-E-S Renaissance Press dot C-A, and you can connect with her on Instagram at @suetaylordavi1953 and visit her on Etsy at etsy.com/ca/people/gracedmoments. Transcripts for In the ’Cosm are available at caitgordon.com. That’s C-A-I-Y Gordon dot com. Thanks for joining us. Take care, and stay safe.

(Transcribed by https://otter.ai. Edited for clarity by Cait Gordon.)
 

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Cait Gordon is a disability advocate who wants everyone to be wise and think of others as we battle COVID-19!

Cait is also the author of humorous space opera novels Life in the ’Cosm and The Stealth Lovers, and she is the co-editor of the Prix Aurora Award nominated anthology Nothing Without Us. When Cait’s not writing, she’s editing manuscripts and running The Spoonie Authors Network, a blog whose contributors manage disabilities and/or chronic conditions. Her latest new adventure is hosting the In the ’Cosm podcast, which is really an excuse to gush over authors she admires.