Heeding the Universe’s Calling

A Conversation with Catherine Hernandez

catherine hernandez

(she/her) is an award-winning author and screenwriter. She is a proud queer woman who is of Filipino, Spanish, Chinese, and Indian descent and married into the Navajo Nation. Her first novel, Scarborough, won the Jim WongChu Emerging Writers Award for the unpublished manuscript and was a finalist for several awards, including Canada Reads 2022. She wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation of Scarborough, which was nominated for eleven Canadian Screen Awards and won eight, including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay. Her second novel, Crosshairs, was short-listed for the Toronto Book Award and made the CBC’s Best Canadian Fiction, NOW magazine’s 10 Best Books, Indigo Best Book, and NBC’s 20 Best LGBTQ Books list of 2020. Her third novel, The Story of Us, was published this year by HarperCollins Canada and was an instant bestseller. She is currently working on a few television projects and her fourth novel.

Tali Voron: Catherine, thank you so much for taking part in this interview. I thought we could get started in a slightly unconventional way. Rather than me introducing you, can you describe yourself in three words and share why you chose them?

Catherine Hernandez: I would describe myself as a storyteller, a changemaker, and homesteader. I became a storyteller under the tutelage of my late mother, Cecille Estioko Hernandez, who was a pioneer of Filipino folk education here in Canada. As a child of the Filipinx diaspora, I grew up understanding that our stories were important. If we kept our stories alive through dance, song, and writing, then we would never be lost. Home would be wherever we were in the world. I consider myself a changemaker because after surviving theatre school, where I was basically taught that my stories as a brown woman didn’t matter, I worked for years to reclaim and decolonize my creative process. For decades I shared my decolonized creative process with countless institutions and organizations in various disciplines. Now I do regular international keynotes on subjects such as embodied allyship, resilience, and sincere community outreach. I am also a homesteader. My husband and I are caretaking 3.7 acres of land on the traditional territory of the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte. We engage in permaculture practices by rewilding our land, foraging, and beekeeping. It is a challenging yet rewarding life in which I can treat our land as its own country where we as QTBIPOC folks are safe, where people of all communities are welcome, and we have equal access to resources.

TV: Thank you so much. That is a really great answer. I wonder if you could share a bit about how you started your writing career. And, do you remember the first story that you wrote?

CH: The first stories I wrote were in notebooks as a child. I loved imagining film scenes in my head and watching them come alive in my imagination. It was real for me, as though the scenes would play out before my very eyes as I wrote them.

After graduating theatre school, I quickly realized that the only way I was going to work regularly was to create the work myself. This led me to writing and developing my own plays. After my first play, Singkil, was produced by fu-GEN Asian Canadian Theatre and Factory Theatre and was nominated for several Dora awards, I was thrilled that Playwrights Canada Press was willing to publish it. It was thrilling to hold a book in my hands knowing that the play could cross borders and be read by a larger audience than the entire run of the play at Factory. That was the power of books. I wanted to try my hand at writing long-form fiction and already had a series of short stories about my hometown, Scarborough. Since I had a home daycare, I wrote a book in my off hours (before 7:30 a.m. and after 9:00 p.m.) and submitted it to the Jim Wong-Chu award because I just wanted feedback on the manuscript. To my surprise, I won the award, then got the publishing contract with Arsenal Pulp Press for the novel Scarborough.

TV: It’s inspiring to hear the ways in which you’ve used your practice to not only create space for yourself, but also for the stories of others. What is your writing process like?

CH: My writing process is a decolonized writing process. In other words, rather than believing that I’m disconnected from the world around me and from the spirit world, I believe that I am one with it. I believe that my ancestors are speaking to me all of the time. It’s almost like a form of mediumship, you know? Every morning I journal and I ask the question, “What do you want me to say today?” They tell me and I spend the entire day manifesting what they want me to say. My books, screenplays, plays—all of them—are truly co-written with my ancestors. I know that sounds different from a lot of people just because I know a lot of writers like to use outlines or character sketches, but for me, it really is just sitting and letting them speak to me. It’s a very powerful process because it means that it’s not about you. It’s about you being a conduit to the whispers of the universe. I feel really blessed to have been given this gift.

TV: I love that so much. That’s incredibly powerful. I wonder, has your writing process changed, or has it stayed the same throughout all of your various projects? I’m curious if there have been shifts as you’ve moved through different works.

CH: The process that I just told you really spans every discipline that I’ve been a part of from dance to writing screenplays. The only thing that changes is the way that the art form manifests. Is it your body that’s moving? Is it the way that people are speaking to each other in dialogue when you’re writing a screenplay? So yes, the only thing that really changes is the art form itself.

TV: That makes a lot of sense. In your interview with Malia Baker for CBC, you mentioned that Scarborough was the first novel you wrote and that you were a playwright first. I wonder if you could share how you decided, or perhaps knew, that Scarborough was meant to be a novel rather than a screenplay or a play first.

CH: I could sense that I was being called to tell the story of the resilience of Toronto’s East End. I certainly wasn’t the first person to tell stories about Scarborough, but it was an important story to show the precarity of living in certain underserved neighbourhoods and the fact that everyone deserves to have equal access to resources. I had never written a novel before, so I just wanted to try my hand at it and that was it.

TV: In 2021, Scarborough was adapted as a film, and you wrote the screenplay. I wonder if you could share what that process was like.

CH: Since I had written for theatre, I knew how to write dialogue and I already had a taste for movies that I loved. I intuitively understood what makes a good film and what doesn’t. However, I still had a lot to learn. I was approached by a few filmmakers who had asked if they could option the book and I had taken a look at their reel, and they were very talented people, but the work they created was polished and Scarborough is not a polished place. I wanted it to feel just as raw as the novel itself, so I knew it had to look like a documentary. I approached documentary filmmakers and good friends, Shasha Nakhai and Rich Williamson of Compy Films and asked them if they’d be willing to produce it. I said, “Do you think it’s possible that I could write the script, but you can make it look like a documentary film?” They had never written, produced, or directed a fiction feature film before, so they were venturing into unfamiliar territory as well. They said, “Well, you know, two weeks from now, there’s one funding application we can try for. Do you think you can maybe offer a snippet of what your vision is?” I looked up how to format a script on Google Images because I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t even have the money for any script-editing software. I just used Word and my tab button, and wrote it over the course of two weeks.

TV: Wow.

CH: And that very poorly formatted script ended up winning the Canadian Screen Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. As an artist, I have always adopted the mindset of “Let’s just try it!” “Let’s fail brilliantly!” I try not to let my ego get in the way of thinking you have to make a film that’s going to win all the awards or notoriety or whatever. That’s not what I’m doing. I’m trying to tell a story. We ended up getting the funding and we just hit the ground running. With that said, it was a very arduous time for the producers, the cast and the crew. I put them through hell and back. That team worked very hard, and we were running on nothing but steam and a dream and very little money. We should never ever have to suffer like that again. This crew and these producers deserve the world. And I hope that they never work under such limited conditions ever again.

TV: It’s really incredible that so many of your experiences and projects are brought to life by you through the vision that you have. It’s certainly not easy. I wonder, did you always envision Scarborough as both a novel and a film?

CH: Since I work in multiple disciplines, I understand that art can exist in different dimensions. I was open to it one day being a film. I just didn’t know what the process was going to be, and I had no idea that I was going to be at the helm of it. You just have to take the bull by the horns and dream big. There’s no reason to fuss over whether things are not for you or consider what is not possible. You’re just wasting your time and energy as an artist believing those things. Instead, I ask myself “what’s possible here?” Thankfully, the film was possible.

TV: “What’s possible here?” That opens up so many possibilities and is such a great approach. Would you like to see any of your other novels adapted into film as well? And is it something that you’re working on?

CH: Sadly, I can’t share any of those details with you. It’s a ridiculous thing in the film and television industry that you can’t share what you’re working on. It’s really strange! However, I can just tell you that yes, I always have the intention for my books to be adapted into television or film and news will be shared when it’s ready.

TV: Fair enough. Well, we’ll keep our fingers crossed. Jumping forward to 2023, The Story of Us came out earlier this year. Congratulations! In our own words, can you tell us a little bit about the novel and the inspiration behind it?

CH: It’s about a cisgender Filipina by the name of Mary Grace who becomes an Overseas Filipino Worker. She goes to Hong Kong and then to Canada by working as a caregiver, and she comes to Canada under the live-in caregiver program, hoping to give her family a future here. She inadvertently becomes the personal support worker of an elderly trans woman by the name of Liz. They create this beautiful friendship and become each other’s chosen family, and it’s all told through the eyes of MG’s newborn baby, Dina. The novel is inspired by a few things such as the act of creating chosen family in both queer and diasporic communities, the mysterious wisdom of newborn babies and most importantly, my ancestors who felt that I needed to write a book that told my readers that love was possible.

TV: In your interview with Tom Power, you spoke about the incredible amount of research that you had to conduct for the novel, and I was really fascinated by that. I wonder if you can describe what that process was like, and how it informed and shaped the writing of your novel.

CH: It started way back in 2008 and 2009, when the Sulong Theatre Collective began research for a play called Future Folk. Over the course of the play, the audience was going to understand the emotional truth behind the notorious live-in caregiver program. This program requires participants to observe twenty-four months of service caring for children, those with disabilities or the elderly, and they must live in their employer’s homes. If you are able to complete the program, you are given just the chance to apply for permanent residency in Canada. And then, if you’re lucky, you can apply for citizenship and one day sponsor your family. It’s an arduous journey for participants who are vulnerable to financial, physical, and sexual abuse living in their employer’s households. Sometimes they don’t have a door. Sometimes they don’t have a proper room. Sometimes they aren’t given a lot to eat. They’re cheated out of their paycheque. They’re cheated out of their time. We interviewed dozens of people who were going through that program to ask them about their experiences. The show was a sold-out run and it was profound moment for me in my career, especially when we had the chance to perform for caregivers at that time.

When I started writing this book, I referred back to that research that we did for the play. But then I did another round of research where I spoke to people who were specifically caregivers for the elderly, and then also people who were specifically caregivers for elderly trans folks. It was eye-opening. It was humbling to understand the wear and tear on someone’s body doing caregiver work for the elderly. To give you some background, I used to be a home daycare provider, and that’s tough on your body. You have a maximum of five children, all under five, maximum two non-walkers. You build a lot of muscle carrying children, putting them on the toilet, feeding them, teaching them to go to sleep by themselves, etc. It’s a lot of carrying and rounding children up, putting on boots and all that stuff.

For dealing with the elderly, you’re holding an adult; you’re bringing them in and out of chairs. You’re changing their diapers. You’re dealing with a lot of violence too. That was humbling to hear.

TV: The Story of Us, as you mentioned, is told from the incredibly unique perspective of MG’s newborn baby. And in Scarborough, you write from the perspective of three children in the novel. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what lies behind your decision to write from the perspective of children.

CH: Children learn most of what they need to know to survive by the age of two. Who is safe to be with, who’s not safe, where do you get your food, just the physics of the world. When you’re writing from the perspective of a child, you can help the reader surmise all of the dynamics between people very quickly. The only problem is when people write children’s dialogue and it’s so bad. In order for you to write from a child’s point of view, you really have to listen to the way children speak. You can’t make that up. The way that they speak, the pattern, the honesty, the truth bombs that they give people all the time. You can’t make that up. I always imagine that I’m just listening to characters beyond my laptop and I’m just their court stenographer. And that’s especially true when it comes to children.

TV: I spent a lot of time working with children as well. And there’s so much wisdom that they have that. When you’re able to see that on the page, and it’s authentic, it’s a hard thing to do well when you’re able to honour that, and you do.

You write in a number of mediums and genres from realistic fiction to the dystopic fiction of Crosshairs to your work in television and screenwriting to your children’s books. How do you move between these mediums? And perhaps a very basic question: do have a favourite to work in?

CH: I don’t really have a favourite because if a story comes through me in in a particular form, that’s how it comes, and I don’t think I have any control over it. For example, Crosshairs came out the way that it came out. I’ve never written dystopian fiction before, but I had to try.

TV: Have you ever worked on a project where partway through it, you’ve switched the medium that you were working in, or you found that something else would serve it better?

CH: No, no. If the ancestors are speaking to me in this way, I allow it to happen. No point fighting it. They know best.

TV: My final question is one of my favourites to ask: what is the best piece of advice that you’ve received, for writing or otherwise, that you would like to share with our readers?

CH: I remember David Chariandy and I were having lunch, and he told me that when considering publishing contracts, to always centre the work and partner with people you believe are going to make you a better writer. In the publishing world, you want to be paired with an editor who’s going to challenge you, who’s going to make you believe that a better version is out there and you just need to uncover it. You want to work with an editor who’s going to encourage you and who’s going to believe that you can do better. And, since then, even when I’m curating a television writers’ room, for example, my thought is not who’s going to agree with me, but who’s going to challenge me. It’s very tempting to choose people who have an impressive CV or who might have the connections to get you further in your career. Instead, think about who you are vibing with.

That’s the reason why I love working with Jennifer Lambert over at HarperCollins Canada. She pushes me to places that I never thought possible, and yet she does so with a loving hand. I’m grateful. I’m also grateful for screenwriters like Adam Pettle, Andrew Burrows-Trotman, and Marsha Greene. These folks in the television and film industry have challenged me by asking, “What story are you telling and is there a better way to tell it?”