Interview with Tiffany Morris about Green Fuse Burning

Today we talk to Tiffany Morris about her recent novella Green Fuse Burning! I loved this story…philosophical and beautiful and bizarre, it left me reeling. It captured something I’ve felt despair over but haven’t been able to articulate…the connection between our culture of consumption’s denial of climate change and its denial of death in general. This book shows the complicated healing power of facing one’s own pain.

Here’s Tiffany’s bio:
Tiffany Morris is an L’nu’skw (Mi’kmaw) writer from Nova Scotia. She is the author of the swampcore horror novella Green Fuse Burning (Stelliform Books, 2023) and the Elgin-nominated horror poetry collection Elegies of Rotting Stars (Nictitating Books, 2022). Her work has appeared in the Indigenous horror anthology Never Whistle At Night, as well as in Nightmare Magazine, Uncanny Magazine, and Apex Magazine, among others. She has an MA in English from Acadia University with a focus on Indigenous Futurisms and apocalyptic literature.

Green Fuse Burning celebrates the cultural beauty of the First Nations people, the Mi’kmaq. Can you tell us a bit about your own favorite experiences with Mi’kmaw culture?

Sure! I grew up off-reserve, so even though my L’nu’k family is from Eskasoni, I experienced my culture in ways that weren’t as immersive as they would have been if I’d grown up in community. As time has gone on, though, I’ve connected more and more to my culture and the teachings - including undergoing my own process of language reclamation, becoming better acquainted with ceremony, L’nu’k epistemology, etc. It’s been deeply transformative and healing. I hadn’t realized how much colonialism had damaged my psyche until I started seeing these other ways of knowing and being. The L’nu’k world is so much more alive and connected than the hegemony of settler-colonial capitalism, and I think we can all benefit from understanding the vitality and connection that exists outside of those systems. 

The book explores how much harder grief is in a culture where you aren’t supposed to feel sad…where you’re supposed to stay productive and happy so you can do your part in the constant expansion of the economy. You have mentioned your own recent experiences with grief, the death of loved ones. What advice do you have for people who are grieving someone/something and feel ashamed or alone in their grief?

Oh gosh, it’s such a deeply human experience, and truly among the most challenging, deepest understanding of what it is to be alive. We’re such socially connected animals and the isolation of grief is definitely what I’ve found hardest about it - each of our relationships will be different so no one knows the exact dimensions of what that loss means to you. I think it’s important to honour the difficult emotions that come - people will give advice and it may be clumsy, but it’s because our culture is awkward and deathphobic and not anything to do with the griever. You just have to make your way through the swampland, and understand that life really does grow around the pain. Something new in you will emerge from it.

Your book includes a character having suicidal thoughts. Why did you think it was important to include this in your story?

I guess this is part of how I am transgressive, as this subject is something society absolutely does not want open conversation about, and I think people suffer as a result. I obviously wanted to show care in the process because many people are impacted by it, especially Indigenous communities (who have a higher rate than any other population). I’m only 38 and I’ve known six people, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, who’ve died from it, a few who have attempted it and still more (including myself) who have struggled with ideation. The fear of contagion causes people to suffer in silence and alienation from something that causes alienation and isolation in the first place, creating wounds in wounding.

The silence around suicide also reminds me of the silence around climate change - the demand that we wake up every single day with the full-hearted belief that the future is possible, that we ignore the accelerating failures of the present - and how painful it is that articulating these feelings is met with such suffocation, smothered, invalidated. So it was important to me to create a literary space to explore those twin experiences and give them some room to breathe in the open.

Your main character, Rita, is a visual artist, and I loved the rich descriptions of painting, even though I’m not familiar with that world. Are you a painter, or did you research it really well?

Thank you so much! I do paint, but just for fun. I wasn’t all that familiar with the landscape tradition when I started and didn’t even like it as a style for a long time! So writing a landscape painter character required a little bit of research. I did have a head start, though - before I found my way into writing, my life dream was to become a curator specializing in Indigenous contemporary art. Life didn’t shake out that way, but contemporary art and contemporary Indigenous art have remained among my interests. I occasionally write freelance art reviews for Visual Arts News, a Nova Scotia-based magazine, so I brought some of that to the structure of Green Fuse Burning.

Any lessons to share that you’ve learned from releasing this novella into the world? Did you find it stressful at all, or just fun? 

It’s definitely both! I’ve learned that a novella is a lot more of an intimate experience with the reader than I’d accounted for - and I think that comes from building a world and inviting a reader to spend extended time in it, which is so different from poetry or short stories where your time together is shorter and more singularly focused. It’s a vulnerable (stressful!) and beautiful (fun!) process.

You’re from Nova Scotia, and you’ve talked about your experience with the wildfires there in the summer of 2023. What was that like, and how did it change your perspective on climate change? 

This was the summer where climate change became apparent to people in Mi’kma’ki - we’ve been fortunate to not have too many catastrophes in the recent past, so when there were flash floods and months of wildfires where people on the outskirts of the city were displaced, their horses forced to run loose in fields with hope for return, where the smoke entered the city and smothered everything with its heat, it became undeniable. As someone who’s been a bit of a climate doomer for years, it was validating in the worst way - but it also showed that a palliative mutual aid process is possible, even if nothing else improves. So there’s reassurance in knowing that people can take care of each other even in deeply challenging and irrevocably bad conditions.

Any particular influences for this book you’d like to mention?

“Dissolutions”, a short story by Miguel Fliguer, is told as an art catalog entry and it inspired the chapter structure for Green Fuse Burning. Also the novel A Spectral Hue by Craig Laurance Gidney follows an art scholar through a marshland and tells its stories from queer African American perspectives - I’d already been well into the writing process of GFB when I read it but I really appreciated seeing swampcore from those angles as well.

What’s captured your imagination lately in your writing life? 

Winter - I guess because I’m craving winter, but also I feel like Green Fuse Burning was my spring long fiction piece, and now I want to dive deeper into the possibilities of winter horror. I also love found/epistolary fiction, so I’m playing with that, as well.

Anything else to add? Anything that’s been on your mind?

Save the wetlands and we save a whole world. Wela’lin for this amazing interview!