English professor Sarah Henstra nominated for Governor General’s Literary Award
Photo: Sarah Henstra tackled campus rape culture in her 2018 novel The Red Word. Photo credit: Paola Scattolon.
In 2013, Sarah Henstra began writing a novel about one of the most difficult issues of our time. Five years later, it was released in a moment when the issue was on everybody’s mind. The Red Word (external link) , Henstra’s 2018 novel, deals with rape culture on a U.S. college campus. It follows a female sophomore who finds herself drawn to two polarized groups: a radical feminist student organization, and a notoriously toxic fraternity.
The Ryerson English professor and Y.A. author couldn’t have picked a trickier subject for her first adult novel, but she has received vindication from high places: Henstra is one of five finalists shortlisted for this year’s Governor General’s Literary Award (external link) for fiction. “I’ve been kind of floating,” says Henstra. “And also, I immediately got a really bad cold. It’s like my body couldn’t quite take it in!”
Looking back, Henstra feels she started writing at just the right time. “If I had begun the book last year or this year, I might not have allowed my curiosity to draw me so far into the topic of rape culture on campus, sexual harassment, and violence against women.” Henstra is always private about her works in progress, and in this case, “It afforded me a kind of privacy to allow my own creative imagination as an author to explore this topic without thinking every second about the political implications of what I was saying.”
The novel seeks to capture the sometimes-feverish temperature of undergraduate life—a time of new friends and exciting new ideas, of intellectual experimentation, and of spiritual growing-pains. “It was a goal of mine writing the book to not offer easy answers on these questions, because I think the questions are incredibly complex and difficult. I didn’t want to write a book where you knew from page 10 which characters were the good guys and bad guys. In order to preserve a sense of an open arena for inquiry, I wanted the waters to be muddy over the course of the novel.”
As an associate professor and graduate practicum director at Ryerson, Henstra keeps a close connection to the university life. “Ryerson has this incredibly diverse, active, enthusiastic student body,” says Henstra. “Students come to my classes from all across Ryerson. I teach a course called Fairy Tales and Fantasies, and it draws students from across disciplines—early childhood education, psychology, sport media, fashion communication… It’s really inspiring to approach literature from all those different perspectives.”
Does teaching inform her writing? “It absolutely does,” she says. “I write Y.A. novels, and I write about young people. I think a reason I gravitate to that age group in my writing is because I’m around it all the time. I feel connected to that age group in a way that I don’t think I would if I weren’t in a classroom with them.”
Winners of the 2018 Governor General’s Literary Awards will be announced October 30.