NWP: In a few words, please describe the story of After Alice.

KH: After Alice is a story in two time frames of a woman who returns to her roots in the Okanagan Valley after many years in Montreal. She realizes that, running away as a young woman, she has some issues, memories, unfinished business. She thinks she has come back to retire, but instead she learns what she’s made of.

NWP: The backstory of the book revolves around the rising and falling fortunes of a family orchard in British Columbia's Okanagan valley. Did you have to do a lot of research into growing apples in preparation for After Alice?

KH: Growing up in orcharding country, I know the landscape. I had to do some historical research, though. My mom grew up in the valley in the 40s and 50s, and has always told me stories about what life was like in the orcharding communities in those decades. And my grandmother knew everyone in my community, when I was a child – all their business and kinship diagrams. She had lots of stories, too.

NWP: Some of the familial conflict in the story results from Sidonie's moving away from rural B.C. to Montreal for school, and sort of becoming a new person while she's there. Do you think that the rural/city divide is still as present these days, in the wake of social media and the Internet supposedly keeping everyone closer together at all times?

KH: It’s true that the Internet and social media can keep us in touch with the world, wherever we live. But rural life – or small town life; hardly anyone really lives rurally these days, according to the census – is still categorized by tighter social networks, and looser social strictures, possibly. And people who truly do live off the grid have different relationships to the production of food and goods, and the landscape, and the body, I think than urbanites. I wanted to show that in Sidonie’s family, when they take on the orchard life.

NWP: Some of our readers have noticed strains of Greek mythology woven throughout the story, in character names and places especially. Do you feel that the old myths still have relevance these days?

KH: Mythologies of all cultures provide us with symbols that help us understand, or at least impose patterns on, our lives and what happens to us. I see that my own children and my students are still very interested in myth. With the characters of Cashiel and Fearon, I’ve tried to include links to mythologies that are not part of the Western Classical tradition, as well.

NWP: Now that After Alice is almost out into the world, what are you working on at the moment?

KH: I’m about halfway through a new novel about a rural BC family in the 1970s, and am thinking I might have a collection of short fiction soon (also largely set in the South BC Interior).