Catherine Black's Debut Novel, Blessed Nowhere, Finds a Way Through Sorrow and Loss with a Grand Road Trip

As a poet, Catherine Black has been nominated for multiple awards, and has challenged savvy readers with inventive, hybrid forms that explore complex themes of motherhood, mental health, addiction and grief, amongst others.

The author shifted into longer forms over ten years ago with a non-fiction novella, which is now followed by the release of her debut novel, Blessed Nowhere (Guernica Editions).

In the novel, we experience an impulsive adventure on the open road with Abby, a grieving mother who buys a beater car, stows a buck knife in the glove box, and takes off in order to escape the tragic circumstances of her life. She heads south and keeps driving until she finds herself in a town in central Mexico, and there searches for avenues out of her own trauma and heartache in the company of some other outcasts and expats who have likewise abandoned their old lives.

Check out this fascinating Long Story Novelist Interview with the author where she talks about what inspired this moving and poignant novel!

Open Book:

Do you remember how your first started this novel or the very first bit of writing you did for it? 

Catherine Black:

I recently found a notebook I’d kept while living in Mexico, before I started grad school, and there was one entry that captured the sentiment that I think catalyzed the novel. It described a feeling of being displaced and lost–my life felt like it was in shambles–but there was also this glimmer of hope for a different future. The entry described a feeling of being held by Mexico and the community I’d found there. While Abby’s reality and mine are, thankfully, quite different, we both shared that feeling of brokenness, apartness. I began writing the book from that emotional space many years ago.

OB:

How did you choose the setting of your novel? What connection, if any, did you have to the setting when you began writing?

CB:

The novel takes place in a fictitious town in the interior of Mexico–some amalgam of San Miguel de Allende in the 90s and a few of the towns I visited during a months-long backpacking trip I took through Mexico in the late 90s. I chose San Judas Tadeo as the name of the town as he’s the patron saint of hopeless cases, which seemed a fitting name for a place that collects strays and broken people. The setting, the town itself, is an important character in the book, with its own moods, proclivities, and magic.  

OB:

If you had to describe your book in one sentence, what would you say?

CB:

Blessed Nowhere is a book about being at the crossroads between self-destruction and healing.   

OB:

Who did you dedicate your novel to, and why? 

CB: 

I dedicated the novel to my mom, who lost her son to brain cancer when he was sixteen years old. She has carried that grief and lived with a yawning absence at the centre of her life for decades. As a child, I witnessed the world telling her in so many ways to move on when she simply couldn’t or wouldn’t. I wanted to honour her resilience, her resistance, and her experience by dedicating this book to her. 

OB:

Did you include an epigraph in your book? If so, how did you choose it and how does it relate to the narrative?

CB:

The epigraph in my book is from my favourite book, Pedro Páramo by Mexican author Juan Rulfo. For those who aren’t familiar with it, it’s the story of a man who returns to his ancestral home in Mexico to seek out his father amidst the ghostly inhabitants of his father’s semi-deserted town. A stunning book. The epigraph captures perfectly the otherworldly quality of a central Mexican town; the draw it has, the spell it casts with light as well as the “pure murmuring of life” that convinces a person to stay. It was those ineffable qualities that spoke so deeply to the protagonist of my book and that continue to enchant me to this day.

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Catherine Black is an Associate Professor at OCAD University, where she was a co-founder of the Creative Writing BFA program. She has published two collections of prose poetry: Lessons of Chaos and Disaster, and Pat Lowther Award-nominated Bewilderness. Her lyric nonfiction novella, A Hard Gold Thread, was nominated for the ReLit Award. This is her first novel.