Mercy

Alissa York was born in 1970, in Athabasca, Alberta, to Australian immigrant parents. There, Alissa’s father taught high school English and outdoor education, and her mother taught part-time at the local elementary school and studied creative writing at the University of Alberta. Alissa has commented, “My imprint from that time is incredibly strong… I’m drawn to writing about people with their insides showing. There’s a boiling down of human experience in small towns.” In 1977, the family moved to Victoria, British Columbia. A decade later, Alissa graduated from high school and moved to Toronto, then on to Montreal, where she studied English Literature at McGill University.After Alissa met her partner, writer/filmmaker Clive Holden, the couple travelled all over Canada, living in Toronto, Whitehorse, Montreal, Victoria and Vancouver (they were married in Victoria in the summer of 1993). Alissa feels these travels have helped her immensely when it comes to her writing and other projects: “Living in different places opens up your mind.” Along the way, she earned her living as a waitress, a florist and a bookseller. She also worked for a small theatre company while studying acting in Toronto, and appeared in theatre productions in Whitehorse before she discovered that writing was her passion.Alissa published her first story in The New Quarterly in 1995. Her work continued to appear in various anthologies and literary journals, and in 1998 she and Clive founded Cyclops Press, an independent publishing company that specializes in literary multimedia titles by such writers as Al Purdy, Patrick Lane and Catherine Hunter. Alissa has co-edited several Cyclops Press titles and currently serves as Associate Editor.In 1999, Alissa’s short fiction won the Journey Prize and the Bronwen Wallace Award. Later that year, Arbeiter Ring Publishing of Winnipeg published Any Given Power, a collection of short stories, which won the Mary Scorer Award for Best Book by a Manitoba Publisher and was short-listed for the Danuta Gleed Award. Shortly thereafter, Alissa found an agent and set to work on the novel she’d been musing about for years.Mercy originated from the central image of a woman living alone at the heart of a black spruce bog. The character of Mary Wylie began to take shape, and at some point it became clear to Alissa that she was meant to tell the story of Mary’s parents as well. As the dual narratives developed, Mercy became a novel in two parts and, more importantly, an exploration of the emotional evolution that takes place over generations.Reviewers have praised not only the story at the heart of Mercy but the intensity of the writing -- Alissa’s ability to infuse every image, every word, with power. “I’ve done some acting in the past and what I took away was that you need to be inside the words you are speaking,” Alissa has said. “Words have a tremendous amount of meaning inhabiting them.” Originally published by Random House Canada in 2003, Mercy has also been published in the Netherlands and will soon be published in the United States.Alissa is currently at work on her third book, a novel set in mid-nineteenth-century Utah. She has called Winnipeg home for more than five years now, and when not writing or reading she is involved in other areas of that city’s cultural life.