Rebecca Fisseha: 'Disappear into writing full time'

Rebecca Fisseha is a writer of fiction, non-fiction, and plays. Having grown up in Ethiopia, Austria and Switzerland, she has lived (mostly) in Canada since 1998. Her work has been published in The Maple Tree Literary Supplement, Room Magazine, Selamta Magazine, Ethioinfodesk, and is upcoming on Worldreader Mobile and in the 2015 Aesthethica Magazine Creative Writing Anthology. She also blogs regularly at diaspora: the Unreliable Narrator. 

Her debut novel-in-progress Vase Life is set in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, during the week of global flight disruption from Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano in 2010. It charts the post-grief confrontation between a grounded Ethiopian-Canadian flight attendant and her grandfather, a retired military chief who is determined to get the body of his daughter exhumed in Canada and transported to Ethiopia for reburial.

Rebecca and I met through the Toronto Women Writers' Salon last summer, and then got together a couple of times to talk about her writing and the story of Vase Life. Here is a short video of our conversation.