Bringing Local Mystery To Life

kc dyer
2 hours ago
5 min read

Squamish writer set to thrill her readers once again

As a location, Squamish is hard to beat in terms of its thrill quotient.

Rock climbing, hiking, mountain biking, even a gondola that whisks riders to what feels like the top of the world.

All the same, local writer Amber Cowie manages to find a way to add her own brand of magic to this incredible setting, and since living here has written five edge-of-your-seat thrillers. Recently, she agreed to sit down with The Watershed to talk about her life as a writer and the local inspiration that flavours her next project.

Watershed: You've written five novels now, thrillers all, and have another one in the works. That's an impressive number of books since 2018! What drew you to the mystery/psychological thriller genre?

Cowie: I’m a strong adherent to Stephen King’s statement that “you write what you read”. Mysteries, thrillers, and suspense have always been my go-to books since my mom first introduced me to Kinsey Milhone, PD James, and the wonderful world of Agatha Christie. I love the pioneers of this genre, including Patricia Highsmith, Shirley Jackson, and Raymond Chandler but I also adore current writers including Robyn Harding, Zakiya Dalila Harris, and Liann Zhang. I read more than I write so I could name beloved authors all day— I find inspiration and insight in other people’s books.

Watershed: Can you talk a little bit about your process? Do you plot the entire story out before sitting down to write?

Cowie: I am nothing if inconsistent. Some of my books have developed from a set of nearly unintelligible scribbles while others have been written off the top of my head with only the characters telling me what they are going to do next. I deeply wish I was a more diligent outliner but I get bored when I feel like I’ve written the story before I’ve written the story. I like being excited and curious when I draft a book. I usually write a note for myself about what the next chapter will be, I always write chronologically, and I tend to consider my first drafts to be very weird little pancakes that need a lot of love to be shaped into something real.

Watershed: Your books have a wide range of characters. Do you have any special tricks for finding your way into each of their heads?

Cowie: In the author bio for my debut novel, I talked about how I’d served haggis as a barmaid in Scotland, planted trees in Northern B.C., and had two babies in a Pacific Northwest adventure town before I finally finished my first book. I think all of those lives help me to understand my characters and what they would do in the increasingly tense and difficult situations I put them in. As a writer, I think it’s a huge advantage to be a dilettante and not a specialist when you are careless and fancy-free so you get a taste of the many different kind of lives a person can lead.

Watershed: How big a role does your home community play in the writing of your novels? Has living in BC in general (and the Sea to Sky in particular) been inspirational for you?

Cowie I grew up in a small town in British Columbia called Clearwater and made Squamish my forever home about 10 years ago. B.C. is in my heart and it matters deeply to me to be able to represent it in my writing. My first three books were published with an American publisher who preferred me to fudge my settings in a way that made them vaguely American but I was so grateful to land a deal with Simon & Schuster Canada for my most recent novels so I could name the Canadian towns I was writing in. Many years ago, I lived in Toronto and devoured every book written by Andrew Pyper, an immensely talented and sadly recently deceased author, who set his books in Canada’s largest city. I loved being able to read a creepy book in the place where it was set—it deeply amplified all the tension and unease in an unforgettable way.

Watershed: What sorts of books are you drawn to as a reader?

Cowie: It’s very difficult for me not to head straight to the mystery/suspense/thriller aisle but I force myself to read out of genre so I can understand the larger landscape of writing and the technical aspects of memoir, non-fiction, and other fiction categories. I hate gory books but I love a deep and unsettling horror story so I push myself to find interesting and elevated writers who toy with fear like Jessica Johns, Marcus Kliewer, Iain Reid, and Stephen Graham Jones. I am reading The Darkest White right now by Eric Blehm, which is a compelling biography of Craig Kelly, but I have three other mysteries on my nightstand that I’ll get to next.

Watershed: Can you tell us a bit about the story you are working on right now?

Cowie: My current manuscript has taken me more than a year because the subject matter feels delicate and daunting. As a resident of Squamish, I have long been intrigued and troubled by the mystery of who cut the Sea to Sky gondola (line) twice and my curiosity has infused my work. The unsolved mystery is at the centre of my new manuscript and it’s been so fascinating and challenging to create fiction that is so deeply connected to the world I live in—though even saying it out loud gives me nervous butterflies in my stomach. I keep telling myself that writing always contains an element of risk but this is my most ambitious and unnerving project and sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever send it to my publisher.

Watershed: Anything else you'd like our readers to know?

Cowie: We are so lucky to live in a community that is bursting with phenomenal writers like Clea Young, Katherine Fawcett, Mahtab Narsimhan, Feet Banks, Rebecca Wood Barrett, Yin Xzi Ho, Stella Harvey, Sara Leach, Jan Redford, Leslie Anthony, Veronica Woodruff, Mary MacDonald, and Tatiana Lee. I was grateful to be a part of the recent publication of the Sea to Sky Lupine Review and read so many incredible up-and-coming writers like Drea Moothu, Lucien Telford, and Colleen McDonald. Our region is so rich in amazing talent writing in a diversity of genres so I’d deeply encourage Watershed readers to make a point of picking up something local at either Gather Bookshop in Squamish or Armchair Books in Whistler.