I set Dread Spring where I live: on the unceded land of the Omàmìwininìwag (Algonquin), Anishinabewaki ᐊᓂᔑᓈᐯᐗᑭ, and Kanienʼkehá꞉ka (Mohawk).

I am a settler on this land. I grew up in Ottawa, and spent my childhood roaming the Gatineau Hills, hiking, and swimming. The closest I ever got to learning about the Indigenous peoples who were driven from this area was a historical project that made Indigenous peoples seem like an artifact, disconnected from the present. That could not be further from the truth.

This is unceded land, which means that the land rights of the Algonquin people were never signed away. The Crawford Purchase covers most of the land that appears in the book, but there were no Algonquin signatories to that agreement. For centuries, the Algonquin have been petitioning the government to assert their rights, so far unsuccessfully.

I am a settler on this land. My ancestor, Philomen Wright, settled here in 1800 and began to destroy the local ecosystems to make a fortune in the lumber trade, a trade that quickly took over and destroyed the wildlife of the Ottawa Valley. You'll recognize the name “Wright” from the Alonzo-Wright Bridge, featured in Dread Spring, as Alonzo was Philomen’s grandson; the original colonizers’ legacy continues to be unjustly honoured and upheld even now as an ongoing act of colonization. No rights agreement was signed, either at that time or at any point since, between any of the settlers or their governments and the Algonquin people. Though members of the Algonquin Nation at the time attempted to warn the government about the absolute decimation of the environment and disappearance of the local wildlife due to the lumber industry, the government ignored them.

In 1853, the Algonquin inhabitants were forcibly removed to Kitigan Zibi, so that settlers could colonize the fertile lands of the Ottawa Valley. The reserve lies in an area in the Gatineau Hills that would have historically been an occasional hunting ground for the Algonquin, not a permanent home; as stated in Dread Spring, the arable land up there is limited. For a century, Kitigan Zibi inhabitants were forbidden by the colonial government from hunting, cutting wood, and voting, and the school on the reserve was a federally run day-school. In the past few decades, the members of the Algonquin First Nation who live at Kitigan Zibi have transformed the reserve into a vibrant community, having gained hard-won control over their own health, education, and police services after decades of effort.

Throughout Dread Spring, I used the colonial place names for the Kichesippi and Tenagatino Zibi (now called the Ottawa and Gatineau rivers). During a fruitless search for the Algonquin name for Farmer’s Rapids, all I found was an itemized list of everything the titular Farmer brought with him from England (apparently that knowledge is deemed valuable through the lens of colonization).

I would encourage anyone who enjoyed Dread Spring to read books by Indigenous authors as well! In the genre of post-apocalyptic science fiction and from my area (Ontario), I can recommend a few to get you started.

Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice. The book takes place as the apocalypse is unfolding. We’re in agreement that taking care of little kids during the apocalypse wouldn’t be much different than taking care of them now.

Take Us To Your Chief and Other Stories by Drew Hayden Taylor, particularly A Culturally Inappropriate Armageddon, the most apocalyptic of the stories. The collection is so wide-ranging, it somehow covered all of sci fi, thoughtfully and playfully.

The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline. This one is set a little further out from the apocalyptic event, and I found it to be a little darker in tone. The ensemble cast has a delightful range of distinct characters and personalities, set against a stark dystopian world.

Dear Lovely Reader,

When I came up with the idea for Dread Spring, I wanted to take a crack at a post-apocalyptic kidnapping romance where the kidnapping felt earned. I’ll leave it up to you whether or not I succeeded, but from this seed (that was supposed to be a short novel or novella) grew Dread Spring, my longest published work so far!

On my blog, I have a post complete with street views that will take you through all the locations mentioned in the book, but the one that inspired me the most is on Highway 7, which runs between Ottawa and Toronto in Ontario. An abandoned farmhouse, windows gone, weeds and trees growing out of it, is splashed with brightly coloured spray paint. That farmhouse inspired me to set Dread Spring in the Ottawa Valley instead of in a fictional world, which is my usual go-to.

I planned out Chloe and Richard's romance, and I knew Vishesh was going to be a secondary protagonist (I had no idea he was going to get a love interest until Neil popped into Aaron's office and Vishesh swooned). But my biggest surprise by far was Portia. She was a side character at most, someone to exist in Aaron’s settlement, make it feel lived in, and be under his thrall, but when she popped onto the page and dove right into a totally toxic relationship with Aaron that brought out a completely different side of his character, she fought her way into a secondary character role. (Don’t tell anyone, but when I wrote Portia and Aaron’s first steamy scene together, I told myself I was just writing it to get a handle on their relationship and I could totally cut it out of the finished manuscript. Turns out, my muse already knew it was important to the story.)

Over in the real world, when I was writing Dread Spring, I had just published Endless Sea of Stars to Amazon and confronted their terms of service for the first time. I think I was working through a lot of feelings about big corporations who have a stranglehold on the market, leaving us normal folks to accept or fend for ourselves; there’s no negotiation, no wiggle room. The terms are set and you can either take them or leave them. Considering that Amazon is by far the largest bookstore in the world, opting out of their terms has real consequences for anyone who wants to get their work out there, just as opting out of using corporation infrastructure has real consequences in the Radioactive Rain universe. (I don’t like the “my book is my child” parallel, but I think my muse ran with it on this one. While I was writing Dread Spring, Endless Sea was effectively held hostage in KU like Chloe's family.)

And, of course, in 2022, my family was emerging from our COVID bubble. Just as Chloe realizes her family can no longer survive isolated on their little farm, I was realizing that I couldn’t keep hiding from COVID. It was dangerous out there beyond our safe walls, but staying inside wasn’t going to be an option forever.

If Dread Spring means something to you, as it does to me, that’s all I can hope for as a writer. I’m so glad we could share these pages together. <3

Looking forward to our next adventure,

Elizabeth F. Shearly