Archivist and curator Susannah M. Smith of Vancouver says her storytelling influences include visual artists, photographers, illustrators, filmmakers and fashion designers. "I admire writers who break the rules," she says, "who create forms that are truly novel, who make me feel like anything is possible." As a follow-up to her debut novel, How the Blessed Live (Coach House Books), she has devised a curiosity cabinet of interconnected galleries for The Fairy Tale Museum (Invisible Publishing 2018). Ranging from grotesque to endearing, her subjects include bird-headed lovers, a cyborg cyclops, revolutionary ventriloquists' dummies, Eros and Thanatos and a narcoleptic vampire. Her blend of eclectic influences includes W. G. Sebald, Audrey Niffenegger, the Brothers Quay, Banana Yoshimoto, Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, Peter Carey and Anne Carson.

BOOKS

The Fairy Tale Museum (Invisible Publishing 2018) $19.95 978-1-988784069

How the Blessed Live (Coach House Books)

[BCBW 2018]