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Kim Spencer is a graduate of the Writers Studio at Simon Fraser University, where she focused on creative nonfiction. Two of her short stories were published in an anthology released through SFU, and an experimental short story of hers appeared in Filling Station magazine. Kim was selected as a mentee by the Writers Union of Canada for BIPOC Writers Connect, as well as for ECW's BIPOC Writers Mentorship Program. Kim is from the Ts’msyen Nation in northwest BC and currently lives in Vancouver.
Spencer published Weird Rules to Follow (Orca, 2022), a middle-grade debut set in 1980s Prince Rupert focusing on Mia, an Indigenous girl, and her white friend Lara, exploring themes of social class, cultural differences and prejudice.
Weird Rules to Follow won the IODE Violet Downey Book Award, the Geoffrey Bilson Historical Fiction Award, the Jean Little First-Novel Award, and the TD Canadian Children's Literature Award. It's was also shortlisted for the 2023 Governor General's Literary Award for Young People's Literature.
Spencer followed up with the novel, I Won't Feel This Way Forever (Orca $14.95), which follows Mia adjusting to life without her ex-best friend, Lara. Publicity says: "Summer vacation starts off well enough as Mia binges MTV and learns how to jar fish with her aunty and uncle. Then her grandma starts feeling unwell. At first, Mia isn’t too worried, but when a call comes in from the clinic to say her grandmother has to go to the hospital in Vancouver, everyone realizes this is serious. Mia and her mom and aunties head to the city to be by her grandmother’s side. Mia mostly ping-pongs from the hospital to the motel, but she also gets to see some of the city and eat (too much) takeout. She even joins a basketball camp at the Friendship Centre, where she meets a teen coach who inspires her to get back into the game she loves and delve deeper into what it means to be Indigenous. As time passes, Mia’s grandmother's health doesn’t improve, and she has to face the fact that her beloved grandma might not get better."
In 2026, Spencer's coming-of-age YA novel Here for a Good Time (Swift Water Books $26.99) that addresses issues an Indigenous girl faces as she navigates through her teen years, will be published. Set in 1990, the story tells how Morgan, a resident of Prince Rupert takes care of her father while attending school, dealing with intergenerational trauma and experiencing young love. A new connection helps her in the face of tragedy and Morgan works her way through to a fresh start based on love and forgiveness.
Also scheduled to come out in March 2026 is Spencer's picture book called Springtime in Kitkatla (Orca $21.95), with illustrations by Karlene Harvey. The story follows the young Indigenous girl, Wałaas, who visits her family's reserve, Kitkatla, during spring break. From publicity: "Kitkatla always feels like home. She [Wałaas] and her dzi'i (grandmother) travel there by fishing boat, and on the way Wałaas spots porpoises in the sparkling waves. Once they arrive, they stay with her da'as (auntie), and her mom comes too to join in the fun. The days pass slowly as Wałaas spends time with family, wanders the shore and enjoys foods you can't get in town, like fresh chiton and sea urchin. She likes listening to her family speak Sm’algya̱x, even though her mom won't always tell her what they're talking about, and sharing an evening snack of homemade anaay (bread) and jarred cherries. The visits to Kitkatla are never long enough, but Wałaas knows she will always return to the reserve because it's her home."
***
I Won’t Feel This Way Forever
by Kim Spencer
(Orca $14.95)
Review by Heidi Greco (BCBW 2025)
This memoir-like novel revisits characters from the award-winning Weird Rules to Follow (Orca, 2022) which earned, among a slew of other prizes, a place on the list of finalists for 2023’s Governor General Awards. The main character, Mia, is back, though it’s now 1989 and she’s still on the outs with Lara, the non-Indigenous girl who’d been her best friend since kindergarten. The gap between the two, who were once practically as close as sisters, only grows now that they’re both in secondary school. Lara seems to have found a new crowd to hang out with, leaving Mia behind.
Along with her Uncle Dan and her mother, Mia lives in Prince Rupert in a small house owned by the family matriarch, the grandmother—a woman whom Mia adores. Mia is fortunate to travel frequently with her grandmother—often to Vancouver, whether for medical appointments, to visit the PNE’s Playland, to see family or to attend Christian revivals. The two make a great team, especially as the grandmother doesn’t speak a lot of English, and still mainly uses her Sm’algyax language. Besides keeping the language alive, Mia’s grandmother keeps many of the old ways, which Mia admires. When Mia is allowed to help prepare the salmon for jarring with her aunt and uncle, she’s excited to report to her grandma that she’s learned a new skill.
The family relies on the grandmother’s wisdom as well as her daily survival knowledge. Once, when she’s away for a revival (without Mia for once), Mia begins to realize just how much her grandmother does to keep the family fed and comfortable. In addition to frequently serving jarred salmon as a staple of their diet—along with less-traditional foods like beef, chicken or pork—she has devised many ways of serving bologna, including as a curried stew. As for her assessment of the latter, Mia confesses: “I’d never say this to Grandma, but certain things in life should not be curried—bologna is one of them.”
It’s hard to know just how much of Lara’s snobby behaviour is intentional or whether it’s the result of peer pressure from a new group of girls—ones who perhaps don’t understand how Lara could be friends with an Indigenous girl. Whatever the cause, Mia feels hurt and sometimes dwells on the good times the two of them shared. But she also recalls their differences such as how Lara’s family always put so many restrictions on their daughter, not allowing her the freedom to roam that Mia always had or how Lara considered it boring to go down to the docks where they might see eagles or seals or sea lions. Mia explains these thoughts to herself with the justification that “Maybe because Lara isn’t Native, she doesn’t enjoy these things as much as I do.”
Over the course of the summer many things change as Mia’s grandmother becomes seriously ill and needs to be hospitalized in Vancouver. Some family members make the long drive down to the city to be near her and to help however they can. During this time a number of stories unfold—about the hardships endured, especially during the time of “those schools” (residential schools). Mia learns that the grandmother herself experienced many hardships, from the death of her parents when she was an infant to having two of her own ten children die shortly after they were born, to later losing “three grandchildren in tragic accidents over the years.”
Any adult who remembers how hard early teen transition years were will have sympathy for the emotional confusion and sadness Mia goes through. Besides the person she loves most being gravely ill, Mia and her family take up residence in a motel near the hospital so that they can be near at hand—hardly the way a young teen would choose to spend her summer holiday.
Then, by one of those lucky flukes that life sometimes grants, Mia sees a notice for a basketball camp, which she is quick to join. Having previously played, this experience helps her regain some of her old confidence and spirit.
When at last the family needs to go back home, they bear heavy hearts. And yet this is one of the most interesting parts of the book as the author, herself from the Gitxaala Nation, offers some of the arrangements they “as Tsimshian people…must follow.” Such explanations serve to enlighten readers and never feel preachy or intrusive.
In so many ways, Spencer has given us a book that we as West Coasters will immediately recognize as part of us, like this poetic interior monologue from Mia: “I stare out the window at the dreary sky. It’s drizzling. That fine rain that seems harmless yet coats you in wet.”
Although it isn’t essential to read the first book, it does enhance one’s understanding of what life is like for Mia and her family, including some of the ways they experience discrimination. It will be interesting to see whether Spencer might decide to add another volume to this insightful coming-of-age story. 9781459838208
Heidi Greco is a Surrey-based poet and reader.
BOOKS:
Weird Rules to Follow (Orca Book Publishers, 2022) $12.95 9781459835580
I Won't Feel This Way Forever (Orca, 2025) $14.95 9781459838208
Springtime in Kitkatla (Orca, 2026) $21.95 9781459840102
Here for a Good Time (Swift Water Books/Penguin Random House, 2026) $26.99 9781774887806
[BCBW 2025]
**
REVIEW:
BC BookWorld, 2022
Weird Rules to Follow by Kim Spencer
(Orca Book Publishers $12.95)
by Erin F. Chan
Eleven-year-old Mia is well aware that her tears are different from “white tears,” that “Native girls don’t cry like the white girls do.” She’s amazed at how readily white girls can cry in public—and about such trivial things, too. Having already experienced many painful things in her life, Mia doesn’t get upset easily, and she knows that her tears wouldn’t be received in the same way anyway: “White tears get a lot of sympathy and attention. They are like show-and-tell tears. Our tears, the few that are shed, seem to make people uncomfortable.”
This phenomenon is but one of the many implicit “rules” that shape Mia’s life in Kim Spencer’s debut novel, Weird Rules to Follow, which is based on her childhood experiences growing up in Prince Rupert in the 1980s. Spencer, who is from the Ts’msyen Nation in northwest BC, reveals her lived experience through the book’s protagonist, Mia, who deals with prejudice from a young age while navigating friendships, family and school in the small coastal town. The novel is middle reader fiction, but the charged coming-of-age story will also resonate with older YA readers and adults, too.
Central to Mia’s story is her relationship with her best friend, Lara, who is non-Indigenous. Having grown up in the same cul-de-sac, Mia and Lara don’t remember the time before they were neighbours and then friends. Lara lives in one of the nicest houses on the street—which has many rooms and appliances, a view of the mountains and ocean, and two cars parked in the driveway—with her nuclear family. Mia lives in a run-down wartime house—which has “original everything, at a time when original has no value,” a view of a retaining wall, and no car parked out front—with her churchgoing grandmother, her binge-drinking mother and a revolving cast of extended family members. The two friends mostly hang out at Lara’s house, seemingly because Lara’s mother is strict about her daughter visiting other people’s homes. Mia doesn’t mind, though, as Lara’s home gives Mia a break from her homelife: “Lara and I never get bored when we hang out. … I forget about things like my mom’s drinking, or that there are so many people living in our house with us. Lara’s home is like an escape—well for me anyway.”
Although the differences between Mia and Lara had never seemed to matter before, they begin to overshadow their friendship in a way that feels inevitable—as Mia becomes increasingly aware of how the adults in their lives treat her differently because she’s Indigenous.
Weird Rules to Follow is an anecdotal history of life for young Indigenous girls in a very specific time and place. But the book’s themes of glaring discrimination that Mia and other adolescent characters face, and are deeply affected by, offer representation and understanding for readers today who face similar issues (and an opportunity to learn and empathize for readers who don’t). The novel also exemplifies many aspects of Indigenous history, particularly residential schools, in an effective, personal way that will impart some of the lasting, multi-generational impacts and continued realities and injustices. Spencer explains that, in addition to using outdated terminology and names that were common at the time (such as Native and Indian), her framing of residential schools reflects the fact that such atrocities “were not openly talked about or widely discussed back then.”
The novel is a series of scenes from Mia’s childhood, presented as episodic chapters told through Mia’s first-person perspective. Spencer’s writing style captures an authentic youthful voice while tackling challenging themes and topics—emphasizing not only how well kids understand prejudice and inequality but also how related anxieties, shame, and belittling experiences can control a kid’s life and influence the construction of their identity.
In one scene, a Coast Salish dance group performs during a large assembly at Mia’s school. When one of the dancers addresses the audience and asks the Indigenous students to identify themselves, Mia doesn’t raise her hand. “I’m too embarrassed to raise my hand. But I feel equally ashamed for not raising it,” Spencer writes. “I admire the Native students who put their hands up. They seem so comfortable with themselves. I can’t imagine feeling that way. The speaker continues, ‘It’s nice to see so many of you in the audience. Always be proud of who you are, be proud of being Native Indian.’ I feel even worse. Like I need some Pepto-Bismol.” It’s a learned shame, just one of the many weird rules that Mia knows, implicitly, to follow.
Despite all the painful things Mia experiences in her young life and all the rules that shape it, Spencer earnestly highlights the good things in Mia’s life, too: distinct moments of friendship and solidarity; youthful fun times; cultural practices and the importance of community and elders; and above all, a family’s deep love and best efforts to protect and provide a good life for their kids—even if, as a rule, it’s left unspoken. Mia knows being made to feel special is its own kind of love, as in a scene where her uncle gives her cousin Sherrie money he won from playing pool because the song “Oh Sherrie” was playing: “My cousin beams in her father’s embrace. Not just about the twenty dollars, which would make anyone happy, but because he’d made her feel special. I’m just a kid and I can see that.”
Weird Rules to Follow delivers on its title, as Spencer explores how kids understand the kinds of power and weird rules that surround and control their present realities and relationships, their self-identities and their ideas of their futures. 9781459835580
Erin F. Chan (she/her) lives and works as a publishing assistant, copy editor, and graphic designer on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.
[BCBW 2025]
Spencer published Weird Rules to Follow (Orca, 2022), a middle-grade debut set in 1980s Prince Rupert focusing on Mia, an Indigenous girl, and her white friend Lara, exploring themes of social class, cultural differences and prejudice.
Weird Rules to Follow won the IODE Violet Downey Book Award, the Geoffrey Bilson Historical Fiction Award, the Jean Little First-Novel Award, and the TD Canadian Children's Literature Award. It's was also shortlisted for the 2023 Governor General's Literary Award for Young People's Literature.
Spencer followed up with the novel, I Won't Feel This Way Forever (Orca $14.95), which follows Mia adjusting to life without her ex-best friend, Lara. Publicity says: "Summer vacation starts off well enough as Mia binges MTV and learns how to jar fish with her aunty and uncle. Then her grandma starts feeling unwell. At first, Mia isn’t too worried, but when a call comes in from the clinic to say her grandmother has to go to the hospital in Vancouver, everyone realizes this is serious. Mia and her mom and aunties head to the city to be by her grandmother’s side. Mia mostly ping-pongs from the hospital to the motel, but she also gets to see some of the city and eat (too much) takeout. She even joins a basketball camp at the Friendship Centre, where she meets a teen coach who inspires her to get back into the game she loves and delve deeper into what it means to be Indigenous. As time passes, Mia’s grandmother's health doesn’t improve, and she has to face the fact that her beloved grandma might not get better."
In 2026, Spencer's coming-of-age YA novel Here for a Good Time (Swift Water Books $26.99) that addresses issues an Indigenous girl faces as she navigates through her teen years, will be published. Set in 1990, the story tells how Morgan, a resident of Prince Rupert takes care of her father while attending school, dealing with intergenerational trauma and experiencing young love. A new connection helps her in the face of tragedy and Morgan works her way through to a fresh start based on love and forgiveness.
Also scheduled to come out in March 2026 is Spencer's picture book called Springtime in Kitkatla (Orca $21.95), with illustrations by Karlene Harvey. The story follows the young Indigenous girl, Wałaas, who visits her family's reserve, Kitkatla, during spring break. From publicity: "Kitkatla always feels like home. She [Wałaas] and her dzi'i (grandmother) travel there by fishing boat, and on the way Wałaas spots porpoises in the sparkling waves. Once they arrive, they stay with her da'as (auntie), and her mom comes too to join in the fun. The days pass slowly as Wałaas spends time with family, wanders the shore and enjoys foods you can't get in town, like fresh chiton and sea urchin. She likes listening to her family speak Sm’algya̱x, even though her mom won't always tell her what they're talking about, and sharing an evening snack of homemade anaay (bread) and jarred cherries. The visits to Kitkatla are never long enough, but Wałaas knows she will always return to the reserve because it's her home."
***
I Won’t Feel This Way Forever
by Kim Spencer
(Orca $14.95)
Review by Heidi Greco (BCBW 2025)
This memoir-like novel revisits characters from the award-winning Weird Rules to Follow (Orca, 2022) which earned, among a slew of other prizes, a place on the list of finalists for 2023’s Governor General Awards. The main character, Mia, is back, though it’s now 1989 and she’s still on the outs with Lara, the non-Indigenous girl who’d been her best friend since kindergarten. The gap between the two, who were once practically as close as sisters, only grows now that they’re both in secondary school. Lara seems to have found a new crowd to hang out with, leaving Mia behind.
Along with her Uncle Dan and her mother, Mia lives in Prince Rupert in a small house owned by the family matriarch, the grandmother—a woman whom Mia adores. Mia is fortunate to travel frequently with her grandmother—often to Vancouver, whether for medical appointments, to visit the PNE’s Playland, to see family or to attend Christian revivals. The two make a great team, especially as the grandmother doesn’t speak a lot of English, and still mainly uses her Sm’algyax language. Besides keeping the language alive, Mia’s grandmother keeps many of the old ways, which Mia admires. When Mia is allowed to help prepare the salmon for jarring with her aunt and uncle, she’s excited to report to her grandma that she’s learned a new skill.
The family relies on the grandmother’s wisdom as well as her daily survival knowledge. Once, when she’s away for a revival (without Mia for once), Mia begins to realize just how much her grandmother does to keep the family fed and comfortable. In addition to frequently serving jarred salmon as a staple of their diet—along with less-traditional foods like beef, chicken or pork—she has devised many ways of serving bologna, including as a curried stew. As for her assessment of the latter, Mia confesses: “I’d never say this to Grandma, but certain things in life should not be curried—bologna is one of them.”
It’s hard to know just how much of Lara’s snobby behaviour is intentional or whether it’s the result of peer pressure from a new group of girls—ones who perhaps don’t understand how Lara could be friends with an Indigenous girl. Whatever the cause, Mia feels hurt and sometimes dwells on the good times the two of them shared. But she also recalls their differences such as how Lara’s family always put so many restrictions on their daughter, not allowing her the freedom to roam that Mia always had or how Lara considered it boring to go down to the docks where they might see eagles or seals or sea lions. Mia explains these thoughts to herself with the justification that “Maybe because Lara isn’t Native, she doesn’t enjoy these things as much as I do.”
Over the course of the summer many things change as Mia’s grandmother becomes seriously ill and needs to be hospitalized in Vancouver. Some family members make the long drive down to the city to be near her and to help however they can. During this time a number of stories unfold—about the hardships endured, especially during the time of “those schools” (residential schools). Mia learns that the grandmother herself experienced many hardships, from the death of her parents when she was an infant to having two of her own ten children die shortly after they were born, to later losing “three grandchildren in tragic accidents over the years.”
Any adult who remembers how hard early teen transition years were will have sympathy for the emotional confusion and sadness Mia goes through. Besides the person she loves most being gravely ill, Mia and her family take up residence in a motel near the hospital so that they can be near at hand—hardly the way a young teen would choose to spend her summer holiday.
Then, by one of those lucky flukes that life sometimes grants, Mia sees a notice for a basketball camp, which she is quick to join. Having previously played, this experience helps her regain some of her old confidence and spirit.
When at last the family needs to go back home, they bear heavy hearts. And yet this is one of the most interesting parts of the book as the author, herself from the Gitxaala Nation, offers some of the arrangements they “as Tsimshian people…must follow.” Such explanations serve to enlighten readers and never feel preachy or intrusive.
In so many ways, Spencer has given us a book that we as West Coasters will immediately recognize as part of us, like this poetic interior monologue from Mia: “I stare out the window at the dreary sky. It’s drizzling. That fine rain that seems harmless yet coats you in wet.”
Although it isn’t essential to read the first book, it does enhance one’s understanding of what life is like for Mia and her family, including some of the ways they experience discrimination. It will be interesting to see whether Spencer might decide to add another volume to this insightful coming-of-age story. 9781459838208
Heidi Greco is a Surrey-based poet and reader.
BOOKS:
Weird Rules to Follow (Orca Book Publishers, 2022) $12.95 9781459835580
I Won't Feel This Way Forever (Orca, 2025) $14.95 9781459838208
Springtime in Kitkatla (Orca, 2026) $21.95 9781459840102
Here for a Good Time (Swift Water Books/Penguin Random House, 2026) $26.99 9781774887806
[BCBW 2025]
**
REVIEW:
BC BookWorld, 2022
Weird Rules to Follow by Kim Spencer
(Orca Book Publishers $12.95)
by Erin F. Chan
Eleven-year-old Mia is well aware that her tears are different from “white tears,” that “Native girls don’t cry like the white girls do.” She’s amazed at how readily white girls can cry in public—and about such trivial things, too. Having already experienced many painful things in her life, Mia doesn’t get upset easily, and she knows that her tears wouldn’t be received in the same way anyway: “White tears get a lot of sympathy and attention. They are like show-and-tell tears. Our tears, the few that are shed, seem to make people uncomfortable.”
This phenomenon is but one of the many implicit “rules” that shape Mia’s life in Kim Spencer’s debut novel, Weird Rules to Follow, which is based on her childhood experiences growing up in Prince Rupert in the 1980s. Spencer, who is from the Ts’msyen Nation in northwest BC, reveals her lived experience through the book’s protagonist, Mia, who deals with prejudice from a young age while navigating friendships, family and school in the small coastal town. The novel is middle reader fiction, but the charged coming-of-age story will also resonate with older YA readers and adults, too.
Central to Mia’s story is her relationship with her best friend, Lara, who is non-Indigenous. Having grown up in the same cul-de-sac, Mia and Lara don’t remember the time before they were neighbours and then friends. Lara lives in one of the nicest houses on the street—which has many rooms and appliances, a view of the mountains and ocean, and two cars parked in the driveway—with her nuclear family. Mia lives in a run-down wartime house—which has “original everything, at a time when original has no value,” a view of a retaining wall, and no car parked out front—with her churchgoing grandmother, her binge-drinking mother and a revolving cast of extended family members. The two friends mostly hang out at Lara’s house, seemingly because Lara’s mother is strict about her daughter visiting other people’s homes. Mia doesn’t mind, though, as Lara’s home gives Mia a break from her homelife: “Lara and I never get bored when we hang out. … I forget about things like my mom’s drinking, or that there are so many people living in our house with us. Lara’s home is like an escape—well for me anyway.”
Although the differences between Mia and Lara had never seemed to matter before, they begin to overshadow their friendship in a way that feels inevitable—as Mia becomes increasingly aware of how the adults in their lives treat her differently because she’s Indigenous.
Weird Rules to Follow is an anecdotal history of life for young Indigenous girls in a very specific time and place. But the book’s themes of glaring discrimination that Mia and other adolescent characters face, and are deeply affected by, offer representation and understanding for readers today who face similar issues (and an opportunity to learn and empathize for readers who don’t). The novel also exemplifies many aspects of Indigenous history, particularly residential schools, in an effective, personal way that will impart some of the lasting, multi-generational impacts and continued realities and injustices. Spencer explains that, in addition to using outdated terminology and names that were common at the time (such as Native and Indian), her framing of residential schools reflects the fact that such atrocities “were not openly talked about or widely discussed back then.”
The novel is a series of scenes from Mia’s childhood, presented as episodic chapters told through Mia’s first-person perspective. Spencer’s writing style captures an authentic youthful voice while tackling challenging themes and topics—emphasizing not only how well kids understand prejudice and inequality but also how related anxieties, shame, and belittling experiences can control a kid’s life and influence the construction of their identity.
In one scene, a Coast Salish dance group performs during a large assembly at Mia’s school. When one of the dancers addresses the audience and asks the Indigenous students to identify themselves, Mia doesn’t raise her hand. “I’m too embarrassed to raise my hand. But I feel equally ashamed for not raising it,” Spencer writes. “I admire the Native students who put their hands up. They seem so comfortable with themselves. I can’t imagine feeling that way. The speaker continues, ‘It’s nice to see so many of you in the audience. Always be proud of who you are, be proud of being Native Indian.’ I feel even worse. Like I need some Pepto-Bismol.” It’s a learned shame, just one of the many weird rules that Mia knows, implicitly, to follow.
Despite all the painful things Mia experiences in her young life and all the rules that shape it, Spencer earnestly highlights the good things in Mia’s life, too: distinct moments of friendship and solidarity; youthful fun times; cultural practices and the importance of community and elders; and above all, a family’s deep love and best efforts to protect and provide a good life for their kids—even if, as a rule, it’s left unspoken. Mia knows being made to feel special is its own kind of love, as in a scene where her uncle gives her cousin Sherrie money he won from playing pool because the song “Oh Sherrie” was playing: “My cousin beams in her father’s embrace. Not just about the twenty dollars, which would make anyone happy, but because he’d made her feel special. I’m just a kid and I can see that.”
Weird Rules to Follow delivers on its title, as Spencer explores how kids understand the kinds of power and weird rules that surround and control their present realities and relationships, their self-identities and their ideas of their futures. 9781459835580
Erin F. Chan (she/her) lives and works as a publishing assistant, copy editor, and graphic designer on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.
[BCBW 2025]
