A Riddle Out of an Answer: Kaelyn Abrahamson interviews Liz Harmer

Liz Harmer

UVic work study student Kaelyn Abrahamson talks with Liz Harmer, one of two judges for our 2026 Novella Prize (accepting entries now, with an Early Bird discount until December 31). They discuss finding the love for your work, career breakthroughs, and how the length of a piece of fiction creates its own rules, limits, & expectations.

 

Liz Harmer is a Canadian living in California and the author of the novels The Amateurs (2018), finalist for the Amazon First Novel Award, and Strange Loops (2023). Her award-winning stories, essays, and poems have been published in Hazlitt, The Walrus, Image Journal, the Globe and Mail, The Malahat Review, the New Quarterly, Lit Hub, Best Canadian Stories, and elsewhere. She has been a fellow at the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences and is at work on a memoir. She taught Creative Writing for several years at Chapman University and is now a Humanities Teacher at the Webb School of California.


Your pieces “Right to Grapple” and “Infinite Regressions” were previously published in The Malahat Review. What is it like coming back to judge a contest for the magazine?

Yes, and in fact a big career breakthrough for me was winning a Malahat Review prize many years ago now. It really changed my life! And so coming back to judge this contest is one of those things that makes a person feel the grand march of time. The Malahat Review has always made me feel my work was in good hands and to be part of the larger TMR community is lovely.

This winter, you will be judging the Novella Prize alongside Rob Benvie. What will you be looking for in a winning novella?

That is truly impossible to say until I see the novellas for myself! I read a pretty wide variety of styles and probably the things that most dazzle me are interesting sentences along with a singular authorial voice sprinkled with a surprising point of view on human existence….

What do you find special about the form of the novella? Are there any elements that you particularly appreciate?

I think each length—from flash fiction to the super-long novel—ends up creating its own rules, limits, expectations. To me that is really exciting. A novella gives you more room than a story to develop characters and ideas but has some of the sharp snap of a short story.

As someone who mentors and teaches young writers, what do you hope to help them discover about their writing? What advice would you give to an up-and-coming writer?

Cherish the moment you are in: the early time of discovery, when you figure out how to write and also how you write—before any of that feels formed or sure—that is where you find the love for your work that can sustain you.

Your writing career so far has been comprised of many genres, including works of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. What keeps you inspired to write and share your stories?

I don’t know that I think of feeling inspired to share my stories, though I do think that writing, in each form, is a way of thinking and figuring out what you believe about the world. I recently read an essay by Donald Barthleme that quotes Karl Kraus, saying that “a writer is a person who can make a riddle out of an answer.” I like that writing makes the world, for me, feel richer and more complicated and mysterious.

Do you have any new projects you are working on that you would be willing to share?

I have a few new projects on the go, ones that I’m slowly piecing together—a long nonfiction work as well as revisions to a novel. I’m enjoying some of the work I’ve been doing on shorter forms—essays and stories—and I’m hoping to put more of those out in the next few months. I recently came out with a novella of my own, nestled in a quartet with three other writers, and that felt enlivening to release.

 

Kaelyn Abrahamson

Kaelyn Abrahamson