Emily A. Weedon is an acclaimed novelist and an award-winning screenwriter who is happy to call Leaside home. An avid cook, she is a huge fan of Cumbrae’s, Alex Farm Products, and Badali’s. She loves being able to walk not only to her favourite food shops but also to other local establishments such as Lit, The Daughter, and McSorley’s, welcome watering holes from which a writer can draw liquid energy and creative inspiration.
“I am a gender criminal. I am Unmale, yet I write as though I am a person.” So begins Autokrator, a disturbing epic that poses timely questions about the ominous rise of autocracy and the ongoing chaos engendered by the toxic masculinity of its patriarchal practitioners. Sound familiar? The novel alternates and juxtaposes the first-person narratives of two gender criminals. The first is Tiresius, a highly educated and status-driven male impersonator with vaulting ambition that o’erleaps itself. When the novel begins, Tiresius has been sentenced to death and awaits execution for violating her society’s most sacred rule: she has committed the heinous crime of masquerading as a man. The second is Cera, in the beginning, a domestic female labourer whose son, the Autokrator in waiting, was taken from her at birth; in the end, a gender criminal desperate to become part of the life of her son, to whom she ultimately reveals herself and sets in motion the violent emergence of a new social order.
The original Tiresias of Greek mythology was a blind prophet who spent seven years as a woman. Here the gender change is reversed, but unlike her visionary predecessor, this Tiresius is a Machiavellian manipulator who has risen through the ranks of the Autokracy to become Imperial Treasurer, the most trusted confidant of the Autokrator. The intertwining of Tiresius’s power-driven journey to death with Cera’s love-driven journey to life is deftly accomplished.
In this chillingly evoked dystopian world, Unmales have been stripped of their personhood and made to function as labourers and baby makers. Their only role is to serve men. Part of the novel’s unrelenting critique and caustic satirization of patriarchy focuses on the male geneticists’ futile and obsessive attempts “to make men without mothers.” Such black humour pervades the book, a book that despite its grisly contents has its comic moments.
Before writing novels, Emily was a screenwriter who co-created the web series Chateau Laurier, the recipient of multiple awards in 2023. She and her collaborator Kent Staines were awarded “Best Writing in a Web Series” at the Canadian Screen Awards that same year. Emily has also been a graphic designer, film producer, set painter, actress, and art director. To boot, she has played music professionally and released three EPs. She is passionate about supporting Canadian literature and runs a monthly reading event, Drunk Fiction, at the Caledonian, an event that showcases both established and upcoming writers.
Emily graduated from Leaside High School in 1990 and returned to our neighbourhood with her daughter, Ginger, in 2023. A voracious reader from a young age, Emily devoured gothic fiction along with such horror classics as Rosemary’s Baby, The Hunger, and Interview with a Vampire. Her appetite for blood no doubt inspired her new novel, Hemo Sapiens, which will be released this fall.
In this bloodthirsty tale, Detective Luke Stockton struggles to deal with the increasingly bizarre behaviour of his pregnant wife, Beatrice, who is expecting their first child. She repeatedly and compulsively attends a medical spa that offers unconventional prenatal treatments, among them leech suctions and vampire facials. The spa is run by Cleo, a suave and sinister woman harbouring lethal secrets. Inevitably, Luke is drawn into her seductive web.
The tension mounts as Luke investigates a series of killings involving runaway boys whose blood has been drained from their bodies. On the trail of an elusive murderer, Luke is thrown into an erotically charged netherworld of sex, money, duplicity, and terror. The closer he approaches the truth, the more the danger to him and his family intensifies. As Heidi von Palleske aptly observes, Hemo Sapiens is “a razor-sharp seductive plunge into a world where the line between predator and prey blurs. With witty, biting dialogue and a dark glittering edge, Weedon delivers a vampire tale that redefines the genre,” a tale whose bite is decidedly worse than its bark.
Autokrator is widely available now, and Hemo Sapiens will be available in late September, just in time for the spooky season. Read it by the fire on a dark and stormy night.
This story was guest contributed by Greig Henderson.