Interview - Gina Leola Woolsey and Fifteen Thousand Pieces

Canada Reads American Style

Tara interviews Gina Leola Woolsey, author of Fifteen Thousand Pieces: A Medical Examiner's Journey Through Disaster, a nonfiction account of Dr. John Butt who was Chief Medical Examiner at the time of the Swissair plane crash off the coast of Nova Scotia in 1998.

Gina left her corporate career mid-life to pursue an education in creative writing, earning a BFA from the University of British Columbia and a MFA from the University of King's College. She splits her time between small-town Alberta, downtown Montreal, and her hometown of Vancouver. Gina won the 2010-2011 CBC Nonfiction Prize for My Best Friend, a decades-panning tale that offers a glimpse into her relationship with her troubled brother, from the innocence of their difficult childhood to his adult addictions.

Website: https://www.ginaleolawoolsey.com/

Instagram: @ginaleola

Gina's Recommended Reading List & Current Reads:

• Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
• Red Earth and Pouring Rain by Vikram Chandra
• The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
• Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey by Chuck Palahniuk
• The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
• The Famished Road by Ben Okri
• On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King
• The Writing Life by Annie Dillard
• Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
• The Language of Butterflies: How Thieves, Hoarders, Scientists, and Other Obsessives Unlocked the Secrets of the World's Favorite Insect by Wendy Williams
• The Family Code by Wayne Ng
• Short Stories for a Long Winter by Yasmin Ahmed
• Vignettes by Josip Novakovich