SATA

PERSONAL

Married; children: one son, one daughter.

ADDRESS

• Home - Quispamsis, New Brunswick, Canada.

CAREER

Textile artist and writer. Has worked as an antique collector; columnist for the Saint John Telegraph-Journal, Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada. Exhibitions: Has staged several solo exhibitions of original quilt work and has contributed to group exhibitions, including Quilt Canada and others in Canada and France.

MEMBER:

Canadian Quilters’ Association, Modern Quilt Guild.

AWARDS:

Commonwealth Book Prize for Canada and Europe, and Margaret and John Savage First Book Award, both 2012, both for The Town That Drowned.

WRITINGS

• CHILDREN'S NOVELS
• PICTURE BOOKS
• NONFICTION
• The Town That Drowned, Goose Lane Editions (Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada), 2011
• All the Things We Leave Behind, Goose Lane Editions (Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada), 2016
• Waiting under Water, Scholastic Canada (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2020
• The Little Ghost Who Was a Quilt, illustrated by Byron Eggenschwiler, Tundra Books of Northern New York (Plattsburgh, NY), 2020
• Modern Selvage Quilting: Easy-Sew Methods—17 Projects Small to Large, C&T Publishing (Lafayette, CA), 2016
• Sew a Modern Halloween: Make 15 Spooky Project for Your Home, C&T Publishing (Lafayette, CA), 2017
• The Little Ghost Quilt's Winter Surprise ( Riel Nason, Byron Eggenschwiler), Tundra (Plattsburgh, NY), 2025
• Disaster at the Highland Games (Riel Nason (Author), Nathasha Pilotte (Illustrator)), Bradan Press (Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada), 2023
• Catastrophe at the Christmas Ceilidh (Riel Nason (Author), Nathasha Pilotte (Illustrator)), Bradan Press (Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada), 2023

SIDELIGHTS

Riel Nason is an expert quilter who has written about her craft in nonfiction form and has also authored novels and picture books for youths. A citizen of Canada, she was raised in the tiny village of Hawkshaw, New Brunswick, with an official population of only a few dozen. She did once live in the big city of Toronto, Ontario, when her father spent a year of sabbatical at the University of Toronto. She was fond of many different types of crafts as a youth, including crochet work. It was not until around 2010 that she first started quilting, but she quickly fell in love with the form. As a longtime resident of her largely rural province in southeastern Canada, Nason told Middle Grade Minded that she is “committed to writing stories set in New Brunswick and writing about small town-life.”

The Town That Drowned, Nason’s award-winning debut novel, written for young adults, was partly inspired by the flooding of a residential district in the Saint John River Valley by the establishment of a new hydroelectric dam in 1967. The novel finds fourteen-year-old Ruby Carter stunned when she falls through the river ice while skating, which evokes a vision of her town being submerged under water. With people unsure what to think about her premonitions, or the unpredictable actions of her apparently autistic brother, Percy, Ruby tries to shrug off her peers’ ridicule and make the most of her innocent adolescence while it lasts.

A Quill & Quire reviewer was especially impressed with Nason’s channeling of Ruby’s voice, which proves “charming, wry, and believable” and delivers “shot-to-the-heart moments of real humour and pathos.” The reviewer found the large cast to be well managed and the images and details “fully alive,” with each snippet of backstory reading like “a sparkling little gem of a short story.” Writing for the National Post, Shawn Syms observed that “in Ruby Carson, we witness someone engaging in what feels like an authentic struggle to come to terms with, and articulate her experience of, the world around her.” Syms affirmed that with The Town That Drowned, Nason has created a “compelling piece of fiction charting a young woman’s coming of age, and raises thoughtful questions about the meaning of home and the nature of progress.”

Nason’s next young-adult novel, All the Things We Leave Behind, is set in 1977, when seventeen-year-old Violet is dealing with the repercussions of her moody brother Bliss’s disappearance. With her parents trying to retrace his steps, Violet spends the summer managing the family antique business, the Purple Barn, while deflecting customers’ questions about her parents’ “vacation.” When ghostly deer make an appearance—harkening to Violet’s encounter with a friendly deer named Speckles years earlier, as well as to her and Bliss’s experiences together—her own story takes a magical realist turn as the family seeks emotional closure. Canadian Literature contributor Nicole Birch-Bayley noted that “Nason’s obvious talent is her ability to imbue her story with exquisite details, including her characters’ relationships to the eclectic objects around them. Nason brings to life not only the mysterious ghost herd, but also the entire setting of the Purple Barn.” School Library Journal writer Marian Mays found the plot “engaging” and the magical realist moments “enticing.”

Waiting under Water is a middle-grade novel, focused on twelve-year-old Hope and her feelings about her family’s imminent move away from their seaside home for her father’s new employment in Ontario. She has a verbal tic that she makes in times of stress, a “hummph” sound, and she copes with this condition in part by making her own seaglass—broken shards worn smooth by the sand and tide over time. She is also making a bittersweet good-bye quilt for her best friend Willa and doing her part to try and help her village community of St. David’s win a TV contest for “Canada’s Tiniest Treasure.” A Quill & Quire reviewer praised Nason’s “deft characterization and poetic description of Hope’s outer and inner worlds” and called Waiting under Water a “gentle, heartfelt account of a 12-year-old’s perspective on navigating change.”

Nason’s first picture book is The Little Ghost Who Was a Quilt. Rather than being a plain white sheet, like all the other ghosts, Scrappy finds himself to be a patchwork quilt. This makes him less quick and agile, which sometimes causes him trouble. When Halloween rolls around, Scrappy hatches a plan to get a close-up look at trick-or-treaters, but a pleasant surprise comes when his quiltiness comes in handy for someone for a change. A Kirkus Reviews writer remarked that “this odd but gently told story conveys the importance of self-respect and acceptance of one’s uniqueness.”

BIOCRIT

PERIODICALS

• Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 2020, review of The Little Ghost Who Was a Quilt.

• Publishers Weekly, August 17, 2020, review of The Little Ghost Who Was a Quilt, p. 74.

• School Library Journal, September, 2016, Marian Mays, review of All the Things We Leave Behind, p. 161; February, 2021, Maryann H. Owen, review of The Little Ghost Who Was a Quilt, p. 62.

ONLINE

• Canadian Literature, https://canlit.ca/ (March 21, 2017), Nicole Birch-Bayley, “Realism as Escapism,” review of All the Things We Leave Behind.

• C&T Publishing website, https://www.ctpub.com/ (March 20, 2017), author interview.

• Middle Grade Minded, http://middlegrademinded.blogspot.com/ (March 22, 2021), author interview.

• National Post, https://nationalpost.com/ (December 9, 2011), Shawn Syms, review of The Town That Drowned.

• Quill & Quire, https://quillandquire.com/ (September 1, 2011), review of The Town That Drowned; (September 1, 2016), review of All the Things We Leave Behind; (May 1, 2020), review of Waiting under Water.

• Riel Nason website, http://www.rielnason.com (August 14, 2021).*