Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Honey Farm
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://harrietalida.com/
CITY: Toronto
STATE: ON
COUNTRY: Canada
NATIONALITY: Canadian
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born in Canada.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. McMichael Canadian Art Collection, manager of digital and social media. Her Royal Majesty, founder. Provides creative branding and media services to Google, Louboutin, Condé Nast, and others. Worked previously at Shakespeare & Company as a bookstore clerk and writer-in-residence and as a contributor to Julie de Muer’s interactive digital project, Promenade nocturne à Marseille.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Harriet Alida Lye is a writer and media project producer. While attending college in Nova Scotia, she founded literary magazine Her Royal Majesty. Following graduation, she moved to Paris, where she continued publishing the magazine. Lye lived in Paris for seven years. She worked at Shakespeare & Company as a writer-in-residence, where she held several launch events and readings. During this time, Lye contributed to Julie de Muer’s project, Promenade nocturne à Marseille, an interactive digital experience that allows participants to wander the streets of Marseille at night.
Lye is a creative branding specialist and provides media services to companies such as Google, Louboutin, and Condé Nast. She is the manager of digital and social media at McMichael Canadian Art Collection. Lye lives in Toronto.
In The Honey Farm, Lye’s debut novel, honey farm owner Cynthia is in dire straights as her farm faces yet another month of draught. Worried that the farm will not make it through the upcoming summer harvest season, Cynthia and her assistant, Hartford, cook up a plan to attract free labor. Advertising the farm as an artists’ retreat, the farmers hope to gain free hands to help with the laborious task of beekeeping. The supposed artists’ residency attracts painters, writers, and other creatives.
Among this troupe is Silvia, a recent college graduate who has come to the farm to write, despite having no prior writing experience. The retreat is as much a space for creativity as it is a means to escape for the Halifax native, who yearns to leave the strict Christian ruling of her parents. At the retreat Silvia meets Ibrahim, a painter from Toronto who uses discarded cardboard as his canvasses. The two are drawn to one another, both creatively and romantically.
As the two grow closer, they begin to grow suspicious of the farm keeper. Cynthia’s demands allow little time for creative endeavors, and she seems oddly unperturbed by unsettling events that occur at the farm, such as the water turning blood-red for a day. Just as the romance between Silvia and Ibrahim grows, a darker, more sinister side of Cynthia and her honey farm begin to emerge.
“At times lyrical, biblical, and otherworldly, The Honey Farm is a suspenseful and wellcrafted story,” wrote Laura Chanoux in Booklist. A contributor to Kirkus Reviews described the book as “a honey-mouthed debut ruminating on creation, possession, and faith,” while a contributor to Publishers Weekly penned, “an aura of mystery, faintly tinged with menace, permeates Canadian author Lye’s sensuous debut novel.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, April 15, 2018, Laura Chanoux, review of The Honey Farm, p. 19.
Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 2018, review of The Honey Farm.
Publishers Weekly, February 19, 2018, review of The Honey Farm, p. 53.
CONTACT
I’ve always liked documenting things, and when I was eight, I said I wanted to be an artist (switching from previous preferred options: nurse, ballerina, and magician). I’ve fixed on being a writer.
My novel The Honey Farm will be published in April/May, 2018. Pre-order it in Canada on Indigo or Amazon; in the United States from Liveright Publishing, on B&N, Indiebound, Google Play, or Amazon; and in Australia/New Zealand on the Penguin website right here.
I also do creative branding and media projects – in French and English – for clients like Google, Louboutin, and Condé Nast. I’m the Manager of Digital and Social Media for the McMichael Canadian Art Collection and, whenever I can, I post Instagram Stories with hip hop soundtracks.Harriet00019
email: harrietalida [@] gmail.com
twitter: @harrietalida
skype: harrietalida
Represented by Stephanie Sinclair at Transatlantic Agency: stephanie[@]transatlanticagency.com
Writer Harriet Alida Lye on creativity and the writing process
A writer’s biggest challenge is self-doubt, says Lye
By Selena Mercuri
Published: 11:40 pm, 12 February 2017
under Arts & Culture
PHOTO BY LAURA STEVENS, COURTESY OF HARRIET ALIDA LYE
Writer Harriet Alida Lye on creativity and the writing process
http://var.st/254
Harriet Alida Lye is a Toronto-based writer and the founder of the international literary magazine Her Royal Majesty. Her past projects include the Little Red Guide to Toronto, for which she was the writer and photographer. In an interview with The Varsity, Lye discussed her creative ventures and the quirks of the writing process.
Lye founded Her Royal Majesty as an undergraduate student in Nova Scotia, and it became international when she moved to Paris, where she lived for seven years. “The Anglophone community there is so strong,” said Lye.
Her experience in Paris centred on the famous bookstore Shakespeare & Company, where she worked and later lived as a writer-in-residence.
At Shakespeare & Company, Lye was able to hold several launch events and readings, which she described as “a really natural way of getting to extend the network and meet writers from all over the world.” The main thing that elevated the magazine to a new level, said Lye, “was finding two hugely talented and generous graphic designers, one for the website and one for the printed magazine, whose work elevated the journal to what I would consider the caliber of an ‘international magazine.’”
Lye contributed to Julie de Muer’s project Promenade nocturne à Marseille, with two other writers on a Google Story. The project allows participants to digitally explore the streets of Marseilles by night. While freelancing for a French advertising agency, she was assigned to find people in France who had relied on Google’s ‘Search and Maps’ features for a creative or humanitarian project.
“I found Julie and became super interested in her story because of the way she discovered, and then animated, contemporary and historical narratives in her city in order to help try to remove the negative associations that Marseille has in the public consciousness,” Lye said.
Lye believes that the biggest challenge writers face is “self doubt, combined with an oversaturation of the market.”
She described the difficulty of feeling confident about a written work and putting it in the world.
On her own writing process, she said that the first draft of her upcoming novel The Honey Farm was written over the course of two or three months, and she wrote around 1,500 words a day while staying at a family friend’s house in northern Sweden. The greenhouse was one of her favourite spots, and she would work there with her laptop perched on her knees.
“I look things up on Google Maps a lot and walk around the digital streets, open up books and read paragraphs at random just to remind myself of what a sentence is, drink coffee, look at the sky, walk,” she said. After taking a break from the book for over a year, she spent two years doing intense edits, with the help of many readers. At one point during these edits, she cut 200 pages from the novel, and rewrote 100.
The result is a psychological thriller as well as “a love story/identity crisis.” Lye outlined the novel’s development, explaining how its conception began with the setting, a honey farm in northern Ontario, followed by the character of the woman who runs it, Cynthia.
The book follows Silvia and Ibrahim, who end up at Cynthia’s farm after she markets it as a writer’s retreat to attract free labour. “At the start of the novel, Silvia has just graduated from university, has a very closed and Catholic background, and wants to be a writer, but has never written much of anything,” Lye said.
The Honey Farm will be published in April 2018 by Nimbus Press.
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Print Marked Items
The Honey Farm
Laura Chanoux
Booklist.
114.16 (Apr. 15, 2018): p19.
COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
The Honey Farm.
By Harriet Alida Lye.
May 2018. 336p. Norton/Liveright, $25.95 (9781631494345).
Cynthia's honey farm in rural Ontario has been dealing with months of drought, and she and her assistant,
Hartford, need help with the upcoming summer harvest season. They advertise the farm as an artists' retreat,
where painters, writers, and others can live for free in exchange for their labor, and soon a dozen artists
from across Canada arrive. Silvia, who applied as a writer, though she has no writing experience, recently
graduated from college and wants to escape her religious parents. Ibrahim spends his nights painting
massive works on pieces of found cardboard. The two are immediately drawn to each other at the isolated
farm. As Silvia and Ibrahim thrive, though, the other artists begin to question Cynthia's demands as well as
her disregard for the odd things that begin to happen on the farm, such as when the water turns bloodcolored
for a day. With a strong command of tone and a haunting sense of atmosphere, Lye's first novel will
transfix readers. At times lyrical, biblical, and otherworldly, The Honey Farm is a suspenseful and wellcrafted
story.--Laura Chanoux
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Chanoux, Laura. "The Honey Farm." Booklist, 15 Apr. 2018, p. 19. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A537268045/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b0de5344.
Accessed 3 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A537268045
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Lye, Harriet Alida: THE HONEY FARM
Kirkus Reviews.
(Mar. 15, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Lye, Harriet Alida THE HONEY FARM Liveright/Norton (Adult Fiction) $25.95 5, 29 ISBN: 978-1-
63149-434-5
Two young artists grapple with love, purpose, and identity in a paradise turned sinister.
In Lye's debut novel, a once-prosperous, now-troubled farm--known as The Honey Farm--is beset by
problems of biblical proportions: frog-filled lakes, lice infestations, and diseased livestock. In an effort to
save her land of milk and honey, the farm's enigmatic owner, Cynthia, and her assistant, Hartford, offer the
property as an artist's retreat in exchange for manual labor. The summer brings together a group of artists
including Silvia, a recent college graduate fleeing her religious family, and Ibrahim, an artist for whom
"nothing exists...until he paints it." As the two grow closer, they slowly learn about Cynthia's past--and
begin to see glimpses of a looming danger. For every intricate description of a delicate honeycomb, there's a
worrisome image like hundreds of dead bees. The good exists among the bad; the light balances the dark.
Short chapters, which shift between Silvia's and Ibrahim's points of view, help build suspense. As the book
races to its close, the secrets beneath the surface begin to buzz as loudly as a bees nest. For a psychological
thriller, the novel sometimes shows its hand too much, making the characters seem naive or willfully
ignorant. Despite this, there's a lot that's done right: the use of biblical verses and stories; the meticulous
rendering of the farm; the unsettling tone woven throughout. Most important is Lye's lush, poetic prose,
which soars off the page: "the earth soaks up water like someone thirsty for love," and "the world breaks
and heals itself again, eternally." Each lyrical line feels like a gift left at the reader's altar.
A honey-mouthed debut ruminating on creation, possession, and faith.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Lye, Harriet Alida: THE HONEY FARM." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A530650875/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=286d7986.
Accessed 3 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A530650875
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The Honey Farm
Publishers Weekly.
265.8 (Feb. 19, 2018): p53.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Honey Farm
Harriet Alida Lye. Liveright, $25.95 (336p)
ISBN 978-1-63149-434-5
An aura of mystery, faintly tinged with menace, permeates Canadian author Lye's sensuous debut novel set
in a remote, drought-imperiled part of Ontario. Farm owner Cynthia has attracted some desperately needed
extra hands by advertising free artists' residencies in exchange for farm work. A couple of the young
arrivals quickly determine that the exhausting daily round of gardening, beekeeping, and other chores leaves
scant time for creative pursuits (or anything else) and split. But Ibrahim, a painter from Toronto, and
Halifax native Silvia, nominally an aspiring poet but mostly a directionless recent college grad chafing at
her rigidly Christian parents' expectations, embrace the opportunity and, eventually, each other. Casting a
shadow over everything, however, is queen bee Cynthia, who may have a hidden agenda hinted at by
references to her vanished former partner, Hilary--apparently a dead ringer for Silvia. Though the plot
falters somewhat toward the finish, Lye offers an achingly lyrical excursion into a lost Eden. Agent:
Stephanie Sinclair, Transatlantic Literary Agency (Canada). (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Honey Farm." Publishers Weekly, 19 Feb. 2018, p. 53. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A529357508/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8e77e331.
Accessed 3 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A529357508