In fall 2025, Green College resident member and writer Dani Sherman met with the college's 21st writer in residence, Clara Kumagai, and discussed her work and time at the college.
Dani: What led you to apply for a residency at Green College? How has it been different from other residencies you’ve had?
Clara: A friend of mine who’s a professor here at UBC told me about it. I have done several residencies, and I find them really useful. In my writing, setting and place are really important, and being in a place for a while can throw up a lot of new ideas. When I did my MFA at UBC, I had some friends in the writing program who lived at Green, and it seemed very idyllic, which has been proven correct in the time I've been here. I was also drawn to the ethos of Green being all about multidisciplinary learning, and people from different disciplines and backgrounds coming together. In my work, talking to people is always important. As I'm writing, research is very necessary. The more you learn, the more you want to ask. It's not a finite process. My research has been quite multidisciplinary, and I like to talk to people from different backgrounds and areas of expertise. The lecture series was really interesting to me as well: to present work and engage with residents here—and, of course, people outside of Green.
Dani: You mentioned you’re an alumnus of UBC’s Creative Writing MFA. How did you change as a writer throughout the program?
Clara: I was born in Vancouver and lived here till I was five. One of the reasons I wanted to do the MFA here was that I was interested in coming back to a place that was sort of home, but not home. The Creative Writing MFA offers lots of genres. At the time, I had written some plays, and I was reviewing a lot of theatre, but I knew I wanted to write for young people. So through UBC’s MFA, I could try out different things.
I don't think, to write, that you need to do any sort of degree. You don’t have to have any piece of paper that says, “I'm a writer.” One of my reasons was to give myself a dedicated amount of time, and that's what the program did for me. And something that was really important for me personally, and for my writing as well, was being in a place that had a more diverse range of experiences in terms of culture, race, and history that just didn't exist in Ireland in the same way. I was able to read a whole new body of work. In some ways, there was a new language I could acquire here. I had a lot more opportunities to meet people who I felt like I could connect with in terms of having similar kinds of stories.
Dani: You’ve often been asked, “Why young adult (YA) fiction?” I’m curious about why speculative YA. How do you think those genres relate to each other?
Clara: I always loved the speculative genre when I was young, so to write YA in that feels natural. Catfish Rolling is inspired by the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake: a very real tragedy that is very much in living memory. One of the elements of the disaster was the nuclear meltdown. Then people had to leave the affected areas. When I started writing Catfish Rolling, it had even more magical realism and was more directly related to the nuclear meltdown. But as I kept researching and learning more, that didn't feel right. It felt like the magical realism with the nuclear element was demonizing; I felt like I was adding to the stigma and discrimination that Tōhoku, or Fukushima Prefecture in particular, is still experiencing. People still won’t buy food grown from that region. It's had an extremely tangible effect on real people. I was feeling uneasy about it, so I took away the nuclear element. But I kept the displacement. That's where the time breakage came in. By doing that, it was easier to access the emotional reactions or the trauma or the loss in a broader sense—by abstracting it, I was able to get closer to it. I think that's something that speculative fiction and magical realism can do quite well. You can see things from new perspectives. You can approach loss or grief in this alternate way, just by posing it as, “What if time is broken, and you can go to these places where time is running differently?” I think that's the way people experience trauma. So, magical realism can be a good method of looking at those themes. When young people are reading, they have less experience, less time in the world, so magical realism can also allow young people to imagine things more. When it’s a fantastical world no one has experienced, you're all experiencing it for the first time.
Dani: Why did you choose to focus on oceans for the lecture series Where the Waves Take Us? How do oceans factor into your work?
Clara: I love the ocean, and it’s in the imagination and the history and the psyche of Ireland. Ireland has a long history of emigration, and I was interested in the idea of leaving Ireland and sailing across the ocean. There’s something about being the last piece of land before this vast distance—and, in the other way, from Vancouver to Japan. It's always interested me, the idea of one ocean, one huge body. I was working on a graphic novel about a famous Irish pirate called Grace O'Malley; she was a real person. I wanted to write something in the form of an immrama, an Irish form of narrative. Lots of cultures have this form, which is a sea voyage, sort of like The Odyssey. I was also really interested in islands, islands as places, and the journey between them.
When I lived here in Vancouver, I could always see the ocean. I was always sort of thinking about it. I know it depends on where you're from, but sometimes looking at the ocean is very comforting, and sometimes it can feel like homesickness. Some of the strongest things I associate with Vancouver are mountains and ocean. And I thought that would be a good theme to tie things together. You can interpret the ocean in lots of different ways, which is helpful. I was interested in exploring what it can represent, and how it exists in the imagination.
Dani: In your first Where the Waves Take Us event, you talked about visiting Fukushima to see the aftermath of the disaster and how communities were commemorating that event. What was the research process like for your second novel, Songs for Ghosts?
Clara: I also did a residency during Songs for Ghosts. I wrote about half of it in Japan. I wrote the first two drafts while I was there, and I went down to Nagasaki twice. Madama Butterfly, one of the inspirations for Songs for Ghosts, is set in Nagasaki. My second visit was specifically for a festival called Shōrō Nagashi; it's kind of climactic in the book. Nagasaki as a place is really interesting because it's a port city. It's where most of the international trade and connection was happening during Japan’s period of seclusion. The one place where foreigners—and it was only Dutch traders—could go during this period was Nagasaki. So it's interesting, historically, as a place of different communities and different exchanges. That's been eclipsed by the atomic bomb, which has an element to play in the book as well. Nagasaki is a place that has a lot of history. And a ghost story is always about that, right? It's always about history.
Dani: What inspired you to adapt Madama Butterfly in Songs for Ghosts?
Clara: I have a lot of problems with it. I saw it for the first time in Vancouver in 2016. It's really a beautiful opera. It's one of the most performed operas in the world. And it has had a big influence on representations of Asian women. That is, I guess, a ghost of its own sort. There’ve been lots of interpretations of Madama Butterfly done by Japanese, Japanese-Canadian, and Japanese-American artists; in a broader sense, there's been Asian diaspora retakes of it. The narrative and what it represents are still very present. We think of opera as being old and not a current form of entertainment, but it has had quite a lasting effect in ways you might not immediately see.
When I saw Madama Butterfly, I was struck by all the things I didn't like about it, which can be productive. I went with my godfather and his friend. I was like, “I hate Pinkerton,” the Navy officer. My godfather's friend was like, “We all hate him.” Traditionally, the audience always boos when he takes his vows, which is fun. But I was like, “Yeah, I guess we all hate him, and I guess he is the villain—but he still wins.” I was really struck, then, by the character of the child of the Japanese wife and the Navy officer. Their child is a crux of the plot. At the end, he’s left on stage, and I was wondering: What about him? What's that story? This question was the first thing that prompted the novel. I wrote a short story which was never quite right. I worked on that story for a while, and I couldn’t crack it. Four years later, I went back to it. I was able to see it more clearly and think about how it could be expanded.
Dani: You've talked about what’s informed your writing in terms of history and art. It reminds me of how you share poems and songs in your weekly emails to Green College residents. Can you say more about your specific artistic influences?
Clara: I always use music when I'm writing, and there has to be some tonal resonance. I couldn't listen to a pop song when writing some grief-filled scene—that would be weird. I'm sort of creating an atmosphere for myself. There were times when I was trying to channel some teenage feelings, and I was listening to stuff I listened to when I was a teenager. That can really bring back time and place and memories. Songs for Ghosts has a lot of music in it, so it made sense for me to listen to a lot of music.
The current thing I’m working on is set in Ireland, so I'm listening to a lot of Irish music in particular. Sometimes I write vague notes to myself. I look at them later, and I think, “I have no idea how to achieve this.” In another residency, I went to an island off the west coast of Ireland for historical research. I listened to some old ballads. I started reading about the Child ballads from Britain and Ireland. They're narrative ballads, and they all have similar—very dark, murderous, grim, interesting—themes. And I wrote this note: “Write a book with the tone of a ballad.” These ballads are like fairy tales in that they're telling a story that has some warning or message or teaching, and the tone of them is sort of lonesome, a little eerie. I’m aiming to have an element of that in this project.
Dani: What else can you share about your current project?
Clara: I had the beginning of something before I arrived, so I have this goal of trying to get a first draft done while I'm here. The event that started me on this story is a real thing in Ireland, close to the end of the 19th century. A woman, Bridget Cleary, was burned to death by her husband because he thought she was a changeling. In Ireland at the time, it was a huge sensation; it was not by any means considered to be a normal thing that happened. This woman was quite self-sufficient. She and her husband were relatively well off in that they both had good trades. So gender and socio-economics played a part. At the time, Ireland was under British rule. There were debates in Parliament, in London, about whether to allow Ireland to have a semblance of self-governance. And it was denied because Parliament cited this as showing the Irish were too savage and they couldn’t be allowed to govern themselves. So the reach of this went pretty far.
I found this an extremely rich narrative theme, and this ties in with the ballads. What I've written so far is about three teenagers in Ireland in the present day. This case will come in, but as of yet, I don't know where. I just know that it was the starting point. I'm thinking about it in different iterations, as it is in the present day. One of my other notes is “Who deserves a home?” We'll see if that can guide me.
Clara Kumagai is from Ireland, Japan, and Canada. Catfish Rolling, her debut novel, was a 2024 YOTO Carnegie Medal nominee, and winner of the 2024 KPMG Children’s Books Ireland Book of the Year. Her second novel, Songs for Ghosts, is out in 2025. She lives and writes in Ireland.
For her residency, Clara has organized the public series Where the Waves Take Us: Art, Identity, and the Sea, a multidisciplinary exploration of creativity and the ocean, and of the relationship between humans and the natural world. This series explores the ocean as a world unto itself, as well as a site for human journeys, and how traversing them links to themes of identity, (im)migration, and human connections to our environment. UBC’s coastal location and the ocean's fluctuations due to climate change heightens the relevance of engaging with the sea and our connection to water in thoughtful and insightful ways. The series’ guests include writers, a singer-songwriter, and a playwright, with a body of work that engages with nature and communities through the lens of both past and present.
Clara Kumagai was in residence at Green College for three months, beginning in September 2025. Learn more about her work on her website.