Stella Harvey: The Writing Life and Her New Novel, Disruption
In this conversation, I speak with writer Stella Harvey about her newest novel, Disruption, and about the writing life, mentorship, and the literary community she has helped build in Whistler.
Disruption is set in a fractured future shaped by pandemic, environmental damage, surveillance and fear. At its centre is Kitianna, a young woman whose desire to write, ask questions and understand what lies beyond the wall surrounding her world gradually becomes dangerous.
CiTR 101.9 FM / The Blue Hour
Recorded live on September 29, 2026
Listen: CiTR | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube
The Blue Hour, hosted by Farha Guerrero, airs live every Tuesday at 2 p.m. PT on CiTR 101.9 FM at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
Stella Leventoyannis Harvey was born in Cairo, Egypt, and raised in Calgary. She later made her home in Whistler, where she founded the Whistler Writing Society and served for twenty years as Artistic and Executive Director of the Whistler Writers Festival, stepping down in 2022.
She has mentored writers through Simon Fraser University’s Writers’ Studio and is the 2026 Whistler Writer in Residence.
Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in literary journals, newspapers and on CBC Radio. She is the author of four novels: Nicolai’s Daughters, The Brink of Freedom, Finding Callidora, and Disruption.
Transcript
Transcript lightly edited for clarity while preserving the natural rhythm of the live conversation.
Farha: Welcome, Stella, to The Blue Hour.
Stella: Thank you so much.
Farha: You are a remarkable person in many ways.
I happen to know you personally, you've spent an enormous part of your life creating opportunities for others, especially other writers. Founding that Writers Society that I spoke about, building this incredible festival, which now is a real cultural gem in the municipality of Whistler, and at the same time you've been mentoring writers and also producing your own work.
I'd like to begin simply with your own practice.
Stella: I've always been an early morning person. I'm not generally a very quiet person either, unfortunately.
But in the early morning, I can be very quiet when it's dark. I'm usually up around four in the morning, and after some meditation, I start to write again because it's quiet.
My characters come to the forefront when my mind isn't organizing. I think my forte is organizing. I like putting things together and events together.
And I love people. My background is, I'm a social worker by training, so I love people.
But for me to write, I have to be quiet and away from those things that I love, the people aspect as well as the organizing aspect.
That's why I write early in the morning when it's dark, and my mind is quiet, and I can focus on the characters I'm creating.
I work until about seven or so, take a break, come back and do some more work, and usually finish up around nine.
Then I can get on with everything else I do.
I think it's like with everything. When you have a schedule for something, you do it. If you're going to work out every morning, or you work out at night, or you go for a run, writing is the same thing.
I schedule it. That way, I know I'm going to be able to do it.
The other thing that's important for me, and I've shared this with students and other people I've mentored, is that there have been times when I haven't been able to follow my schedule because I'm visiting family or I'm traveling.
When I come back to my writing, it's very difficult to find my way back into the story and into character.
What I do is, I've got a kitchen timer at my desk, and I basically commit to ten minutes. I put the timer on and say to myself, "Okay, I'm going to stand, because I stand, I'm going to stand here for ten minutes. If I get one sentence out, that'll be better than anything."
Then I do that for several days, sometimes for a few weeks, until I'm back into the story.
But more importantly, I can hear my characters.
That gets me back into my routine when I've been away from that routine for a period of time.
Farha: So this is a daily practice.
I know that the late Mario Vargas Llosa wrote and spoke about this. He had a very similar practice to yours, Stella, where he said that he needed to show up at the office, so to speak, every day.
And I think, if I'm not mistaken, he was an early riser as well.
I can hear you. It is a very quiet, beautiful time, the early morning.
Do you feel that, because you are a novelist and have so many characters on the go when you're writing, that this daily practice is one of the things that keeps you connected to them and helps you make sense of that tremendous dialogue going on in your head?
Stella: For sure. I think that's what consistency brings.
Even when I have trouble, when I don't know what a character is going to do, or why he or she is doing what they're doing, I walk away.
Because I have a consistent practice, they won't let me go.
So I go into the garden to do some gardening, or I do something that doesn't take a lot of my brain power.
But I hear a voice.
It's so interesting. I have a story with my first book, Nicolai's Daughters, where I couldn't understand what Nicolai wanted in terms of what he wanted his daughter to see in him and other people to see in him.
He had lost his wife. I was trying to understand and figure out what motivated him to do some things that were not exactly the nicest things in the world to do.
But what motivated him? What is it that he wanted?
I couldn't figure it out.
I did some notes, tried to think about it, and then I went to bed. I thought, I'm never going to sleep.
I fell asleep.
In the middle of the night, I woke up. I heard his voice.
"I want to see. I want to see what Sarah sees in me. I want to see the person I am in her eyes."
It was his voice. I could hear that.
I got up and wrote that down.
Suddenly I knew why he did the sorts of things he did and what motivated him.
It's an interesting thing.
And that's happened to me in other cases as well.
Farha: It's almost like a dreamlike state, because you are a writer of fiction. Fiction sometimes feels as though we are entering another world subconsciously.
So the idea of waking up at 4 a.m. makes a lot of sense because you've just finished one or two cycles of dreaming.
I can see that, but how beautiful it is to hear the character you are creating in the moment, and then also to hear his voice, which I think is really important because that's what makes it real.
Stella: For the reader, if he or she is real to you, the writer, he or she will be real to the reader as well.
I think the other thing too is, this is what I say to students that I've mentored in the past: find the time that works best for you.
For me, when I was in university, I never stayed up late to finish something. I always got up early to finish something.
It's my personality. It's my routine.
But there are people who, in fact, I had a student on the island who, after his wife and son go to bed, writes at ten o'clock at night.
If that works for him or someone else, I think it's finding where you can schedule your writing, finding that time, making it happen and scheduling it like you would anything else, a workout, a job assignment, an interview, whatever it is.
You schedule it and you get it done.
Once you do that, it becomes habit.
Again, for me anyway, and I'm sure there are a few psychologists who wonder about me, I hear voices in my head.
These are the characters. They won't let me go until the story is on the page.
Farha: The voices in your head, what you just said is so beautiful because it shows that, like an artist or a musician, a writer of fiction sees, hears and imagines.
It's the creative side of our brains that produces fiction, that creates something invented.
And as we're living in an increasingly realistic world, I don't think it's an understatement to say how important that creative side is.
Stella: Absolutely.
Farha: You mentioned mentors, which we need to talk about because it's something that's really near and dear to you.
I don't think I'll ever know a Stella who doesn't want to mentor someone.
I am certainly one of those people you've mentored in the past, and I can thank you tremendously because what you gave me, like you've given to so many writers, is a little seed that grows with time.
You may not realize how important what you give can be.
For someone just beginning a writing life, even a little bit of confidence can really encourage that creative side.
Why is mentoring so important to you?
Stella: Writing is such a solo, an alone type of work. You're working on your own.
Unlike other work that I've done, other things I've done in my career, where you have timelines and people expecting things from you.
Even when you're organizing a festival, there are a lot of timelines, activities that have to be done, people are counting on you.
With writing, unless you have some sort of publishing deal, your book is required, or something is required by a certain time, there aren't those deadlines.
So I think when you write, it has to be important to you because there isn't anybody watching over your shoulder saying, you've got to get this done.
Helping somebody understand what it is they want to write about, and how they can get there, both from their practice as well as brainstorming ideas, is really important to me because it's such a solitary type of work.
That's important to me.
And I think that I've been so fortunate to meet such wonderful people who have such wonderful ideas that need to be shared.
But again, there's no one pushing you along to share those ideas or to get the words on the page.
If I can help somebody do that, you're making a difference in that person's life by helping them get their stories out into the world.
But then the other part is, you don't know the impact of that story on so many others.
That impact wouldn't happen if those stories weren't out there.
With writing, a lot of it is just drive and persistence.
Again, we write on our own. But you have to persist.
That's hard to do by yourself, as I found.
For me, having a community, or helping others, just helps them get their stories on the page and get them out into the world so that they can have that subsequent impact on others who might read that work.
Farha: Do you think that every writer, even though writing is, as you said, an individual endeavour, still needs another reader?
And that should ideally happen while we're still in the process, right?
Is that one reason why you think mentorship has so much value?
Because in the end, you're still a reader - someone there to read and to listen.
Stella: That's right.
I think it's just having somebody pay attention and knowing that you're not alone.
I think that, more than anything, it's the fact that you're not alone.
Somebody takes an interest in what it is you're writing about.
In some of the mentoring, some of the students I've mentored in the past, sometimes the discussion, and that has happened to me as well because I belong to a critique group, I have a writers group, you think you have everything on the page.
You think your idea is there.
And yet you listen to somebody else talk or ask a question, as sometimes I ask my students, and it starts them thinking about something they hadn't thought of.
It gets them to maybe focus on what it is they want to write about, or alternatively, it confirms what it is they're writing about.
That also motivates the writer to keep going.
So I think it does a number of things.
It recognizes and acknowledges, maybe that's the better word, acknowledges what the other person is doing.
Farha: You send out newsletters every month.
In those newsletters via email, you often showcase one of the writers you've mentored or someone you might know personally who is a writer.
You share with whoever's receiving your newsletter, or with the world, we could say, what I think you're very proud of: this writer has published here, or this writer has done something else.
Why is that important to you, to see that evolution of something that may have started just in the first draft to seeing it actually in the world?
Stella: I'm just so proud of all of the students that I've been so fortunate to work with.
For me, it's really important to share that with my contacts as well.
I think that's part of it.
I'm just so proud of them because, as you know, writing is not easy. It's not.
Stella: Some people take a very, very long time.
Yesterday, when I was at my reading event at the Container Pub, there was another lady who also read.
Her book was about mothers in a war situation.
What she said initially in the introduction to her book was that from the first paragraph through to completion and through publication was something like, I think she said, eleven or twelve years.
That's a long time to pursue, to work, to keep going.
And with Disruption, my latest novel, seven years.
I started in 2019 and it's gone through more than 20 drafts.
Farha: Which I actually really want to talk about!
It's sitting here on the desk. I had only seen the PDF, so it was lovely to see it in print.
I did ask you, if you don't mind, to introduce the novel and then read a little for us, and then we'll delve into it.
Stella: Okay.
The book came to me in 2019 as I was finishing my third novel, Finding Callidora.
It really was about walls.
Initially, countries were building walls to separate themselves from other countries, and I wondered about that.
The question came to me: would we build the concrete walls if we didn't build the walls within each other that keep others out?
And why would we do that?
Because we're all human beings.
That's where Disruption came to be.
It is a little bit different for me as a novel because it's dystopian fiction.
While it speaks to the walls that separate us physically and emotionally, I also wondered about security.
We have all sorts of technology, et cetera.
What would we give up to be safe?
I think about that sometimes now.
It was a work of dystopian fiction, and yet now, more and more so, it feels real.
I don't have to go very far to look at the headlines and see some of the issues that I've dealt with in Disruption.
The countries are made up, although probably some of them will be recognizable.
But I think the other thing is that my feeling is what happens in Disruption, and what's happening in our world today, could happen to any country.
We can't be complacent when it comes to things like democracy and fairness and the law, et cetera.
As I said, with this novel, I've gone a little rogue from my previous novels, and my publisher called me a cyberpunk novelist now, whatever that means.
Farha: Just to back up, you've written historical fiction and many other kinds of fiction in the past.
So this was a very new thing to you.
Stella: Yes, very new.
Again, you just sort of wonder.
For me, all of my writing has to do with something that bothers me or that I wonder about, whether it's a piece of history, belonging, or things that separate us from others.
In what I'm going to read, I'll read a little bit of Chapter One, "Partition," which is from Kitianna's point of view.
Kitianna is about to finish high school, a smart, creative, innovative young woman who is fascinated with a wall that basically separates her country from the other part of the country that used to be one big country at one time.
That fascination with the wall and her questions, because she has lots of questions and doesn't understand why she can't ask them, may get her into trouble.
"Partition" is Kitianna's point of view.
One thing I should also say, because I have a lot of voices in my head, there are many characters in this novel, just as there are in my other novels.
So this is Kitianna's point of view.
Kitianna stares at the towering metal wall, one panel flanked by another and another and still another, no beginning or end in sight, each one rammed into the ground with such force that the earth at its base lies splintered. At the top of the wall, barbed wire is coiled, its spikes silhouetted against the cloudless blue sky. The wall runs the entire length of her country, separating the Northern state from the poor Southern one where she lives.
Once North and South were united, but that was before she was born. Now the wall cuts through her city like a knife. The thin tongues of light waver and beckon her.
"Stay back," Daniel says, his voice sharp and low. "Don't get any closer."
He'd had to run to catch up to her and stands beside her now, bent over, hands on his thighs, sucking air.
Daniel wants to keep her safe, but she doesn't want to be safe. She wants to know. She wants to see, just to peek.
She finds herself wondering what life is like for the people on the other side whenever she catches a glimpse of the wall over the buildings or back alleys in her city. She has thought about them since she was a child. Now in her last weeks of high school, she knows for certain what matters to her, the truth.
Kitianna edges closer to the wall, looks up. The metal glints in the sun. She can feel the sun's reflected warmth radiating off the steel.
When was the last time the sun had been this bright, the sky so clear? She puts her face up to one of the cracks between the slabs and says, "Hello, is anyone there?"
Daniel grabs her arm and wrenches her away, checking over his shoulder. She tugs her arm back.
"Stop it."
"Why are you so stubborn?"
Daniel's breath is calmed. His voice remains restrained.
"You act like you're in one of your make-believe stories. This is real life. They are watching. They always are."
Kitianna looks around, shrugs. There are no guards around. She knows about the cameras, the drones, and the droids.
Her parents warn her constantly that the droids are everywhere. Usually she ignores her parents' concerns. Why would the droids care about her? If her mother is right, the droids, like the wall, are simply there to protect everyone.
Daniel lays his hand on her shoulder.
"The guards won't come the minute they see you. They'll watch. They'll pounce when you aren't expecting it."
He takes a breath.
"Let's get back to school," he says.
His voice is pleading.
"We'll be late. I'll hear about it from Dad."
She slips out of his hold and starts to explain her curiosity about the wall, but he's already walking away. Kitianna watches him disappear between the blackened trees of the wooded area, separating the wall from her school. His father is a general.
That's why Daniel worries about security, about who is watching.
She turns, lifts her hand to place it flat on the steel wall. It's hot, but she keeps her hand in place until she can't stand it anymore.
When she pulls away, the metal has left a scalding imprint on her palm.
Farha: I know that Kitianna is this very young girl.
I said to you as I was coming in to UBC, this campus is still buzzing with that energy of the first semester.
Many of the young women and men walking around could be this character.
The word curiosity may, in many ways, capture that energy because you have these young students who are just starting university.
One of the things driving that energy is curiosity, asking questions.
You introduced this novel with the question of the wall.
So in some ways, I see a little mirror there, perhaps a younger self, embedded in the first chapter, where you can feel that you as the writer were asking why.
Why walls? And why are they also perhaps internal?
Stella: I think that's part of it.
It's why would we build, as I said, why would we build these concrete walls if we didn't have the walls within ourselves to keep others out?
Because we want to be safe? Because we want to be secure?
I don't know, but that certainly was the question for me that started this whole thing.
And I think the other thing for me is the naivety of my character, which sometimes I've been accused of too.
But why is that a bad thing?
Why is that a bad thing?
Because you just want to understand why things are the way they are.
And in Kitianna's case, is there something she could do to change that? To make it better?
What is the big deal of not being able to cross over to the other side?
Farha: It's such a basic question, and yet it's quite deep philosophically.
Stella: I think so.
That's what I'm hoping with my novel.
I think for me, I also wondered, do things change?
Can they change?
When you have somebody like Kitianna going against a society that has basically locked doors, locked themselves in to protect themselves, because there's been a civil war before her time.
And the answer oftentimes in conflict, whether it's personal conflict on a one-on-one basis, or whether it's societal conflict, the answer typically is to shut down and protect.
But what does that give us?
And how do things change for the better when you shut down?
Is that possible even?
It's interesting.
You start somewhere, and I think all books do this, all novels, and likely short stories as well.
You start somewhere.
But so many other questions are raised as a result of just that first paragraph, or the first line, or those first thoughts that you have about a story.
Farha: I just think it's so interesting that you, the writer, and the character are meeting in that same way.
You're both questioning this massive structure.
And of course, as the novel unfolds, we start to understand why.
But you also created a whole family.
Other characters extend outward from them, but Kitianna's family remains central to the novel.
I'm curious about how you began with this idea of the wall as the setting.
In many ways, even as other settings come into the novel, like the prison, walls remain a continuous theme.
How did you go about creating a family in which each character is so important to the narrative, from beginning to end?
What was the challenge of that?
And how did you imagine them as this cohesive family, while at the same time allowing for so much disruption within it?
Stella: It was interesting because, thinking about both Kitianna's parents, they take different perspectives.
Her father is a doctor, and he works on the other side of the wall because in the North they need professional services.
That helps some of the people in the South be able to support themselves.
But he resents what is going on on his own side of the wall.
He comes back every night and typically goes and works with people who are living in the equivalent of a tent city, to help them, because nobody is helping them.
And because he's a doctor, he can't not help.
Kitianna's mother is someone who wanted to fight the system at one time.
And yet, when she has her child, she wants to protect her child and her family.
While she sees the wall, she sees the security, she knows what she can and cannot do.
She basically goes along because she wants to protect her family.
So it was interesting pursuing those two differing aspects in their characters, and the contrast, both how they contrast each other, but also Kitianna, who is curious and wants to know more.
At one point, you wonder, were the parents like that too, like we all do?
Do we wonder, were we different at one time in our lives?
Farha: The theme of security is a very important one in your novel.
Again, to use the word disruption, security itself is disrupted, misunderstood and misconstrued in many ways.
There's this idea of false security, and even Kitianna comes to understand what security means when she leaves her hometown.
Why was that such an important theme to weave through the novel?
Stella: I think for me, again, it had to do with what would we be prepared to give up?
It's mostly to do with that question that I had.
We want to be safe, we want to be happy, we want these things, but at what cost?
At what cost?
Is there a maximum, basically?
Are you prepared to give up all your freedoms in order to be safe?
And what does that mean for your life?
It had mostly to do with that, what would we be prepared to do just to be safe?
I think about my own parents, who left a business and a life, a very good life in Egypt, to come to Canada because they didn't have the freedoms anymore that, at that point in their lives, they were worried about.
So they made a decision, a big decision, to come to Canada with three small children and start again.
It's those kinds of things that I wonder about, what people give up.
I've written as well, The Brink of Freedom is a book about refugees, and what people will do to leave a country to save their children, to save what little life they have.
So I think these themes are probably quite common throughout my novels.
Farha: I think so.
And I also think your language of safety, especially in this novel, really is a language about justifying control as well.
That is the contradiction.
Stella: Yes.
Farha: That's certainly very strong in this novel, and this sounds uncannily familiar, strikingly contemporary to our world, where surveillance, media, technology, migration, polarization start to feel like almost everyday language.
And yet sometimes what we can feel is institutions can easily justify certain things in languages of safety, especially surveillance.
Stella: Yes, absolutely.
It's interesting how we just take it all for granted, right?
It's a security thing, or we're protecting you, or we're doing this for you.
It's interesting.
When I first started writing this, I thought of it as being futuristic.
And yet I think it's not far from reality in terms of what's going on in the world today.
It's very real.
Farha: And I think that in the seven years since you started this, we've seen so much of it encroaching into our lives.
Stella: Yes.
But I think the other thing too is it's not like it hasn't happened in history before, long before technology.
There was still surveillance.
There were still horrible things that happened in the name of protecting you from others.
I think that's the thing I wonder about.
How is it possible that we don't remember our history, and that we continually find ways to have these things happen again, more surveillance, more us versus them, when we're in 2026?
But I think what fiction does is it might give you a glimpse into something that a newspaper article or a headline just doesn't do.
I've had that experience with my previous novels.
One time, I think with The Brink of Freedom, I was invited to a book club.
The Brink of Freedom, again, is about refugees, and in particular refugees who are not protected by international law.
At the end of that book club, one person said to me, "You've made me feel for people I don't even see."
That's what literature does.
And I think it also gives you an eye into a, hopefully, a remembrance of how we continue to repeat history as opposed to learn from history.
Farha: I think that intimacy within the family is also an important part of the book, because you can see how things can break down even within that structure.
Sometimes, in a world that feels very much like this dystopian novel, we forget that tensions also exist within very intimate circles.
I think you capture that very well.
Stella: Thank you. Thanks so much.
Farha: But I want to shift a little because a big part of this novel is about political resistance.
You did say the words, "we can't be complacent," and that's certainly part of it.
There are some beautiful images in the novel that bring things we might not normally think of as resistance into the realm of acts against the state or against power.
Whether it's the father bringing medicine illegally across the border, knowing he can give it to people who need it, especially one young girl with asthma, or the women working in the prison laundry and what they are doing there.
But there are also these beautiful layers of culture, like songs, friendship and trust.
In some ways, you've woven a narrative that gets to the heart of humanity.
Resistance is not necessarily the kind of public resistance we often imagine. It can also be found in these small, almost mundane, everyday acts.
Stella: It's interesting because, as dark as this book is, and I guess this surprised me as the author as well, I think what I believe is in the goodness of humanity.
Somehow, we find a way, which has also been shown through history, that somehow you find a way to make things work, to make things better, whether it's for your family, or for your community, or whatever.
It doesn't have to be something huge.
It can be something small, that you find a way to help.
I still believe in the goodness of man, that despite the fact that there are so many things happening today in the world, I still feel that there are people out there who are resisting and helping each other under incredibly horrible circumstances.
Farha: And by capturing these small acts of resistance, do you feel that in some ways they're actually much larger?
Stella: Absolutely.
For me, I think it's the little things that make a difference in a person's life.
Somebody who just says, "Can I help you? Are you okay?"
Someone who just pays attention.
The things in the novel, they're small things, but they also make a big difference in terms of getting word out about the protests, about fighting against the surveillance, the autocratic system.
It's those kinds of things that make a difference in the long run, the smaller things.
Farha: I'm going to confess, Stella, I think this novel should be a movie.
At least that's the image I feel you've achieved.
That's hard to do, to give a novel that kind of cinematic feel. But this one certainly has it because it's so visual.
It made me think of an anime I watched with my son that also had a wall. It made me think of Jean-Paul Sartre's "The Wall," some Italian films I've seen set in prisons, and even Victor Hugo.
You know I read a lot of old literature, but it certainly has that feel.
And I think maybe it's worth coming back to the question of why walls, and whether some of your own personal experiences influenced what you wrote, perhaps subconsciously.
Stella: Could be.
Certainly, when I think about the themes, I think of all my books as separate and different and that sort of thing.
But they all have some sort of theme about belonging, about finding your way, about what separates us from others.
They're different stories.
This is much more in your face about it, though, much more evident.
Going back to what you're saying about there being a lot of images here, I think for me, and again, what I talk about in classes and with mentoring, what a good book does is it makes you feel.
And how do you make a reader feel?
Through images.
Images that are specific, that are sensory, that place the reader in your character's point of view, place them in the character's body, so that they're feeling that.
Again, I think with all good fiction, that's what it does.
It makes you feel in a way that a headline in the newspaper just can't.
Farha: Do you want to quickly tell us where you'll be reading this tomorrow?
Stella: Yes, thanks.
I'm going to be reading at Helicon Books, which is in North Vancouver, starting at seven o'clock.
There'll be a bit of appies, I think, and some wine.
Please come, and it would be lovely to meet you all.
I hope you'll be able to come.
Farha: Thank you so much for doing this. It was a wonderful conversation.
Stella: Thank you.
Farha: I just want to say that I think this will get some attention. I feel it.
I think you've written something that is topical, scary, but it does offer some comfort.
Stella: Absolutely.
Farha: And that's not a spoiler, because we've talked about the songs and the richness of resistance.
But it's certainly not a novel that offers any easy answers, if that's what people are looking for.
Stella: No, exactly.
Farha: I feel the questions are very much part of this novel.
So, cyberpunk, or maybe a bit philosophical. Thank you, Stella for joining me.