Featured Author

BIOLOG: Kelsey Hutton
by Richard A. Lovett

Kelsey Hutton is a Red River Métis science fiction writer from Winnipeg, Manitoba, who started learning her craft before the age of ten. That’s when an elementary school teacher she had from first through third grades not only urged her students to write novels, but transcribed their dictated words into spiral-bound notebooks. “I thought that was normal,” she says in a nod to what might have been one of the greatest teachers of all time.

Not that the teacher urged her to write science fiction, specifically. That was a love Hutton had already gotten from her grandmother. “She would bring us together to watch 2001 Space Odyssey and Planet of the Apes,” she says. But the teacher was a science fiction fan, and included science fiction in her classes. “I connected with that,” Hutton says.

She particularly remembers watching the James Cameron movie The Abyss in third-grade. “I really love anything to do with oceans,” she says. “In my mind they are very similar to space.”

She particularly remembers a scene in which a character had to breathe in a special type of oxygenated water, to saturate his lungs for a deep dive. “I remember being fascinated by that,” she says, “and I still love the kind of science fiction where it could almost be true.”

Then, her family moved to Brazil for several years—an interesting coincidence, because the teacher she so strongly remembers was Brazilian. It was a move that really fed her fiction-writing bug, because it took her a while to learn Portuguese, and it wasn’t like the airline was going to allow her to bring an entire library of English-language books with her. “I read through all the books I brought in the first two to three weeks,” she says, “so, I had to create my own stories.”

Back in Canada, she found herself studying creative writing and politics, a seemingly odd pairing. “When I was in university,” she says, “I thought never the twain shall meet. I just thought they were both interesting, on their own.” Then she took a job with the Manitoba legislature writing speeches and mailers for members of the then-governing party. It was, she says, “a great crash course” in editing and more importantly in learning how to voice characters, so their individuality comes through. “I learned how to write a lot of different people’s styles,” she says.

From that, she moved to the federal government, where she worked with the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls—a major issue in Canada that has not been well reported south of the border. Which leads back to her heritage. Part of it is Cree, one of Canada’s largest First Nations peoples. Métis are an even larger group, predominantly composed, as the French-looking name implies, of people of mixed French-Canadian and Indigenous descent who developed their own distinct language, culture, political organization, and laws.

Growing up, Hutton says, she didn’t see science fiction stories featuring Indigenous people of any group. “They just didn’t appear,” she says.

So, when she started selling stories, one of the things she set out to do was to help fix that omission. “A lot of people think Indigenous people don’t exist anymore,” she says. “The stereotyping is that they only live now in Wild West movies and TV.” But the reality is that millions of Indigenous people live in the modern world, as they will in the world to come. “So, I really like the idea of writing these characters into different scenarios,” she says. “It’s something I never saw growing up.”