Meet Somer Canon

We were lucky to catch up with Somer Canon recently and have shared our conversation below.

Somer, we’re thrilled to have you sharing your thoughts and lessons with our community. So, for folks who are at a stage in their life or career where they are trying to be more resilient, can you share where you get your resilience from?

Resilience runs in my blood, for better and most certainly for worse. I come from a long line of stubborn survivors who meet tough times head on and, even if those times leave you on your butt, you get up and keep going. It’s embedded in our DNA. I’m not one to romanticize struggle, and I don’t particularly want to subject my children to some of the things that hurt me as a child. While I am someone who gets up when knocked down, I still hurt and I’d rather spare my loved ones that pain.
I was born and raised in West Virginia, and there’s something about that Appalachian mindset that forbids you to give in or give up. While some may visualize certain extremes at the mention of Appalachia, my childhood didn’t include a lot of the worst. We had running water, we had food, and rats didn’t gnaw my face as I slept. But my grandparents knew the worst, my parents got whiffs of it, and I knew lean times as a child. I also knew what those stresses do to people and that they take them out on those around them. I learned resilience from those around me, yes, but I also learned it growing up in an abusive home, surrounded by adults who didn’t care to intervene. I got my resilience from having no other choice but to persevere.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

I’m a horror author. My stories are almost always character-driven. I want the readers to feel a very real kinship to my characters. I have a love for folklore, but I also am drawn to witchcraft, particularly the mountain witches I grew up hearing about.
I focus mainly on female protagonists, many of them in their thirties and forties. I think the female perspective is seen as interesting in horror, but isn’t told enough BY women. The inner lives of women, the struggles, and the moral duplicity of women are very interesting to me. My characters are good and bad at once, like we all are. They make stupid decisions that frustrate the readers, and they go in to situations with the best intentions that sometimes end up hurting others. Even when I am dealing with supernatural material, I want my characters to feel real.
I also aim to make the reader feel all the big emotions. I want you angry, I want to break your heart, and I even want to make you laugh out loud sometimes.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

I was a quiet kid and though that was mostly because it was demanded of me (children should be seen, not heard), as a consequence, I spent a lot of time either inside of my own head or listening to the adults around me. I grew to have an almost clinical fascination with people and their different personalities. That has helped immensely in crafting believable characters.
I also read a lot. You cannot be a good writer without first being a prolific reader. You learn what works for you, what doesn’t, and what you’d like to strive for in your journey as a creator. It thrills me to read something by another author and think to myself, “I want to be able to do THAT.”
Resilience itself is actually a really important quality to being an author. It’s a rough game, writing stories and putting them out into the world. People’s opinions of you and your work make or break you. Sometimes those opinions are devastating, and it’s hard to learn that art is subjective and some people are just going to dislike you and what you make. But being resilient, having that ability to refuse to stay down, serves one greatly in a career like writing.

Alright, so before we go we want to ask you to take a moment to reflect and share what you think you would do if you somehow knew you only had a decade of life left?

Writing in the horror genre is a gamble, and the odds are never in the author’s favor. A lot of people don’t like horror, which is completely understandable, but those of us who do love the genre are often labelled unfairly as weirdos and sickos. That’s one challenge to this venture.
Another is that people will brag about never reading. I’ve done shows where I spend hours behind a table filled with my books to sell, and people will stop just to tell me they don’t read. Perhaps I am incredibly biased, but I believe that society is poorer for the loss of reading as an activity. So much of our humanness has been lost to activities that don’t require us to use our imaginations, empathy, and critical thinking. Combine those two: horror people are seen as freaks and most people don’t read, and you’ve got a recipe for failure. It’s very difficult to rationalize staying with a career that often feels lonely and thankless. But when telling stories, and seeing writing as a skill to be constantly improved, the drive to keep going verges on compulsion. The payoff is in the doing, not the money or praise. Money and praise are lean offerings anyway.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://SomerCanon.com
• Instagram: @somercanon
• Facebook: Somer Canon Author
• Youtube: @somercanon5142