Lynn Hutchinson Lee’s novella leads us through a decadently aromatic world: notes of orchids, chanterelle mushrooms and plush moss; sterilized and burned bedsheets abound. Just out of frame, girls long-dead slip past us, organza-like. A dizzying and beautiful debut, Origins of Desire in Orchid Fens explores life as a Romany woman in Canada, and the flowers that refuse to die amidst the decaying world of capitalism. -Daisuke Shen, author of Vague Predictions & Prophecies (Clash Books) and Funeral (Kernpunkt Press)
In this Indie Corner, I welcome Lynn Hutchinson Lee, an author I recently met on a panel of readers who contributed to Through the Portal: Tales From a Hopeful Dystopia (Exile Editions), an anthology that Lynn edited with Nina Munteanu. Lynn was first place winner of the 2022 Joy Kogawa Award for Fiction, and a Best of the Net nominee. Her writing appears in Prairie Fire; Room; Fusion Fragment; Cli-Fi: Canadian Tales of Climate Change, and Food of My People (Exile Editions); Weird Horror and Northern Nights (Undertow Publications); Wagtail: the Roma Women’s Poetry Anthology (Butcher’s Dog, U.K.), Kin:an Anthology of Poetry, Story and Art by Women from Romani, Traveller, and Nomadic Communities (Salmon Poetry, Ireland), and elsewhere. Her flash fiction won the Editors’ Choice award in This Will Only Take a Minute: 100 Canadian Flashes (Guernica Editions).
Today we talk about Lynn’s new novella, Origins of Desire in the Orchid Fens (Stelliform Press, April 2025).
Mary: What led you to the creative outlet of writing?
Lynn: For decades I was a visual artist with a particular focus on painting and multidisciplinary installations. But I’d always had a desire to write. In 2011 I began the gradual move to text, with a project developed by Hedina Sijercic and me. We produced a collaborative sound installation through our small Romany women’s arts collective, chirikli collective, for the Roma Pavilion in the Venice Biennale. For the installation, I recorded a spoken word poem about my father, “Five Songs for Daddy,” and that experience was like opening a door. The potential of the power and beauty of words and language really moved me, and I began to spend more and more time writing. I found in writing that I could express ideas in a new way.
Mary: Tell us about your new book and what inspired it, or was it accidental?
Lynn: My debut novella, Origins of Desire in Orchid Fens, was inspired by marshes and bogs and fens and their fragile, energetic beauty. I think the idea was really seeded over half a century ago by my mother, who used to visit wild orchids and pitcher plants and other wonders in a marsh near where we spent our summers. As a child, I spent a lot of time in the marsh, and formed a deep connection to that place and even though it’s gone from my life, I still carry it inside me. I wanted to write about it.
My love for the marsh, and the orchid fen that I created for the novella, alerted me to the increasingly dire threats to vulnerable ecosystems and, in this story in particular, the horrific environmental devastation caused by mining companies. So I looked at the kind of destruction that mining can inflict on such an ecosystem. I wanted to put an alluring face on the front man of disaster capitalism, and ultimately a horrific death, so I wrote that character in. My childhood diet of fairy tales and Russian folk tales, with all their magic and horror, led me to incorporate vengeful river spirits as a supernatural embodiment of resistance.
I was also inspired to explore identity in relation to environment and social constructs—in this case capitalism—so I wove these threads into the narrative: the orchid fen as a beautiful, threatened character in its own right, the struggle of a vulnerable young woman, a working class mining town in a poisoned environment, and the notions of identity—of historically feeling like an outsider—that I inherited from my father.
Mary: How does your book align with nature and place?
Lynn: For a while I wasn’t sure which came first—the story or the fragile ecosystem where it takes place. But, as I wrote, I came to understand that nature and place called for the specific narrative and trajectory of the book. The novella actually grew from a flash fiction I’d had published in the Guernica anthology This Will Only Take a Minute. The story, “Something Has Fallen In”, is about a girl who’s going home with wild orchids she gathered in a marsh, is intercepted and later seduced by a beautiful man whose wife jumped—or was pushed—off the Plough River bridge. But nature and place were significant characters in the story, for without the marsh and its orchids, the unsettling trajectory would not have had a starting point. It’s the same with the novella; without the marsh, and the depth and sensuality of Orchid’s relationship to it, she would not have met Jack or married him in a blackfly-infested ceremony. And she wouldn’t have later met the beguiling man of the mining company. Nature and place are really the heart of the story.
Mary: Does your book have a message, or do you consider it more a piece of art? Or both?
Lynn: I’d say it’s a bit of both. My parents – formerly painters and printmakers – instilled in me a love of beauty, art and literature, an ethic of social justice, and deep reverence for the earth. And I hope the book is awash in all these. For me, they’re enmeshed. While I learned—kind of by osmosis—that we need beauty and art in our lives, I was also taught that we should find it where we can. So the book spends a good deal of time luxuriating in the beauty of the orchid fen. I see it as an extension of a painting I made up north in the 1980s, “In the Marsh Garden”. I went out into the marsh and drew the vegetation I found there in preparation for the painting. In a way, that painting lives through the book. So, yes to the book as a piece of art. As to the message, it’s about relationships between people and between people and the beings of the non-human world. That includes the river spirits, and two other characters who may or may not be human. It’s also a bit of a screed against capitalism and exploitation.
Mary: What’s your greatest experience in nature that somehow profoundly moves your work?
Lynn: There were so many experiences, but the memory of my childhood exploration of our summer marsh and the forest was pivotal. My cousin and I took our rowboat into the marsh, mapped it, and named the small islets and channels. I must have been 9 or 10. I remember an afternoon, I was about 17, when I stood on the islets and my feet sank into the layered moss and rotted vegetation, and it was so cool and delicious. I can still feel it, all these decades later. The air smelt of water lilies and pine from the forest at the edge of the marsh. I picked cotton grass and gathered cranberries for a family supper. And, around that time, I spent a magical hour with a boy in the forest near the marsh. Another experience that stays with me—some years later—I took my canoe out into the lake, and a storm came up. It was mid-evening and getting dark. I kept trying to get to back to shore but was continually swept out into the middle of the lake. A man appeared out of the driving rain, lashed my canoe to his, paddled me home, and then disappeared back into the storm.
In my memory, these moments have been softened into one, and they’re all linked by place, so it was the place that gave me these gifts. Looking back on it now, the experiences did profoundly move me to the extent that after so many years they’ve found their way, directly or indirectly, into my work.
Mary: What’s next for you?
Lynn: Next up is my novel Nightshade, coming out with Assembly Press in spring of 2026. It’s the Southern Ontario Gothic/magic realist story of a young Romany woman and her family living in the Ontario tobacco belt. Nightshade was inspired by stories of the women in my father’s Romany family, who emigrated from England with their troupe of puppets in the early 1900s. I’m loving working with Assembly’s editor and publisher Leigh Nash, and we’ve just started on a round of edits.
Mary: Is there anything else you want to talk about?
Lynn: Yes. I want to give a shout-out to Selena Middleton, Stelliform’s wonderful editor and publisher. Selena and I worked closely together to weave new elements into this story, deepening the fractured relationship between Orchid Lovell, the troubled mother, and her enigmatic husband, as well as Orchid’s guilt over a devastating betrayal. We also worked to give the river spirits strong individual characters, which hadn’t been very developed in the original manuscript. I found that as we worked my writing began to lean here and there into small unsettling moments of horror, which I loved. Interestingly, these moments were inspired by my reaction to the cover design. I discovered that I’m very attracted to the weird juxtaposition of beauty and evil. It has made me want to really explore the alchemy of sensuality and horror in new writing. I’m relatively new to writing; I only started to write seriously just over seven years ago, so I’m still learning.
Mary: Our readers, including myself, are big fans of Selena and Stelliform Press. I love hearing about your background in fens and forests. Thanks so much, Lynn!
You can find Lynn at her website, on X @LHutchinsonLee, on Instagram at hurricanehazel46, and on Bluesky @lynnhutchinsonlee.bsky.social.
