Heather Paul is a writer, an artist, a teacher, a mother, a partner, a seeker, a pilgrim, a friend, an adventurer, and a whole bunch of other labels that really don't express her essence of self. Bloom where you're planted is a mantra Heather has tried to embrace and embody throughout her life's journey partly because she’s moved around a lot, and partly because most of the places she’s lived are on the smaller side and don't have a thriving arts or writing scene.
Heather’s natural curiosity and passion for authenticity and adventure has led to diverse paths of travel, education, and employment. She has camped, hosteled and hoteled her way across North America, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe. After completing her undergraduate honours degree at Queen's University in Kingston, she studied Creative Writing at Concordia University in Montreal then went on to earn her Bachelor of Education from the University of Western Ontario. After teaching for a number of years, she eventually achieved a Master of Arts degree from Memorial University in St. John's NL in the English Creative Writing program. Most recently, she completed a two-year yoga teacher training course and is pursuing the next instalment towards her 500-hour certification. Over the years, while raising her children, she has worked as an Art/English/Drama teacher, a canoe and kayak trip leader, a yoga instructor, at a men's prison, at a women's shelter and at an assortment of restaurants--cooking and serving. Currently, she lives with her husband, children, and dogs, in Ontario, Canada.
Several of her short stories have been published in literary magazines such as, The New Quarterly, The Antigonish Review, Prairie Fire, The Nashwaak Review, The Lamp, Paragon, and The Newfoundland Quarterly.
Heather’s first novel, Safety in Bear Country, is set to be published by Now or Never Publishing in September 2022. Rapid-flowing and inventive, Safety in Bear Country follows Serena, a narrator who upon graduating from Art School thought she’d have it all figured out and be making a living as an artist, finds herself instead dumped by her boyfriend and living in her parent’s basement back in the town she couldn’t wait to leave. Miserable and lost in the dark forest of her early twenties, she takes a job with her small town’s main employer, an institution for people with developmental disabilities. When one of her residents dies in her arms, she flees the trauma, ultimately embarking on a journey that pushes and pulls her between constraint and freedom, despair and hope. Set in small-town Ontario, Australia, northern British Columbia and Miami, Safety pulls its narrator though a world of inequity, and spirituality, of activism and psychedelics as she labours to make sense of her place in the world.
Heather's collection of short stories, Love and Other Disappointments, was published in April 2024. Like songs on a concept album, each story stands alone and in conversation with the others. In this relatable, wry, and often darkly comedic collection, Paul manages to vacillate between sparse prose and lush description, employing tension and inventive metaphors to explore the emotional landscape of women at various stages of life and love. Each story asks the protagonist, and by proxy the readers, to grow, to become, and even perhaps to question expectations--both their own and he ones placed on them. An entertaining yet profound collection of short fiction for anyone who has ever loved, or been in love, and lived through the inevitable disappointment.
Stay tuned for the publication of her new novel, Inside Passages. April 15, 2026
Inside Passages is a gripping and timely novel about the collision of profit, punishment, and the human cost of incarceration. When a single mother takes a job teaching at a newly privatized "super jail" in a small French-Canadian community outside of Toronto, she enters a world shaped less by justice than by political agendas and corporate bottom lines. Under the rule of an ultra-conservative provincial government, the prison is run by an American corporation determined to cut costs and maximize profit. Staff is stretched thin, safeguards are replaced with surveillance tech, and rehabilitation takes a back seat to control. Told through six interwoven narratives anchored by the teacher's experience, Inside Passages pulls back the curtain on the hidden workings of a prison system in crisis. It is a powerful exploration of those who live and work inside its walls--guards, inmates, and outsiders alike--and how they are all diminished by a system built not to heal, but to dehumanize.
