by Jamila Douhaibi | photo by Leah Gray –
June marked the beginning of Pride across Canada, with the Island’s major celebration occurring at the beginning of July. In honour of our community’s LGBTQQIP2SAA folks, this month’s column features a remarkable up-and-coming author of two books, Amber Dawn Tonsi.
Amber Dawn is not shy about who she is – she says that she was coming out around the same time that she had her first child and became disabled. “I’ve tried to model being unapologetic about taking up space and having my voice heard.” She wants to ensure that not only her own kids see the importance of this, but also her readers.
Like many authors and writers, Amber Dawn started telling stories when she was young. She says that she remembers “scribbling gibberish before knew how to write.” But whatever she wrote, it was always fantasy-based, with different worlds and fantastical characters. As an early teen she focused on vampires and always made sure the stories ended happily. Now she focuses more on queer romance and mystery in the paranormal realm. Throughout her books, her central goal is to model the plot and the lives of her characters around what she’s seen in her own life. She says that she wants people to read “where queerness is more than a plot point or an obstacle – where it just is.” Amber Dawn is grateful to have found an audience that wants to read about love and trust in queer spaces and about chosen family, whether it’s a cozy mystery or a big adventure.
The author, who goes by the pen name A.D. Tonsi, has written two books, and is currently working on her third and forth. The first, In the Hatred of a Minute, is a horror romance that examines power and isolation, obsession and the macabre. Amber Dawn says: “I dared myself to write it to see if I could,” and she’s proud that she did. Her second book, Barefoot Amongst the Thorns, is about two men who love each other despite convention and have a race through time to survive a curse. Amber Dawn says that this tale is not as heavy as her first book, but is still as passionate.
As far as inspiration, Amber Dawn can look at photographs or a piece of art and this alone “can be enough to build an entire story.” Whether it’s just one scene that sticks out, or an inspiration that she ends up writing her story around, she admits that she rarely writes an outline. Living in Sidney, the water and the small town are helping to guide her next worlds and characters for one of her upcoming books.
Outside of her mythically-crafted worlds, Amber Dawn has found a bit of the fantastic in her own life. Mistaken several times for another local West Coast author with the same name who writes in the same genre, Amber Dawn says that she has been surprised to find a doppelganger so close to home. Will this feature appear as an unusual twist in an upcoming book? Her readers will have to wait and find out!
One of her upcoming books features “a ship captain who is definitely not a pirate, and a sea creature who is most certainly not a merman.” What happens when the two characters meet is another adventure that readers can look forward to in the next few years.
Amber Dawn’s two books can be found online and as e-books from the Greater Victoria Public Library. She recommends that anyone who has dreamt of writing a queer book about their own stories, whether real or imagined, should take the leap like she did. She looks forward to continuing to write the stories that she didn’t have growing up, ones that show “that queerness is acceptable, encouraged, and survivable … to show that we deserve a happily ever-after.”
To find out more about the author and local readings of her books, visit www.adtonsi.wordpress.com. She also writes personalized stories through her site www.betterlightingcreations.wordpress.com.
