A conversation with Sarah Louise Butler
June 09th, 2025
Sarah Louise Butler published her debut novel, The Wild Heavens (D&M, 2020) about how a little girl and her grandfather discover an impossibly large set of footprints and become obsessed with the nine-foot tall creature that made them. Publicity says the story, “pays tribute to the magic and unfathomable mystery of the natural world.” In Butler’s second novel, Rufous and Calliope (D&M $24.95), due out in September, a modern-day cartographer named Rufous heads alone into an ancient BC mountain pass searching for a treehouse hideaway where he spent one memorable childhood summer on the run with his three older half-siblings and his twin sister, Calliope. At times, Rufous feels he is losing his mind while his memories—sometimes vivid, sometimes slipping away—become a map guiding him through towering forests, dry creek beds and smoke-filled skies. Yet, in this wilderness, not everything is as it seems. Echoes of the past lead Rufous on a journey that blurs the line between dream and reality. Publicity says: “As the elements close in, this novel offers an unforgettable tale of survival, memory and the bond between siblings.”
INTERVIEW
Question: One thread of this story is written from the perspective of a five-year-old boy. What made you choose such a young child as a protagonist?
Answer: I feel like we’re more alike as small children than we’ll ever be again. Writing from such a young child’s perspective, I think, allows more people to relate to a character than might otherwise be the case. It also puts the reader in a position where they often know more than the youthful protagonist, which is always interesting.
Q: Why did you choose a group of siblings as a focus of the story?
A: There are so many books that prominently feature parent-child relationships, or romantic ones. With this novel, I wanted to really bring a focus to sibling relationships. One of the central storylines centres around a group of young siblings, ranging in age from five to fifteen. These scenes were really fun to write, and there’s a lot of my own large family in the dynamics between the siblings. I really wanted to show their sense of comfort and enjoyment in each other’s company, despite their perilous circumstances.
Q: There are a lot of caregivers in this story. Why are there so few parents?
A: There are two reasons for this. One is the time period the story starts out in, which is around the time I was growing up. I was born at the tail end of Gen X, and it’s difficult to explain to later generations just how absent even
relatively diligent parents were from the daily experiences of many kids growing up then. If you were lucky, you had parents who housed and fed you. But, at least in the rural area where I grew up, they tended to have no idea what we were actually getting up to during daylight hours, even when we were just 4 or 5 years old. I also really wanted this book to kind of echo the adventure novels so many of us loved as children, in which kids undertook dangerous adventures and parents were conspicuously absent.
Q: The main character struggles with an unusual form of dementia. Why did you choose to represent the condition in this unconventional way?
A: Growing up, I was always being told how much I looked like my maternal grandmother, who struggled with an atypical, early-onset dementia. It probably didn’t occur to anyone that I’d interpret this, in my child’s mind, to mean that I would suffer the same fate. As irrational as the idea is, I still sort of believe it. This novel grapples with imagining that outcome in a way that’s more whimsical than the reality. There are a lot of wildlife encounters in this book!
Q: Is this a reflection of your own experiences, or more aspirational/wishful thinking?
Sarah Louise Butler near her home in the West Kootenays.
A: I live in a region of BC where there are still a lot of large predators and other charismatic megafauna on the landscape. I might be out for a short lunch break just minutes from home and come upon deer, moose, birds of
prey in action, black bears, occasionally even a grizzly or two. It’s not unexpected here, but it’s always thrilling. It’s such a profound honour to witness these animals in their natural habitats, and such a tragedy when any species disappears from a landscape.
Q: There’s an undercurrent of ecological grief running through this book. Is this a response to the growing understanding of climate change, or something else?
A: One of my most vivid early memories is the spring day I ran excitedly down to my favourite frog pond, skidded to a halt at its muddy edge, and stared in confusion. Where there had always been a raucous chorus, there was only silence, and not a single frog to be seen. It was the ‘80s, and amphibian populations everywhere were crashing, presumably due to acid rain. That empty pond was, in a way, my own personal Silent Spring, and it had a profound effect on my developing worldview.
Q: Did you consider any other sort of hideaway for the children in the book before deciding on a treehouse?
A: Not even for a moment! Honestly, a huge impetus behind writing this book was my desire to fictionally live out my childhood dream of living in a treehouse. There’s something about treehouses, I think, that appeals to something deep in many of us. I wonder if maybe it’s speaking to something in our DNA, some ancient arboreal ancestor.
Q: Is there anything you can tell us about your writing process?
A: The only way I know how to write is to locate the story in a place that is so personally appealing that the process of writing feels less like something I do, and more like somewhere I can go – a place I look forward to spending time. In support of this, I fill my novels with things I find personally fascinating. In this book: mountain trails, train-hopping, maps, treehouses and twins.
Q: Where is your favourite place to write?
A: I do a lot of my writing on my porch, for as much of the year as I can possibly manage. Looking out at the mountains, feeling the chill morning air and hearing birdsong –it all helps me create an immersive feel within the
story. It’s a sad day each fall when I have to finally give in and move indoors, but there’s a point where my fingers just get too cold to type!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sarah Louise Butler is a novelist based in the West Kootenay region of the BC Interior. With a background in physical geography and environmental studies, her stories seek to portray natural landscapes and their non-human inhabitants as characters in their own right. Her debut novel, The Wild Heavens, was a 49th Shelf Book of the Year, and a favourite of book clubs and libraries across the country, including being chosen as a Vancouver Public Library Top 20 Favourite Books of 2020. It was recently translated and released in France. Her second novel, Rufous and Calliope, is a “geographical fiction” that features runaway children, treehouse hideaways, early-onset dementia and the persistence of hope amidst ecological grief. Butler was named a CBC Writer to Watch in 2020.
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