Ceilidh Michelle
author, mentor, educator, freelancer, consultant, academic coach
At twenty-one, Ceilidh Michelle was homeless, drifting through countercultural communities along California’s coast.
Told with deadpan humour and insightful lyricism, Vagabond is an observant and at times shimmering narrative suspended between a traumatic past and an as yet unimagined future. Coursing through it is the story of an emergent writer just beginning to find sanctuary in her own creative instincts.
Douglas & McIntyre
“Michelle – whose debut novel, Butterflies, Zebras, Moonbeams, was shortlisted for the 2020 Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction – is a confident writer with a documentarian’s keen eye. She observes without judgment, injecting this personal story with shots of humour and a seemingly effortless style. As a reader, one can feel the sand under her feet but also squirm imagining what it’s like to be a lone woman trying to survive in a lawless place…Readers who become invested in Michelle’s story may be disappointed, left wanting more reflection from this fresh new voice.”
-Sue Carter, Quill and Quire
"If Kerouac were a girl out of Nova Scotia who headed to California searching for the one true guru, for a way to live with meaning, open to adventure and pure experience, tying herself to abusive and deranged men because the alternative for a young unattached female on the streets was worse, if this girl Kerouac had an ear for the vernacular of the down and out in America—the dreamers, the downtrodden, the irreparably damaged—and if she were utterly unsentimental about herself and others, as unflinching as a hidden camera in her observations of the passions, the deprivations, the violence and absurdity of life on the street, and if she, having survived this life, somehow sat down long enough, her blood still surging from drugs and drink, to write it all down, it would be this unforgettable book, Vagabond. And we would be grateful."
–Rachel Rose, author of The Octopus Has Three Hearts
"Vagabond is both a cautionary tale about showing up in LA young, poor, alone and without a plan and a stunning portrait of the family you make when running from the family you have."
–Hayley Gene Penner, author of People You Follow
Butterflies, Zebras, Moonbeams is the story of B, a young non-binary woman coming of age in the Montreal music scene. As she witnesses her friends struggling with mental illness and drug addiction, she also must deal with her own craft, the nepotism of the industry, and maintaining her transient lifestyle. Lucid, subconscious, introverted, and taking B from Montreal to Los Angeles, Butterflies, Zebras, Moonbeams is an intimate perspective on the life of making music.
Palimpsest Press
praise for
Butterflies, Zebras Moonbeams
“Butterflies is a sharply observed realist tale of wayward Romantics living the creative, messy lives that dreams — and nightmares — are made of… Books must be about language and I appreciate the stern way Michelle handles language here, stripping diction and syntax down to simple. There’s nothing overripe. The prose works like clean hard chords on a guitar.”
-Quebec Writers Federation jury
The debut novel from Ceilidh Michelle, follows B, a “not yet […] but soon” musician, as she wanders through the apartments and lovers of her twenties…cradl[ing] moments of unfettered beauty.”
-Emilie Kneifel, Montreal Review of Books
