Eyes in Front While Running is a quick-witted family story about the collision of fear and longing that tackles difficult topics like motherhood, miscarriage, abortion, infertility and post-partum depression.

The novel, authored by Memorial University alumna Willow Kean (BFA’99), is one of two Coast Lines book club selections for November and December 2024.

Ms. Kean will appear with author Marjorie Doyle (MA’87) at Coast Lines and Coffee on Sunday, Dec. 1, at Signal Hill Campus. Read a Q&A with Ms. Doyle here.

Ms. Kean, an actor and writer, has co-written several children’s plays that have toured provincially. Her five-woman comedy, Supper Club, premiered at the LSPU Hall in 2021.

She’s been shortlisted for the Cuffer Prize and longlisted for the NLCU Fresh Fish Award. She won the Percy Janes First Novel Award in 2018.

She lives in St. John’s with her partner, filmmaker Justin Simms, and their son, Jude.

Read on to learn how Ms. Kean went from acting to writing, her early cultural influences while growing up in Labrador West and her thoughts on how society responds differently to child-free women and child-free men.

JH: Where did your interest in theatre and writing come from? When did it begin?

WK: I was lucky enough to grow up in a house filled to the brim with books, and in a town with a library that had excellent librarians who never talked down to kids.

They always took me seriously and gave recommendations for books they knew I could handle, even if they were a bit outside my age range.

I grew up in Labrador West and it was extremely isolated, but there was a thriving local amateur theatre community that my extended family was involved in, and I was taken to see absolutely everything.

“When you inhale books as a kid . . . it’s only a matter of time before you start writing your own stories.”

We were also lucky enough to have an Arts and Culture Centre, and Mom made sure we saw as much as we could, because she knew my sisters and I were at a bit of a disadvantage not being in a bigger centre.

I was the eight-year-old who had to sit through three hours of classical guitar when Liona Boyd came to town.

The writing and acting kind of went from there.

When you inhale books as a kid, you’re prone to the dramatic, and you’re exposed to the arts, it’s only a matter of time before you start writing your own stories.

JH: How did studying theatre at Memorial University’s Grenfell Campus inform your perspective/worldview?

WK: I wouldn’t say inform so much as change completely. Coming from where I did, I might as well have been dropped into the middle of New York City.

Corner Brook isn’t a big place, but the School of Fine Arts was its own amazing little ecosystem of people and things I’d never been exposed to before. Professors, directors, designers who’d lived and worked all over the world.

And I can say definitively that spending two months at the Harlow Campus in my fourth year, travelling back and forth to London, seeing dozens of plays, it changed my life.

JH: Can you explain how you see the intersection between acting and writing, specifically writing a novel? On the surface, they appear opposites, one a very extroverted profession, the other a very introverted one.

WK: They’re similar in so many ways, at second glance.

The biggest intersection for me is the soul-crushing anxiety of putting your work out there, all your vulnerabilities in front of everyone on the page or the stage.

“There’s still this archaic belief that women need to have babies to be fulfilled.”

It’s the same feeling!

And the rejection. Acting has like, a 99 per cent rejection rate, so in that way, when I started putting my writing work out there, rejections didn’t phase me at all.

Water off a duck’s back.

JH: Your book explores motherhood and yet your main character’s greatest fear is getting pregnant. Can you talk a bit about society’s different expectations around having children for men and women?

WK: Oh God, where to start. How many hours do you have?

There’s still this archaic belief that women need to have babies to be fulfilled.

If they don’t, people think it’s so sad, and they’ll regret it someday, no matter how often a woman says she’s happy, it’s all, ‘Oh, you say that now!’

If a man doesn’t have children it’s not even a blip on anyone’s radar, and he can still be seen to have an important life where he’s contributed to the world in a meaningful way.

I think some of society’s true feelings about child-free women were at the forefront during the latest U.S. election cycle. ‘No biological children? Yeah, you don’t get it.’

Don’t get me started on that racket, we’ll be here all week.

JH: What is your Newfoundland and Labrador hidden gem?

WK: Robinsons, about halfway between Port-aux-Basques and Corner Brook. It’s where my grandmother Geraldine was from, and it’s stunning.

These beautiful rolling fields and red cliffs that drop off into smooth pebbled beaches. You can swim in the mouth of the Robinsons River where it runs into the ocean, and the terns swoop over your head.

Pure magic.

Coast Lines book club

Willow Kean will appear with Marjorie Doyle (MA’87) at Coast Lines and Coffee on Sunday, Dec. 1, at the Emera Innovation Exchange, Signal Hill Campus, in a discussion moderated by Angela Antle (BA’91, PhD candidate).

Register for the special event here.

Copies of Eyes in Front While Running are available through the Memorial University Bookstore, the official Coast Lines bookseller.

Established in 2020, the Coast Lines book club encourages the university community and friends to connect through a common love of reading and interest in the Newfoundland and Labrador literary landscape.

The book club’s featured titles are either written by alumni and/or faculty or have a strong connection to Memorial University.

View the website for more information on Coast Lines and how to join.