Alanna Rusnak was born in the wrong decade and dreams of abandoning everything to live in a van and travel across Canada. She’ll call it “a book tour,” but it’s really an excuse to unleash her inner hippie. A collector of typewriters and John Travolta VHS movies, she believes life is too short not to indulge in the things that bring you joy—which is exactly why she left a stuffy office job of eighteen years to launch a full-time indie press out of a chicken coop on her childhood property. It’s since been renovated into a beautiful workspace, where she writes fiction and runs both the press and the award-winning Canadian literary arts magazine Blank Spaces. An author of literary and speculative fiction, Alanna likes to play in dark spaces, but always leaves room for redemption. Her debut novel was a finalist for the 2018 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize and named one of the top reader-recommended titles of 2017 by cbcbooks.ca. Settled in West Grey as a 4-year-old, it has always been her home and source of inspiration, and she’s working hard to build bridges between the various arts communities. She has no immediate plans to abandon it—but she’ll certainly leave it all behind the moment her husband gets on board with the van-life idea.