Eden Robinson wanted to be an astronaut growing up. But when she found out you had to be at least 5”3’, Robinson, one of Canada’s most acclaimed First Nations writers, decided to let her life take another direction.

Robinson, a UVic alumni, visited the First Peoples House on Thursday, Nov. 19, as part of the Indigenous Speakers Series put on by Camosun College’s Indigenous Studies First Nations Student Association and UVic’s School of Social Work and Indigenous Specialization.

Robinson read from her novels Monkey Beach and Blood Sports, and introduced the audience to some of her new material. The Haisla writer, who grew up near Kitamaat, B.C., drew a crowd of over 70 people to the Ceremonial Room.

Robinson spent her youth reading Stephen King, “exploding heads and a lot of angsty works,” she said. But her own literary moment came in Grade 11, when the self-proclaimed science nut discovered that her dreams of becoming an astronaut were dashed.

“I was an angry loner as a teen, and I thought it would be great if you could just go up in a capsule,” she said.

Robinson began her writing career in a film class, when, instead of the prescribed essay, she wrote a fictitious story about how a film should have ended.

The class loved it.

“It was the first time someone said I’d done something cool, and so I kept doing it,” she said.

Since then, Robinson has been shortlisted for the Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award. She is one of the youngest Aboriginal writers to receive international notoriety, with Traplines (a collection of short stories) winning a Winifred Holtby Prize, a New York Times Editor’s Choice and a Notable Book of the Year award.

And it’s not hard to see why.

Robinson’s deeply descriptive prose is saturated in a nature-based world, one where moons smile and eagle down floats through firelight. But her tales capture the essence of growing up in First Nations communities, both through childhood and adulthood. Whether writing about salmon berries, ‘50s TVs, vandalized totem poles, McDonald’s fries or Wal-Mart paint swatches, the 41-year-old delves into modern-day truisms.

At the reading, Robinson’s images echoed throughout the open room, and she finished almost every sentence with a punctuating laughter that had the audience giggling (or squirming) in response.

Blood Sports was the novel Robinson wrote after she stopped smoking, she told the crowd — a decision she made out of “sheer vanity.”

“Nothing makes you look young and hot like an oxygen tank,” she said, laughing. “But growing up, that’s just what everyone did. They had their tea and smokes and told stories and laughed while the kids ran around outside. Now, there aren’t as many smokers left. Most have wimped out like me.”

Robinson says that after page 100, Blood Sports got a little neurotic. But eventually, it mellowed out.

“The problem with publishing is that you still want to edit. They have to pry it from your fingers,” she said. “I know a novel is done when I wake up and it’s not the first thing I think of in the morning.”

During the question period, some audience members stood up to celebrate Robinson’s town and achievements, while others couldn’t help but ask about possible hidden schizophrenia in the stories, real ghosts, symbolic food and the meanings of endings.

“I love open endings — when you hit it right at that moment of possibility,” Robinson said in response. “And I love hearing people’s interpretations of endings, because it usually tells me how optimistic or pessimistic they are.”