From Imagination to Page: Local Author Avi Silver on Writing, Hope, and Finding Home in St. Thomas

Avi Silver will tell you, pretty cheerfully, that they never want to write a trilogy again.

Then they'll tell you how proud they are of this one. Both things are true, and it seems to me that’s likely a pretty common emotion for an author to feel.

Avi, a speculative fiction author and self-described "noted menace," moved to St. Thomas in January 2025 with their partner, fellow author Sienna Tristen. Not long after, they finished One Morning Sun, the final book of the Sãoni Cycle trilogy.

Four years in the making, written through a pandemic, grief, and a whole lot of doubt, the book is out in the world now and has been nominated for the 2026 Aurora Awards. 

An Unlikely Beginning
Avi has been telling stories for as long as they can remember. Poetry came first. As a teenager growing up in small-town Massachusetts, they were doing spoken-word and poetry slams across the country, guided by a mentor who brought together young creatives who needed a way to express their journeys and gave them a stage. That early grounding in language, in the weight of a well-placed word, shows up throughout their writing even now.

The jump to fiction came later, and through a characteristically roundabout route. Avi and their partner, Sienna Tristen, originally met at fourteen, in an anime chat room, lost touch for years, and eventually reconnected as adults. The core of their relationship, as Avi describes it, has always been writing. They share a fictional world called Shale, a kind of collaborative sandbox where they worldbuild, experiment with ideas, and tell stories together. It's an unusual creative arrangement, and it clearly works.

When Sienna published their first book, Avi decided to try. "I did not yet know how hard writing a book was," Avi says, "and so it was easy." They laugh, telling this part.

The result was Two Dark Moons, published in 2019. Described as "Princess Mononoke meets How to Train Your Dragon," it's a queer hopepunk YA novel set in a world where your whole life, including your gender, is shaped by what phase of the moon you were born under. Avi wrote it as a gift to their younger self, as a way of exploring what it might feel like to be trans in a world where transness is entirely ordinary. "I wanted to work with secrecy and family," they say, "without re-traumatizing young queer readers."

So they wrote about giant lizards. It worked.

Writing Through the Hard Years
The second book, Three Seeking Stars, came out in 2021, right in the middle of the pandemic. And the third was supposed to follow in 2023. It didn't.

Finishing One Morning Sun took until 2025, and the path there was genuinely difficult. Avi got the news that their estranged stepfather had died on the same day they finished the draft for book two. The pandemic hollowed something out in them. The book they were trying to write, a hopeful book, felt impossible to write honestly while hope itself felt so elusive.

That’s probably an element unique to the time we can all relate to on some level.

Part of what made the third book particularly hard was its subject matter. The Sãoni Cycle deals, in part, with a colonial invasion and three young characters, aged sixteen to nineteen, trying to navigate what it means to do good within a system that doesn't offer clean answers. One of the main characters is a prince of the invading empire, not a villain, not a hero, just a kid caught inside something much larger than himself. Writing toward resolution in that story, while also watching the world outside, required Avi to sit with real discomfort for a long time.

"How do we live in solidarity with one another?" they say. "That's a question that I think many people are asking."
Avi eventually found their way back to the story by focusing on love at the local level. Not grand gestures or tidy answers, but one-on-one conversations, small wins, the particular hope that lives between people who actually know each other. The book reflects that. So, maybe, does their choice to move to St. Thomas.

Finding Ground Here
Avi is candid about the adjustment to moving to a smaller city. Coming from spaces where a larger queer and arts community was just sort of there, right around the corner, meant that the connections they've made here feel different. More deliberate.

"Coming into a smaller community has made those connections so precious," they say, "and reminded me why I wrote it."
St. Thomas, they note, reminds them of where they grew up. That's not a neutral observation; it means something to them. There's an intimacy to it. And they've found, in the arts and culture community here in particular, people genuinely working to amplify what this city has and can be. "There are people so encouraged to work locally," Avi says. "There's this thing of, when there's only this many of us, we gotta find a way to do it."
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That spirit, they think, is very much what the Sãoni Cycle is ultimately about: even if we don't understand each other, we can care about each other.

The Trestle Bridge Poetry Series
Avi hasn't exactly slowed down since finishing the trilogy. Together with Sienna and another local poet, Julie Berry, they've co-founded the Trestle Bridge Poetry Series in St. Thomas, a regular event designed to make space for poets, poetry enthusiasts, and the poetry-curious alike. The goal, as Avi describes it, is to push back against the idea that poetry and classic literature are precious things meant to exist outside of common society.

"Beowulf is meant to be screamed in a bar," they point out. They're not wrong.

The series is part of a broader conviction Avi holds pretty firmly: that St. Thomas has genuine literary talent, that it's growing, and that the time to build arts culture here is now, not in three years when the city has grown further, and the space is more crowded. "Let's reject the notion that nothing happens in St. Thomas," they say. "That is clearly not true."

For anyone interested in getting involved with local writing communities, Avi also points to writing circles through the library and the Rainbow Connections group for queer teens and adults as spaces worth knowing about.

The Aurora Nomination
Here's a funny thing about the Aurora nomination for One Morning Sun: Avi didn't submit it themselves for the nomination.
"I went, for real, and then closed the tab," they say. "I thought, it's a third book in a trilogy, it's an indie book. This isn't going to happen."

Someone else put it forward. Enough people agreed that it landed on the ballot. Avi learned about the nomination at a Passover celebration, a little dramatically, and woke up the next morning to confirm it was real.
One Morning Sun is nominated in the Best Young Adult Novel category for the 2026 Aurora Awards. The Aurora Awards, presented by the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association (CSFFA), recognize the best in Canadian science fiction, fantasy, and horror each year.

What the nomination meant, Avi says, is that something they'd struggled with and nearly given up on had actually reached people. "Something that I struggled with so much got love that I really didn't expect." That, more than anything, is what made it feel real.

This is also Avi's second Aurora nomination. Their novella Pluralities, a queer slipstream-meets-space-adventure story about gender euphoria, was nominated in 2023 in what they describe as the hardest category to crack. They lost to one of their favourite authors. They seem genuinely delighted about it.

For anyone who wants to dig deeper into what's happening in Canadian speculative fiction, the CSFFA offers memberships starting at $10 a year, which includes access to works from across all nomination categories. It's worth a look. As Avi puts it: "There is so much Canadian talent in science fiction, fantasy, horror. We are killing it out here." Find more at csffa.ca.

The book launch for One Morning Sun was held at Lockwood Books right here in St. Thomas, and Avi is quick to mention it. "I want to make sure their name gets shouted out," they say. It's the kind of detail that matters to them, crediting the people and places that showed up.

A Love Letter, Still
At the end of our conversation, I asked Avi what they hoped young queer and neurodivergent readers would actually take away from the Sãoni Cycle, the series they'd spent six years building and struggling through, and finished, finally, in this city.

They got quiet for a second.

"I feel like it's okay to be too much," they said. "I have just given up trying to be anything but what I am."
There's a character in the books who is loud and always getting into trouble. There's another who is deeply autistic and largely opts out of social expectation, and who spends the third book asking themself whether they even want to be around people at all, and if so, how to bear that. Both of them, Avi says, are aspects of themselves. Both of them belong in the story.

"I think the thing I hope queer kids and neurodivergent kids can get out of it is just... there's a place. There's a place for you to be way too much of anything."
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It's a simple message, but sometimes those are the ones that matter most.

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The Sãoni Cycle (Two Dark Moons, Three Seeking Stars, One Morning Sun) by Avi Silver is available now. Find links to all of Avi's work and more at mxavisilver.com. Pick up a copy at Lockwood Books in downtown St. Thomas. The Trestle Bridge Poetry Series is a recurring event in St. Thomas; keep an eye on local listings for upcoming dates.

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Sarah Noble, Marketing and Communications Manager, St. Thomas EDC

Sarah is Elgin County born and raised, now proudly waving the #StThomasProud flag. With a Bachelor of Commerce from the University of Guelph, she’s passionate about empowering small businesses, arts, and tourism. A former entrepreneur, photographer, and certified Experiential Tourism Coach, Sarah blends creativity with strategy to help businesses thrive and craft unforgettable experiences. When she’s not championing local growth, you’ll either find her curled up with her cats and a book, potentially enjoying a donut or tending to her gardens—because she knows all too well that life is best lived when it's full of stories, flowers, little sweet treats, and cats.