Martha Baillie, actor, artist, and writer, is unafraid to follow an idea to fruition. The Schlögel Archive are an experiment about how a story and its words might change if hand-written in snippets on random postcards, so that they can be shuffled and rearranged.

It seems fitting that one as well travelled as Martha uses postcards in her creative practice. She has crossed the Arctic Circle, hiked on Baffin Island, kayaked in East Greenland, and travelled extensively through Asia, including China, Thailand, Burma, Nepal, and India.

Martha’s most recent novel, The Search for Heinrich Schlögel, received early praise from writer Gina Ochsner: “Capacious, capricious, mischievous, The Search for Heinrich Schlögel moves like a quantum experiment, defying boundaries of time, place, chronology. Fluid as light itself, animated by startling imagery, vivid and peculiar characters, The Search for Heinrich Schlögel is a hymn to brooding memory, the enduring need to inhabit story, and a haunting insistence upon endless possibilities within possibility. That is to say, hope.”

Martha’s first novel, My Sister Esther, was followed by Madame Balashovskaya’s Apartment. Her third novel, The Shape I Gave You was a national bestseller. Martha has had poems published in Descant, Prairie Fire, and The Antigonish Review. Her novel The Incident Report was nominated for the Scotia Bank Giller Prize and was on The Globe and Mail Best Books list.

Martha was born in Toronto and now lives there with her daughter and husband.

Photo Credit: Marian Black

Website: marthabaillie.ca

The Schlögel Archive: schlogel.ca