Jess Gibson On Her First Book, Talk With Mother Margaret Atwood at Miami Book Fair

Jess Gibson spent most of her career as an art historian, now she’s written her first book, a collection of short stories called “The Good Eye.” She appears at the Miami Book Fair with her prolific writer mother Margaret Atwood who just released a memoir. (Photo by Beowulf Sheehan, courtesy of Miami Book Fair)

Jess Gibson and her mother, writer Margaret Atwood, are appearing together in conversation at the Miami Book Fair. But the two aren’t out roving the country on a book tour despite both recently releasing new works.

Their talk on Saturday, Nov. 21 is what Gibson says is their only planned joint appearance. Atwood, who turns 87 three days earlier, will discuss her first memoir, “Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts.” Gibson will talk about “The Good Eye,” her debut short story collection.

“It’s going to be right after her birthday, so I felt that it would be a sweet thing to do,” Gibson says, though she doesn’t expect a regular run of joint appearances. “The books are different and our work is different.”

The public talk will be informal and she eagerly admits she has no idea how it will unfold.

“I’ve never done an event with her,” Gibson says.

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Discussing books, however, is natural for her. She spent her growing up surrounded by two working authors – her father was Canadian writer Graeme Gibson, with memories of sitting beside one parent or the other as they pounded away on a typewriter or, later a computer and traveling to different places from their home in Canada.

Margaret Atwood, author of more than 50 books, will discuss her first memoir, “Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts,” with her daughter, Jess Gibson, at 11 a.m. Saturday, Nov. 21, at Miami Book Fair. (Photo courtesy of Miami Book Fair)

“In the early days they were doing things like writers in residencies, but then later, if they were both finishing a book, they would rent out our house in Toronto and rent a place somewhere else, because in the days before cell phones and the internet, it meant that that the phone wouldn’t ring. I also feel like I grew up in that environment reading and writing a lot,” she says.

But Gibson said she “tried very hard to have a different career” than that of an author. She became an art historian and didn’t publish her first book until May 2026 when she was 49 (she turned 50 just a few days after the official release).

“You know the feeling when you’re reading a book and you’re like, ‘this one’s for me.’ I really loved the idea that maybe I would be able to write something that would find that person and give them that joy.”

Gibson describes “The Good Eye” as a title with several layers: an eye for art and judgment, the supernatural idea of the evil eye, and the broader question of how reliably we perceive the world.

She wasn’t adverse to writing and had written stories over time, then found herself with enough of them to make a book. “I wasn’t setting out to write a book about perception,” she says, but as she brought the stories together, she recognized that there was a theme running through them.

Her training as an art historian, she says, left her attentive to how people see, and how easily their interpretations diverge. “The first thing that I would ask when I was looking at something is like, ‘What am I seeing, and am I seeing it wrong?’”

The stories leave room for readers to bring their own expectations to the page, she says, and the endings don’t always tie up neatly.

Jess Gibson’s debut collection, “The Good Eye,” brings together stories she wrote over time, exploring perception and the supernatural. (Photo by Beowulf Sheehan, courtesy of Miami Book Fair)

The collection also toys with the supernatural. As a young woman working at an artist residency in Italy, she woke to what seemed like footsteps and furniture moving above her.

“It was the 1990s, and I had a Walkman, so I stuck it on my ears, and asked the ghosts in Italian and English to please go away. When I woke up the next morning, I was telling myself, ‘that was not a ghost’ and ‘I don’t know what it was, but I’m never going to mention it to anyone.’ ”

A few weeks later, she had coffee with an architect who had worked on the building and he asked her, “Have you run into any of the ghosts yet?’ ” He said the main ghosts were in a different part of the building, but he confirmed what she heard by saying that people that had stayed in the same room had reported similar sounds. The episode left her with a question rather than an answer.

“I don’t believe in ghosts, but I didn’t have an explanation for what just occurred,” she says.

That unresolved feeling, she says, is something she wanted to preserve in her stories: “This feeling of uncertainty, which I feel about a lot of stuff. You know, you like trying to balance, trying to hold a couple of ideas at the same time.”

Margaret Atwood’s first memoir, “Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts.” Atwood will turn 87 on Nov. 18 and will appeare just three days later at the Miami Book Fair to discuss the memoir with her daughter, Jess Gibson, at 11 a.m. Saturday, Nov. 21. (Photo courtesy of Miami Book Fair)

She was still finishing the stories during the pandemic, not long after her father died in 2019. Thinking about him helped push her to complete the collection: she says he wouldn’t have put stories he believed in “in a drawer.”

Now, after a collection that took shape over time, Gibson is working on novels. She’s already completed the first, set in Berlin in 1984 and 2001, two years when she lived there and has another one in the works.

“But I’m still in the middle of writing that one, so I’m not going to jinx it,” she says.

WHAT: Jess Gibson, “The Good Eye: Stories” and Margaret Atwood, “Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts,” moderated by Georgina Godwin, books editor for Monocle Radio at Miami Dade College’s 42nd Miami Book Fair

WHERE: Chapman Conference Center, Building 3, second floor, Room 3210 at Miami Dade College’s (MDC) Wolfson Campus, 300 NE Second Ave., Miami.

WHEN: 11 a.m. Saturday, Nov. 21.

COST: $20

BOOK FAIR INFORMATION

WHERE: Miami Dade College’s (MDC) Wolfson Campus, 300 NE Second Ave., Miami.

WHEN: Book Fair is Sunday, Nov. 15 to Sunday, Nov. 22. Various times for author events; Street Fair 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., Friday, Nov. 20 and Saturday, Nov. 21, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Sunday, Nov. 22.

COST: Free admission to street fair on Friday, Nov. 20; Otherwise, $18 weekend pass, $12 daily; seniors, $12, $7; teens $8, $5; children under 12 free Saturday, Nov. 21 and Sunday, Nov. 22; some author events have admission prices.

INFORMATION: Visit miamibookfair.com, or download the complete guide here www.miamibookfair.com/downloadable-guide

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