Sarah Henstra is a professor of English literature at Ryerson University in Toronto where she teaches courses in Gothic Horror, Fairy Tales & Fantasies, Psychoanalysis & Literature, and Creative Writing. She is the author of The Red Word, a novel that recently won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. 

We met in Ottawa to talk about The Red Word. Among other things we discuss The Scarlet Letter, shame, the double standard, Greek mythology, unspoken assumptions, #metoo, feminism, frats houses, university life, the 1990s, passive characters and withholding sex.