Sea Conlin
Sea Conlin, also published as Christy Ann Conlin, is a storyteller, writer and grief/death literacy educator.
New Graphic Novel Coming 2027
A backwoods horror story of grief and ecstatic truth in the style of Flannery O'Connor
Full Bleed is a haunting, visually charged collaboration between writer Sea Conlin and artist Katarina Thorsen. Adapted from a short story by Conlin this graphic novel explores grief, truth, and the strange ways art remakes loss.
"Full Bleed is a gripping story of love and grief, through drawings that are radiant and ominous at the same time. An ode to Nova Scotia in Autumn, capturing its beauty and its mysteries perfectly. A really impressive work that gave me chills! A must-read."
- Aimée de Jongh (Lord of the Flies, Days of Sand)
"Full Bleed is a beautifully dark and dense fever-dream. Sea Conlin and Katarina Thorsen weave a perfect meditation on grief and the transformative power of art that pulls you in and reveals itself to be one of the most powerful and immersive graphic novels you'll read this year."
- Jeff Lemire (Gideon Falls, Sweet Tooth)
Books
About the Author
Sea Conlin, also published as Christy Ann Conlin, was born and raised in Nova Scotia, which, for better or worse, has shaped every aspect of her creative work. Her debut novel, Heave (Doubleday), was a national bestseller, an Amazon First Novel Award finalist, and a Globe 100 notable book. Her short story collection, Watermark (Anansi), was a runner-up for the Danuta Gleed Award and the Evergreen Award. Her second novel, The Memento (Doubleday) was a Booknet Top 10 bestselling ghost story. The Speed of Mercy (Anansi), her third novel, was published in 2021 at the height of pandemic times. Her work and ideas have appeared in adda, Brick, Guernica, Lit Hub, Numéro Cinq, Hazlitt, The New Quarterly, Geist and The Globe and Mail. Her short stories have been included twice in Best Canadian Stories. Sea is a graduate of MFA program at the School of Creative Writing at University of British Columbia where she studied screenplay writing. Her radio / podcast work includes co-creating, co-producing, scripting and hosting CBC Fear Itself, a national summer radio series, along with documentaries for CBC The Doc Project and CBC Arts Tonight. Sea served on the Writer's Trust Advisory Group and works as a mentor to both emerging and re-emerging writers. She is a student in the Special Projects program at Chlorine Gardens University, run by comic artist Keiler Roberts. She also works as a death doula and a grief and death literacy educator, having trained at the University of Vermont, and OISE at the University of Toronto. Her first graphic novel, Full Bleed, a collaboration with Swedish-Canadian artist Katarina Thorsen, is forthcoming in Spring 2027 (Conundrum). She lives in Nova Scotia with her beloved children, husband and three rescue cats, and is a devoted member of The Ironbound Book Society.
Interviews, Reviews & Adventures
Quill and Quire: How Christy Ann Conlin Found an Eerie Muse
And as much darkness as there is in my books, in all these stories are these little threads of hilarity, like little beams of sunshine those characters coast on to ultimately, I think, be triumphant in their own lives.
The eleven stories collected in Christy Ann Conlin's Watermark upend expectations. They are quite varied—specific worlds yet all grounded in coastal geographies—with settings on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, even the shorelines of Hudson Bay. Natural beauty comes with bleakness and danger: the sea as a source of wonder and peril, the remote mountain roads.
To the Lighthouse, A review by Allan Pero of Christy Ann Conlin’s novel, The Memento: Christy Ann Conlin, the author of Heave, has published her second novel, and the result is nothing short of dazzling. The final chapters take place roughly ten years later, and in some respects, become an uncanny reworking of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. The dizzying speed of revelation produces, in its masterly way, the effect of what T. S. Eliot calls “genuine poetry”—one that “communicates before it is understood.