Shelley Thompson is best known for her roles in film and on TV series like Moonshine, Sullivan’s Crossing, and the Trailer Park Boys, but she’s also an accomplished writer, director, and producer. Duck Duck Goose, her short film about the impacts of school lockdowns on children, won Best Atlantic Short at the 2018 Atlantic International Film Festival.

Dawn, Her Dad and the Tractor, a feature film Thompson wrote and directed, won the 2022 $25,000 Nova Scotia Masterworks Arts Award for the year’s best work of art. Nimbus Publishing in Halifax recently released her first novel, Roar. Saltscapes spoke with Shelley Thompson about rejection, the Tom Toms and the striated ocean.

You went straight from high school in Calgary to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in England, so I’m guessing you always wanted to be an actor.
I wasn’t that interested in film growing up. Ours was a reading household. My mom read to us as children. My memory of my dad is lying on the couch, reading. I decided at age 10 that I was going to be a writer. 

Were you already writing?
I’d written a poem that I thought was very brilliant called “Clouds.” I sent it to Chatelaine, and I said, I’m a poet. You should publish my poem.

The editors must have been just delighted!
They were so kind. A woman wrote back and said, “This is a really good poem. You should keep writing.” What I saw was a rejection.

If you wanted to be a poet, why go to theatre school in London?
I said to my dad, “If I’m going to write, I need to be able to say this stuff out loud.” I loved Shakespeare and the British romantic poets. Having visited the U.K. in high school with a choir, I fell in love with it. I met my husband there, and that’s where Teddy was born.

Teddy is your son, the singer T. Thomason. But you’re a Thompson.
Yes, and his father is a Thomason. The really peculiar thing is that my ancestors came from Sweden and in my family Bible, the name is Thomason. Pretty spooky, eh? In the U.K., everybody just gave up and called us the Tom Toms.

So, you see yourself as a writer, but your Internet Movie Database profile reflects your versatility, listing you as an actor first.
I love acting and working in cinema. But making movies and TV shows, everything is a compromise. You rarely realize your original vision. There’s something about sitting alone in a room and having people come to life and putting them on the page. You don’t have to answer to anybody.

Your first novel, Roar, inspired by Dawn, Her Dad and the Tractor, came out recently. Because of your film background, did you find yourself writing it in a cinematic way?
Very much so. The responses that I’ve had from other novelists comment on how visual and visceral the writing of place is. The book captures the feel of Nova Scotia in the summer: the heat, sounds, smells, and the way our ocean is striated from silver to gold to pink to green. Nova Scotia is my adopted home, but it’s absolutely my home, and I’m soin love with it, more now than when I decided to move here from the U.K.