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Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.
In this episode of Writer’s Voice, Francesca Rheannon speaks with political philosopher Lea Ypi about Indignity: A Life Reimagined, a genre-blending work of memoir, history, and philosophical inquiry that explores dignity under authoritarian regimes.
“I think of [dignity] as a property that is really what makes us human.” — Lea Ypi
Then novelist Eleanor Shearer discusses Fireflies in Winter, a lyrical historical novel following Jamaican Maroons exiled to Nova Scotia after the Second Maroon War. Through the story of Cora, Agnes, and Thursday, Shearer examines freedom, queer love, grief, and the moral tension between survival and solidarity.
“You were only ever a kind of set of stolen papers away… from having your freedom snatched from you.” — Eleanor Shearer
Together, these conversations probe enduring questions:
- What is dignity?
- What does it mean to be free inside systems designed to deny freedom?
- How do we maintain moral agency when our survival is at stake?
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Tags: Lea Ypi interview, Indignity book, Eleanor Shearer interview, Fireflies in Winter novel, Jamaican Maroons history, historical fiction about slavery, queer historical fiction, Writer’s Voice podcast.
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Segment One: Lea Ypi
A haunting honeymoon photograph of her grandmother — posted online by a stranger and met with accusations and insults — launches Lea Ypi into a philosophical and archival investigation.
Ypi’s grandmother lived through the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, fascism, communism, and neoliberal capitalism. The book asks: What does it cost to defend dignity when systems of power are dedicated to erase it?
Ypi explores:
- Dignity as a universal human capacity for moral agency
- The archive as an instrument of power
- Communist surveillance and modern surveillance capitalism
- Nationalism, fascism, and historical repetition
- The responsibility of art to “rescue dignity”
Segment Two: Eleanor Shearer
Shearer brings to life the little-known history of Jamaican Maroons exiled to Nova Scotia in the 1790s.
Her protagonist Cora has never been enslaved — yet her freedom is deeply precarious. In Nova Scotia, she encounters Agnes, a formerly enslaved woman surviving in the forest, and Thursday, an indentured laborer whose freedom hangs by a thread.
Shearer explores:
- The ambiguity between legal freedom and lived freedom
- Indentureship and stolen contracts
- Queer love as resistance
- The moral collision between survival and solidarity
- Grief as a shaping force