Jessica Marie Frey is a Canadian science fiction and fantasy author. While she is best known for her debut novel Triptych, Frey's work encompasses poetry, academic and magazine articles, screenplays, and short stories. Frey calls herself a "professional geek".
Frey has appeared at Toronto-area science fiction conventions and is involved with charity and community fan groups and initiatives. She regularly appears on radio shows, television talk shows, and podcasts discussing fandom and genre works.
Biography
Frey began writing at the age of eleven. She began by writing fanfiction, which she calls her "apprenticeship to the fandom community", and which led her to write original stories at the age of eighteen. Frey's academic and creative writing focused primarily on Japanese mythology, the Classics, and traditional Japanese theatre. She began her first novel while at Brock University, which has not yet been published, and first began to seriously study creative writing there.
After earning her Bachelor of Arts, Dramatic Literature (honors) in 2005, Frey lived in Fukuoka, Japan for two years, where she taught English as a Japanese Exchange Teacher, and worked on several other to-date-unpublished manuscripts. In 2007, Frey returned to Canada to attend Ryerson and York Universities for a Masters of Arts.
Dragon Moon Press acquired Frey's debut novel Triptych in late 2009 after Frey and the acquisitions editor Gabrielle Harbowy met at a party at the Ad Astra science fiction convention. The book was released April 2011, and re-released with bonus content in 2018. From there, Frey published The Accidental Turn Series (four books; meta-Epic Fantasy; 2015–2018) and The Skylark's Saga (two books; Steampunk Young Adult fiction; 2018–2019) with REUTS Publications, and self-published the 2019 Watty Award-winning The Woman Who Fell Through Time in 2020.
Frey was the recipient of the Toronto Arts Council Works in Progress Grant in 2018, and announced that she will be working on a novel-length version of her 2012 short story The Maddening Science as her granted project. Frey announced in 2023 that her novel "The Woman Who Fell Through Time" (also known as "A Woman of the Sea") had been picked up for publication with W by Wattpad (Wattpad Webtoon Studios) in spring 2024.
Frey is based in Toronto, and is currently unrepresented.
Critical reception
Triptych (2011) received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, and was named the #3 best Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror book of 2011 by Publishers Weekly's Rose Fox. Triptych was also nominated for the CBC Bookie Award for Science Fiction, the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction, and the Lambda Literary Award for Science Fiction. Triptych won best Science Fiction Book at the 2012 San Francisco Book Festival, and was given an honorable mention for Science Fiction Book at the 2012 London Book Festival.
The Untold Tale (2015) was reviewed in Io9, where they compare the book to Redshirts, only "for fantasy, sort of."
The Forgotten Tale (2016) was reviewed by Publishers Weekly where they call the book, "thought-provoking" for the way that it covers the stereotypes of women in fantasy novels.
Frey has frequently presented an academic view on the geek scene in documentaries, podcasts, radio interviews, and television interviews. Her essay, "How Fanfiction Made Me Gay," was written about in the New York Times' Women in the World series.
The Skylark's Saga was optioned on a shopping agreement for an animated children's television series in autumn 2018 by Montreal-based production company Alpaca vs. Lama.
