Ángela Fillingham Wildgoose
Edith Whitfield - Founder of "The Mercy Project"

Author

Edith Whitfield - Founder of "The Mercy Project"

Edith Whitfield was born and raised in Atlantic Canada, where she still lives with her spouse and two children.

She writes literary fiction about damaged people who don’t excuse themselves—characters who carry what happened to them without presenting the bill to whoever earned it. Hummingbird, her first novel, follows a twenty-year-old songwriter driving north from Houston to find a father she knows only by a first name and a photograph.

Because the book is narrated by a musician, it came with a catalogue. The songs of Mercy Grace Robinson are released a week at a time ahead of publication.
Agent: Angela · angela.fw@wildgooseagency.com

Publications

The Mercy Project’: A Multimedia Experience Merging Literature and Music: A unique, raw, and fascinating multimedia experience that breaks the barrier between literature and music

The first press is in for The Mercy Project

A unique, raw, and fascinating multimedia experience that breaks the barrier between literature and music preview

Ahead of the release of Edith Whitfield’s debut road novel, Hummingbird, the music of its fictional narrator—twenty-year-old songwriter Mercy Grace Robinson—is already catching the ears of reviewers across borders.

A huge thanks to Anna Utrech and Octavio Lasheras at "Revista Media" for this wonderful feature in Spanish on how the project blends original acoustic folk-blues with literary storytelling.


Anna's words:

"Through a friend, Angela Fillingham—now CEO of the Wild Goose Literary Agency—we discovered the subject of today's feature: ‘The Mercy Project’ by author Edith Whitfield, which we are delighted to share with our readers.
Ángela explains it in her own words...

A bold, risk-taking project in a globalized world that is so connected and disconnected at the same time—supported by the Wild Goose Agency and by Interarea which leaves us with the question: what would the world be without artists who take risks to put forward new ideas?

Building an international audience for a debut novel before the book even hits the shelves takes relentless work behind the scenes, and seeing the press respond makes every pitch worth it

To see the full article "in Spanish", click here:

View publication

Books

Agent's note

Thirty years ago I learnt that when you come across something extraordinary, you fight for it.

With actors it's obvious. You watch someone walk on and give the whole of themselves to a part, and you know inside a minute. Writers are harder to spot and no less peculiar — they're all artists underneath, with their whims and their quirks. But you start reading, and your imagination does the rest, and suddenly you're at a university in Canada, or a fair somewhere in Ireland, or a tavern in the Wild West. You look up and the manuscript's finished.

I came to Edith Whitfield through a client. 

"Angie, hear what she has to say." 

So I did, and I've been thanking him ever since. We had a video call, all very posh-like, and she took me through a polished, well-documented version of the idea. I was gobsmacked. I kept the British business face on, naturally, because a good pitch isn't enough — I needed to hear the songs and read the writing.

She sent me some of the tracks. I read some chapters.

Audiobooks have their place, but a character stepping off the page to sing her own songs is a different animal altogether. Mercy's voice has grit in it, and highway dust, and cheap gasoline. The lyrics don't just carry the story, they carry the road. And the manuscript holds up every note — the chapters I read had a pulse of their own, unapologetic and hard to put down.

That settled it. The Mercy Project is hosted here at Wild Goose Agency, and I'll be involved behind the scenes as far as the agency allows.

Edith didn't bring me another manuscript. She brought a new way of telling a story, and I'm glad to be part of it.

Thank you, Edith.

What Next?

People she meets = new songs = new books!

Mercy isn’t the only one in that book who writes songs, and she won’t be the only one with a record. Some of the people she runs into on that road have books of their own coming, and the one I’ve started twirling in my mind is Austin Lewis—a Canadian folk singer she meets in Hibbing on the wrong night of the wrong month.

His book goes back a long way before she ever laid eyes on him: the sixties and seventies and into the eighties, when the tap was open and he knew exactly what he was for. His songs start going up weekly, and the book follows in 2027. They sound nothing like hers, which is the point. He argues, he decides, he lands the ending. Mercy never does.

I’m also putting together a paid side of the Substack for the rest of it—songs from Mercy and the others that won’t go anywhere else, and the working half of this that nobody normally gets to see: the research, the drafts, what got cut and why. Same method as before. The songs come first and the book comes after, and it turns out that isn’t a gimmick. That’s just how I find out who somebody is.