Carley Fortune does not start with the love story. She starts with the place. The Canadian romance novelist, whose Every Summer After became a Prime Video series in June and whose new novel Our Perfect Storm releases May 5, told Ponton that setting comes first, protagonist second, and the romantic arc third. "I don't think about tropes until I am like, oh, therefore, it would be this kind of trope. It's not what I go to when I'm brainstorming."
Which explains why Fortune's books feel less like plug-and-play romance and more like emotional weather systems shaped by geography. Every Summer After belongs to a lakeside Ontario town of 1,200 people. Our Perfect Storm unfolds in Tofino, a remote beach town on Vancouver Island where the rainforest collides with the Pacific and the fog rolls in like a second plot.
Fortune lived on Vancouver Island for a year in her early twenties, fresh out of journalism school, chasing an ex-boyfriend who later became her husband. She visited Tofino twice during that year and the place stuck. "I felt like I was standing on the edge of the world," she said. A decade later, she went back with her husband twice more while writing Our Perfect Storm: once to reacquaint herself with the terrain, once to fill in the draft's gaps. They took two surf lessons. The water was so cold they wore full wetsuits and still shivered.
George told Nate he would always love Frankie, and Fortune says that is not unforgivable
The central twist in Our Perfect Storm is a gut punch wrapped in good intentions. Frankie wakes up on her wedding day to a note from her fiancé, Nate, calling it off. No warning, no fight, just gone. Later, readers learn that George, Frankie's best friend since age eight, got drunk the night before the wedding and told Nate he would love Frankie in a way Nate never could.
That confession torched the wedding.
Ponton asked Fortune how she made George forgivable after such a spectacular act of selfishness. Fortune's answer: George never meant to blow up the wedding. "The decision to um not get married was Nate's decision," she said. George handed Nate information. Nate made the call. And by the time readers learn what George did, they have already spent enough time with him to understand how hard he tries not to make mistakes.
Fortune also said she cycled through multiple versions of what George did before landing on this one. What mattered most was that George did not set out to sabotage anything. He got drunk. He said something true. Nate acted on it. That sequence, Fortune argued, creates enough daylight for empathy.
Still, the twist raises a question Fortune does not directly answer: if someone loves you enough to wreck your wedding, are they your hero or your problem?
Tofino is where the rainforest meets the beach, and Fortune needed a story with matching drama
Fortune knew for years she wanted to set a book in Tofino. She just needed a story with the same intensity as the location. Our Perfect Storm delivered: a jilted bride, a childhood best friend, a honeymoon for two, and a mother who left the family for a year to study grey whales.
The whales became a thematic anchor. Frankie's mother, a marine biologist, abandoned the family when Frankie was eight to take a research job on the west coast. That departure coincided with the day Frankie met George. Frankie has hated whales ever since. "Who hates whales?" Ponton asked, laughing. But Fortune wanted the whales to carry the mother-daughter reconciliation arc, and when Fortune and her husband went whale watching in Tofino, a grey whale surfaced close to the boat and made a sound Fortune described as dinosaur-like. That moment, she said, felt profound enough to deserve space in the book.
The honeymoon-as-healing-plan structure also came from Tofino. George designs a seven-day itinerary to help Frankie recover from the breakup, each day with a theme and an activity. Ponton said she nearly copy-pasted the plan to send to her sister, who is going through a breakup. Fortune laughed. Then she admitted the structure required Q-cards on her office floor to map out which day got which activity and which flashback.
Fortune has never written fake dating or true enemies-to-lovers, and she is not sure she ever will
Ponton asked what trope Fortune has not yet tackled. Fortune paused. "I have not done like an enemies to lovers or like a nemesis to lovers," she said. She has also never written fake dating.
Would she? Maybe, if it felt organic to the story. But Fortune confessed she has a hard time keeping characters adversarial. She set out to write friction between Charlie and Alice in One Golden Summer, then quickly softened it. "I very quickly like now they're friends," she said. "I'm like, but I just kind of want them to be friends."
Fortune loves reading enemies-to-lovers when it is done well, but she has also read versions where the characters are not enemies, just mean. "It's just enemies," Ponton said. "They're just bullying." Fortune agreed. The line between tension and toxicity is thin, and Fortune seems uninterested in faking it for the sake of a trope.
That pickiness extends to her own character design. She wanted Frankie in Our Perfect Storm to be hotheaded and argumentative, the opposite of Alice from One Golden Summer, who Fortune described as soft and caregiving. Frankie needed to be stubborn, competitive, a little weird. Fortune said she knew everything about Frankie after writing the prologue, the scene where eight-year-old Frankie meets George through a backyard fence. That vision came to Fortune years earlier while watching her own children chase rabbits in the yard. A rabbit dove under a cedar hedge, and Fortune imagined a girl seeing a pair of blue eyes on the other side.
Every Year After filmed in Vancouver, but Fortune made sure Barry's Bay came with it
Every Summer After, Fortune's debut, is set in Barry's Bay, Ontario, the town of 1,200 where Fortune grew up. The Prime Video adaptation, retitled Every Year After, filmed in Vancouver. Fortune, who serves as executive producer, said it was non-negotiable that the show shoot in Canada and that it preserve the small-town setting.
The production built Barry's Bay in a Vancouver suburb. Fortune walked onto set and saw Steman's General Store, the Tavern, the Dairy Bar. "It was just so un... It really was like I couldn't get my head around it," she said. The crew also constructed Percy's cottage bedroom, complete with posters from the book, and the basement of Sam and Charlie's childhood home, anchored by a red plaid couch. Fortune said walking into that basement felt like stepping into the real place from her mind.
Fortune wrote Every Summer After during the pandemic with no intention of publishing it. She was a journalist trying to prove to herself she could finish a novel. Now it is a television series and her hometown of 1,200 people is asking what is going on.
Fortune also told Ponton she fights to keep specific lines from the books in the scripts. Some writers already know which lines fans expect. Others need Fortune to flag them. Either way, Fortune wants those moments in the adaptation, not to pander, but to give book readers a wink. Ponton agreed. She said she loves when adaptations include details only book readers would catch, the kind of thing you lean over and whisper to someone who has not read it.
Fortune would rather get dumped by voice note than in person, so she can replay it for her friends
Ponton and Fortune closed the episode by ranking breakup methods. Fortune's most surprising take: she would rather receive a breakup voice note than a phone call. Why? "You can replay the voice note," she said. "You can show your friends." Ponton was alarmed. Fortune doubled down. There is nothing worse than trying to recap what someone said during a breakup. A voice note is evidence. You can debrief it with friends in real time.
Fortune also said she would prefer the person breaking up with her to be a little terrible, so she has a reason to hate them. Ponton said her friend is currently going through a breakup where the guy did nothing wrong, but the friend has to hate him anyway as part of the process. Fortune understood. Hating someone makes moving on easier, even if the hatred is a fiction you tell yourself.
The worst breakup method, both agreed, would be getting dumped on the last day of a vacation. Fortune said she would want that one in person so she could throw a drink.