12 or 20 (second series) questions with Judith Pond

Judith Pond [photo credit: Gerald Mills] has published fiction and poetry in a wide variety of literary journals. She is the author of four poetry collections, including A Shape of Breath. The Signs of No is her debut novel.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?  

My first book was published a very long time ago. I guess the main way it changed my life was that it astonished me by getting published. I remember thinking, Now I can be as eccentric as I want! I guess I assumed or hoped that all writers were weird like me. In more a more serious sense, my first book was poetry, as were my subsequent three, and coming to prose through poetry was for me the best way to learn my craft, as poetry is all about rhythm, subtlety, word play, and economy, which are fantastic tools for prose writing.

There’s not a lot of comparison between my current writing (novel form) and my previous work other than the economy that I learned as a poet. I am very glad that I trained in that form.

2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction? 

I started out attempting to write short stories, and then turned to poetry, I think because I fell in love with someone I probably shouldn’t have. Nothing like stolen love to make a person write poems. I never expected to be a novel writer, but at some point it seemed like a good thing to attempt a longer project.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I think that a writing project is sort of already there, and then when the time is right, starts nudging me to get at it. They seem to line up like airplanes waiting to take off. For me, writing is a slow process because I’m a perfectionist and a bit of a coward. The next sentence is holy terror for me. So I dawdle and polish. Drafts appear looking polished but it’s only because I want them to be done, and they never are. Three drafts is a minimum for me. I don’t take notes very much. It’s more a kind of groping, and I let the words lead to some extent. I don’t outline, which (outlining) seems a bit artificial, and ultimately not very useful. I’m more organic at it, or maybe stubborn, and that can get me in trouble. Thank God for my tiny writers’ group of three. Those other two guys have no trouble pointing out where I’m off the rails.  

4 - Where does a poem or work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning? 

For me a poem comes from an image that I build words around. With a novel, I assume that’s what it is (a novel) from the very beginning.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings? 

I haven’t done a reading for a good while, and they do stress me a bit, but I have a background in teaching, and that helps.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are? 

I confess that I don’t care much about current questions, though of course they find their way into my work. For example, I’m a big ally of trans and queer people, having a child who has transitioned, and that process definitely informed The Signs of No. Other than the ‘current’ things I happen to bump into, if I have theoretical concerns, they’re mainly around not hurting other people. The question I’m trying to answer in my current project is about how far it is possible to go in the service of love (filial, erotic, parental, patriotic, etc.). To what extremity in other words, is it possible to push a situation or a conviction in that service, however one defines it.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be? 

I know it’s been said, but I still think that the writer’s role is in some sense to show us ourselves. To show us the world through a particular lens: love, for example, or duration, or loss.

I haven’t done much work with an editor, but I have found it both essential and illuminating to work with an outside editor. No way can I see everything I need to see about what I’ve put on paper. I love being shown what a scene, for example, could be, if pushed a little farther, thanks to an intelligent reader’s POV. 

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)? 

Richard Ford said in an interview that you shouldn’t think that all you’re going to have to do in a rewrite is ‘go through and change the pronouns.’ He says that you are going to rip and tear and rummage in a draft (I now call that nice, pretty, seemingly-all-finished draft my ‘grab bag’) and keep only what you can use. He says it isn’t necessarily going to be the same book at all, once you’re done with it, and that comment has given me more courage and freedom than pretty much any other advice I’ve received. You don’t just write The End and think you’re done.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to short stories)? What do you see as the appeal?

Short stories from poetry wasn’t too bad, but novel from short stories has been quite a jump, and yet I am finding it suits me as a form. I like that big oversized messy overcoat that I can button up and keep warm  in( if I’m lucky) for a good long while.  Like other writers I’ve followed, I find that I’m quite lost when a big project is over.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I write every day, though not in set hours. I kind of live writing, so it’s always on my mind. On weekdays and Sundays I swim first thing in the morning (I do a lot of prewriting in the pool), and then brew up the coffee and get going. I don’t always get a lot done in a day but if I have some significant contact—even if it’s just deciding that a scene should be moved and where I could put it—with my work in a day, I’m happy.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration? 

I read people I admire for inspiration. Invariably I come away thinking, I’m going to try that! I don’t get stalled a lot. I can’t tolerate it. I never (unless something’s really wrong) let myself up from the desk until I feel like I’ve pushed the work to a place it’s not scary to start up from the next day.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home? 

I guess it depends which home. Nova Scotia would be the air, I guess. It’s lush and soft and shocking when you get off the plane. Calgary is my husband’s housecleaning products. ;)

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art? 

I totally agree about books coming from books, but I love dance, and I do find strong inspiration in visual art. Among other things, I studied Art History, and I worked for a decade in a university Art History department categorizing and filing images; that work gave me my first collection of poems, and still informs my work constantly.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work? 

I once had a therapist accuse me of ‘being in love with a dead woman’ (Virginia Woolf). I devoured every word by and about her and about the Bloomsbury group when I was young, and Woolf still gives me wondrous shivers. She taught me how to write letters that are daring and fun and defamiliarized, for example—or at least to enjoy trying. To mention Ford again, though I don’t write like him at all and couldn’t, he is a major ‘lamp unto my feet,’ to quote another great book. I’m reading Atwood again right now after a long hiatus (Old Babes in the Wood) and really loving it. I’m glad I was early exposed to the Bible, and should mention that, since I see I’ve inadvertently referenced it above. I can’t think of a better preparation for a writing career than a foundation in the King James Version and an education in Art History. Other than those books, I’m in Mexico right now, and I can’t stop thinking about Under the Volcano (Malcolm Lowry).

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I would like to dance more. By that I mean learn more kinds of dance. And I would like to be friends with a horse.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer? 

If I hadn’t been a writer, I think I’d have done a PhD and been a prof somewhere. I’d have liked that, maybe. The other thing would be that I would have loved to have been a singin’ chick in a band. I’m pretty wistful about that.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else? 

Life is infinitely puzzling to me. I write to figure stuff out.  

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film? 

I just finished The Sportswriter for the second time. I’ll never know how Ford achieves so much with so much understatement and apparent humility and gentle anarchy. As for films, I really enjoyed Saltburn. Great acting, beautiful cinematography, gorgeously creepy.

20 - What are you currently working on? 

Right now, I’m about to start edits on a collection of linked stories that will come out in the fall of ‘25 with Freehand Press of Calgary, and I’m working on a next novel. What I want to explore, as touched on above, is how far a person might be willing to ‘go’ in the service of what they perceive to be love. A secondary thread in that novel will be (I think so far) a consideration of the ways in which our original woundings operate subliminally and significantly in our lives.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Sean Dixon

Sean Dixon grew up in a family of 12, including his 8 siblings, parents and a grandmother, through several Ontario towns, predisposing him to tell stories about groups of people thrown together in common cause. His debut novel, The Girls Who Saw Everything, was named one of Quill & Quire’s best of the year. His previous books include The Many Revenges of Kip Flynn, The Feathered Cloak, and the plays Orphan Song and the Governor General’s Award nominated A God In Need of Help. A recent children’s picture book, The Family Tree, was inspired by his experience of creating a family through adoption with his wife, the documentarian Kat Cizek.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

I had a big bereavement when I was a child. I lost my 15-year-old brother when I was ten to a swift, horrible factory accident. It was a defining moment for me and it governed my life choices well into adulthood. Some months after I published The Girls Who Saw Everything — I don’t know how else to describe this — I felt all that grief leave my body. I knew the Epic of Gilgamesh held this kind of power all on its own, and I do believe that’s why I became obsessed with it, but I didn't know that my embodying and retelling of it would have such a life-altering effect on me.

It wasn’t an entirely positive feeling either: I didn't know who I was anymore. I had always loved the unchanging, wise, sad child that had grown up inside of me. I had always felt I had known death and was not afraid of it. Now suddenly, unexpectedly, I was like every other life-loving fool. I was no longer Max von Sydow in The Seventh Seal, but rather just the strolling player with his family and his wagon. Faced with grieving people I was just as tongue tied, bewildered and stammery as any normal, well-adjusted person. And, worst of all, I was afraid of dying too. Just like everyone else.

It was awful. I used to have a kind of wisdom. Now it’s gone. Though I will add that the up side of offloading all that wisdom was I was finally able to contemplate raising a child of my own. What happens when you don’t think you’re about to leave all the time.

So I guess the answer is my first book changed my life because it made me less afraid to be a parent.

My daughter asked me to read my latest book to her. So I did. Then she asked me to read my last one — The Many Revenges of Kip Flynn. My impression, reading them back to back, is that my experience reading thousands of words to my daughter out loud over the last several years has paid off, it’s made me a better writer than I used to be. I don’t add unnecessary details anymore. I seem to have a better understanding of what to put in and what to leave out.

2 - How did you come to writing plays first, as opposed to, say, poetry, fiction or non-fiction?

I was trained as an actor at the National Theatre School. In our second year, my class made a project with a Canadian actor from Denmark’s Odin Teatret named Richard Fowler for which we were asked to create short physical scenes using text and props, etc, where the meaning could be entirely personal and did not have to be communicated to the audience. This was a liberating exercise for us, a particularly shy bunch of acting students.

Then I observed, with great fascination, as Richard took our scenes, ordered them, combined some of them, changed a few details, snipped a few bits, and created something resembling a narrative with them. He called it “a process in search of a meaning.” It gave me insight into how you could generate a practice of creating raw material without necessarily knowing how you were going to use it. Our physical bodies provided the raw material, but I realized that material could have been anything, could have come from anywhere.

When my class graduated, we formed a company, Primus Theatre, and made a collective creation called Dog Day that we had begun in third year, still working with Richard Fowler. While in school, I had written some material for Dog Day in a ‘storyteller’ voice that I wanted to expand beyond the parameters of that creation. While waiting for the Dog Day rehearsals to get underway, I wrote a monologue play called Falling Back Home that ended up being a sort of tragedy about a spinner of tales who suffers from the delusion that every story he dreams up is true, no matter how outlandish. By the time the Primus company got underway, I was feeling the pull of responsibility to the script of Falling Back Home so much that the new company felt like a distraction from my true priorities. So I quit the company. It was an interesting decision: I was leaving behind my best friends, great dinners, the opportunity to travel to Denmark and Italy and meet hundreds of passionate and interesting people because I wanted to have more time to sit in my room and write.

So that’s how I started, but the experience gave me the tools to create a larger work of any kind: plays were just my entry point. My father has always been a big novel-reader, so it was the great desire for me to do that but I was so, so afraid that I never would. When I finally started, adapting my oversized stage play The Girls Who Saw Everything, I spent eight months writing constantly, always fearing that I would quit at any moment. But I had the grid of the story-as-a-play to keep me going.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I get an idea, an image, and I tell myself it’s never going to happen. (Currently I’m not going to write a modern version of Apuleius’s Golden Ass and I’m definitely not going to write a stage variation of Achilles sulking in his tent, standing in for all the grievances of men.)

I think my first drafts have a real shape. But they’re a mess on the sentence level. I dispute the idea that you have to build a work via one perfect sentence at a time — Donna Tartt writing The Little Friend. I’m more interested — to use an artist analogy — in sketching out the proportions of the full figure and then going back and filling in the details. If you don’t do that, I think it becomes very hard to throw things away, which is a necessary part of writing a larger work, and it can be very hard to tell a full story that feels proportionally satisfying to the reader. You’re reading and you feel you’ve passed the beginning and now you’re moving into the middle, and now you’ve hit the peak and now you’ve passed the peak. To use the artist analogy again: you haven’t committed to a nose too large and a forehead too small.

But then, once that is done, I think I really need some help from an editor saying now look this sentence here: it’s a mess. And this one, and this one.

4 - Where does a play or work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I’ve always thought of a play as something I can write to inspire and challenge a group of people — something that would be fun for a little community of people to do. My impression is that most playwrights don’t start from this impulse. With a novel, the impulse is more private. I want to explore this world by myself.

With The Girls Who Saw Everything, I was initially challenged to write a play for the women of a repertory theatre company in Montreal that was concentrating on the classics and so there weren’t a lot of parts for them. All the great parts were for the men. So I set out to create a meaty part for every single one of them.

The younger founder of the company loved the play but the older one decided not to pursue it. I’m not sure, but my theory is that he misconstrued the heightened aspect of my characters for mockery. The play was doomed by that point, too large for Canadian theatres, although it did get a second life as a theatre school exercise.

Then, when I rewrote it as a novel, I dove in to what the Gilgamesh epic meant to me, all the personal stuff that came into my mind while I was working on the play but had no performative outlet. The last third of the novel — when the characters find themselves following the old Nindawayma ferry ship across the world to a scrapyard in the Persian Gulf — is a complete departure from the play, and I suppose it renders the play out of date. It provides a much more satisfying ending, at least. It made me realize that it can take a long time to find a really good ending for a story.

For my most recent novel, I suppose I set out to explore what had thwarted my teenage impulse to make visual art. I wanted to feel again the joy that I had felt when I used to do that kind of work.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I love them. I think I’m good at them, but I also think that audiences who go to public readings are so super attentive (compared to theatre audiences, say) that they don’t ascribe a lot of value to whether the reader is a good performer or not. The entertainment value is just a side benefit. So my talent for it doesn't really stand out, it seems to me, except in the eyes of people who really care for that sort of thing. I remember once I tried to behave like a regular, mature writer at a public reading. An old friend admonished me afterwards for trying to behave like everyone else. Ever since then, I’ve stopped worrying about it.

My favourite public reading experience, though, remains a children’s reading at the Ottawa festival, in a packed space. A library, I think? I was promoting The Feathered Cloak, I think. I can’t recall who introduced me but they mentioned that I played the banjo. So all the kids were asking about the banjo. But I had not brought my banjo. I thought that would let me off the hook, but then, during the question period, someone asked me if I would sing a song without the banjo. I sang an old Scottish a Capella ballad called The Blackbird Song and then got mobbed. It was unbelievable. I felt like Taylor Swift.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I think I’ve always held on to that idea from my youth of the process in search of a meaning. what that idea means to me now, is: I sense that, as a very dull person who only finds depth — gratefully, humbly — when I’m in conversation with a searching, thoughtful, charming, vibrant, observant person that is not me, I have no choice but to try to conjure such voices out of the world that surrounds me when I write. I try to be attentive to serendipities that provide the raw material and can then be sketched lightly into my work, and later hammered home. Perhaps that is gobbledeegook. I look for the questions. I don’t think they’re inside me. It has to be a conversation with the world.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I do think the writer has a responsibility to cultivate alternative points of view. My alt pov has always been a celebration of the imagination, so I can see how that is not as important as explorations of culture and class.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Not difficult. Certainly essential. But also: celebratory. I loved working with Liz Johnston on The Abduction of Seven Forgers. I recall a time when I was trying to convey something a little otherworldly, wherein my storyteller was catching a magician in the middle of a mind-boggling sleight of hand. Liz kept writing back that she didn't see it, she didn't get it. I think I rewrote that passage four or five times before I got it right. And I trusted her judgement 100%.

I also like to write about groups of people. My bio addresses that. It can be tricky to keep the reader’s comprehension when you have several names flying around. Liz was instrumental in helping me clarify and distinguish the introduction and follow-through of all those voices.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

I love the line from The Misanthrope (I think) that got retooled in a French Moliere biopic to be more pointed advice to the writer: “Time has nothing to do with the matter.”

And, along with it: do not hurry, do not wait.

How I interpret these fragments: you might come up with the essence of your work, the rosetta stone, in five minutes — but it’s a burning a nub that will warm your hands through a hundred thousand exploratory words. An image can drop so deep that whole chapters will pour out in joyful plumbing of it. Other times, you might spend days and days just trying to catch something that’s just around the corner. Time has nothing to do with the matter.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (playwriting to fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

To summarize: I see playwriting as more of a social impulse and fiction as more of a private impulse. But Daniel Brooks once said that theatre is a young person’s game, and I’m finding this to be more and more the case. I know fewer and fewer people who are making theatre, which means eventually, inevitably, there will be no one left who wants to play with me. So I suspect, if I want to keep writing in a way that feels meaningful, it will have to be from the more private impulse.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

Every time I fall in love with a routine, I always mourn it when it’s over and it takes awhile before I realize that I’ve just started a new routine. But I don’t write at all when I’m worried about the basic welfare of my loved ones. And that catatonia can sometimes go on for months, during which time I start thinking I need to become a gardener, or a tree-pruner, or a teacher, or a plumber.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Ovid. The Golden Legend. Pu Songling’s Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. A lot of obscure classics like the first poems in English or the Carmina Burana. A series of poetry and photo collections that were published in the 60s and 70s that my educator father acquired, called Voices, edited by Geoffrey Summerfield, printed on durable paper. One day I will return to Gilgamesh. Zombie. Troy. Superstition. The first Rickie Lee Jones album never gets old. Get Out of My House from The Dreaming. Running Up That Hill. I aspire to write like those Kate Bush songs, which are rigorous in adhering to their own interior logic. Self-contained. AWOO by the Hidden Cameras. That first album by Joanna Newsom, which I have not heard in awhile because she doesn't stream.

Florence and the Machine. Lhasa. The Waters of March. Halo. Walking in Memphis. Tracy Chapman, HAIM.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Old pee in the panel-board, sadly. And pine needles.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Yes. The Abduction of Seven Forgers was, for me, a joyful exercise in celebrating the influences of visual art.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Is it okay if I link to this essay I wrote?

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Honestly? I’d like to front a band as a vocalist. No instrument hanging off me. I want to dress up, ostentatiously, Prince-like, and dance and sing. If I woke up tomorrow in the body of a 20 year old, that is what I would do, no question.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I’m often haunted by the fact that I looked into the architecture program at the university of Waterloo while I was a first year theatre student there, and realized that my course list from Grade 13 read like I had planned to enrol. But I was dissuaded by the seven year long program. Well and a theatre colleague of mine had suffered a nervous breakdown while attending that program. That scared me away too. It’s one of the reasons I set out to explore what it means to have a visual imagination as a writer with The Abduction of Seven Forgers.

When I was a kid I loved Farley Mowat and wanted to be a marine biologist. I’m recalling that because I’m currently reading some of his books to my daughter. I was dissuaded from marine biology when I heard you spend most of the time in a laboratory, not in the field. But I’ve come to realize that this is true about everything. As a writer, I spend most of my time in the laboratory too.

But if I were just coming of age right now, though, I suspect I’d want to go fight forest fires. Maybe I’d convince my backup band to fight forest fires with me, while we’re not doing gigs.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

Being a middle child in a very loud and opinionated family that drowned me out. The thought that ‘brainstorming’ inevitably meant going with someone else’s idea. The fact that my father has always been a voracious reader and always had a book at hand. The fact the my elder brother—five years senior to me, who was my mentor in all things—died when I was ten. I was trying to write a story that morning, before I learned that he had died. An SF story called ‘The Circle’ about a time-traveller who loops back to — well, I don’t even know because I never finished it.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

I loved Malicroix, by Henri Bosco. I loved The Corner That Held Them and Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner. I loved Tarka the Otter. I’d like to find another animal novel that consumes me as much as that one did.

I want to read that Canadian book about the forest fire fires. Western writer, yes?

I’m trying to read Pip Adams’ The New Animals. I am bridling against its rigorous realism despite admiring it greatly. What is wrong with me?

I read two blockbusters recently: Cloud Cuckoo Land and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. I admired them but did not love them.

I loved the film about the hawk-healers in India — All That Breathes. I am a sucker for the Guardians of the Galaxy movies — all of them, except maybe the one about the starlord’s dad.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I recently asked a local Toronto theatre to reconsider a three-hander from a few years ago that they rejected. The leadership there has changed so I thought I’d give it another shot. They have offered a reading in early Feb. But I’ve had a look at the script and it truly is a mess. So I’m currently trying to use the limitation of the theme and the actors I requested to write something wholly new.

(As of today I’m failing, though, because a 4^th character has suddenly revealed herself, foiling all my plans.)

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Michelle Syba

Michelle Syba’s debut story collection End Times is out in May from Freehand Books. Described by Meghan O’Gieblyn as full of “humanity, ferocity, and grace,” End Times is about people variously entangled with evangelical culture. It features a cast of characters that includes a hipster megachurch pastor, a management consultant who ends up at Davos, a nurse who believes in faith healing, and quite a few Slavic immigrants.

Michelle grew up Pentecostal and left the faith in university, becoming a zealot for literature and completing a PhD in English at Harvard. She lives in Montreal. You can follow her on twitter at @lit_zealot.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

I’m still amazed that some strangers in Alberta were willing to put time and money into my stories. They’re no longer strangers, of course, but given most publishers’ reluctance to accept short-fiction collections I remain awed by the generosity and guts of Kelsey Attard, Naomi Lewis, Deborah Willis, and Colby Clair Stolson.

As far as how the stories in End Times compare with my previous short fiction, most have a stronger current of plot. The titular story was the first one I wrote in which the plot unfolded fairly organically, in a way that surprised me and also felt inevitable, per Aristotle’s handy guideline.

2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?

I didn’t. J It has been a long, twisty route to fiction, after a period of writing academically about literature, hoping it would scratch my creative itch, and then writing a few memoir essays. Above all, I came to fiction first as a reader, and my time in academia gave me the opportunity to read gobs of wonderful art.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

On the whole I’m a slow writer. I prefer some preliminary rumination, in the form of notes (often just a phrase, a bit of dialogue, an image, etc.) scribbled in my notebook or typed into my phone. I need to feel some inner pressure or necessity to write the story, and that pressure takes time to build. I’m totally open to being a faster writer, but that message has not yet been received by my subconscious!

4 - Where does a work of fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

In the case of End Times, the titular story had a lot of energy in it. After I wrote it, I realized that I wanted to write a story about a McKinsey management consultant like the daughter in “End Times,” Katy. (That story became the novella For What Shall It Profit a Man?) Then the homophobic elements in “End Times” made me want to write a story about a gay evangelical man, as a kind of counterargument. Plus I wanted to write more stories about Czech immigrants, a topic treated only glancingly in “End Times”; and then there was the surge of the Christian Right from 2016 until 2020, and again in 2022, with the Ottawa convoy protest. So there were a lot of lively little kernels in that first story, enough for a book, it turned out.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I’ve done only two readings. Each time I enjoyed it: it’s thrilling to witness people’s attention to your words, but needless to say, it’s not essential. What’s been essential is feedback from my writing group.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I wouldn’t say theoretical concerns, but my work has questions and concerns, yes, absolutely. Despite having left Pentecostalism, I remain fascinated by people of faith. I’m curious about what their faith makes possible for them, where it can take them, especially people with more precarious lives, such as immigrants and single mothers.

During the period when I began to write in earnest, Trump was newly elected and the damage wrought by white evangelicals was on full display. My first feeling towards many white evangelicals who supported Trump was contempt, and that reaction unsettled me when it implicated people I loved. After a while my contempt grew tedious. I wanted to explore a fuller range of emotions and perceptions vis à vis evangelicals. Also, I had long felt that there were things secular people didn’t understand about evangelicals, and I wanted to explore some of those blind spots.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

It’s fair to say that the contemporary literary writer is pretty marginal within the larger culture.

What do I think the writer’s role should be? I struggle with this. I don’t even know what the larger culture is anymore. There’s a bunch of niches, a few of which I find either stimulating or cozy. I think literature is still useful for people who seek out complex expressions of human life, where there is space for ambiguity and ambivalence and the emotions or thoughts that make us doubt our own certitudes. After all, reading a good story is an experience of being surprised, recognizing that you didn’t understand a character or a situation as fully as you thought you did. A story turns the experience of uncertainty, which in life we usually dislike, into a pleasure. In a story, I can be delighted by uncertainty and the eventual apprehension of my own ignorance. In this way, literature can be a tiny countervailing force to the snappy strong opinions of social media.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Essential! I can never see my words the way another reader does, so once a story is fully drafted it’s a gift to hear what another reader who cares about literature experienced as they read my words.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Write what you’d like to read.

10 – How easy has it been for you to move between genres (journalism to short fiction to essays to critical prose to the novel)? What do you see as the appeal?

Very! It has been a relief, in fact. When writing in one genre feels stalled (say, memoir), I can always switch to another (like fiction!), which feels fresh and exciting.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

When I can, I write in the morning, though first I read for 20-30 minutes. I need to be reminded of the thrill of literature by someone else’s example. Also, there’s always a snack, even if I’ve just eaten breakfast. I never sit at a desk, always in an easy chair or on a couch. It’s a fairly spoiled routine.

When I began to write creatively in earnest, I realized that I would need to make the experience pleasurable to build the necessary endurance to finish a project. Given the failure built into the writing life (as Stephen Marche has recently argued in his exhilarating book On Writing and Failure), the experience of writing has to be enough. And once you get into it, it is.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Books! I started to write creatively because it didn’t feel like ‘enough’ to be a reader. My faves are fairly canonical. Munro. Flannery O’Connor. George Eliot. Woolf. Also: Bohumil Hrabal, Rachel Cusk, Yiyun Li, J. M. Coetzee, Gogol.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Lynda Barry has a great piece about how bad we are at identifying the smells of our own homes, which to us smell like nothing much. Probably the home with the most distinctive smell was my childhood home, which was above my mother’s health-food store. It had that classic ‘small health-food store’ smell—notes of chamomile, nettle, cinnamon, glycerin, freshly-ground peanut butter, and a bunch of other spices and herbs.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Nature is the closest thing. As I get older I am consistently charmed by nature. The way I now notice the texture of lichen on a tree or the swoop of a chickadee’s flight has made its way into my work. During the pandemic I started foraging for mushrooms on Mont Royal, and that activity oriented me towards decay and death in unexpected ways, resulting in the story “Matsutake.”

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Like many middle-aged people I have been drawn to meditation. Shunryu Suzuki and Pema Chödrön are the bomb!

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Garden. In fact I’ve just started this spring, but I haven’t really ‘done’ gardening yet. I am becoming an aficionado of worms.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I don’t know. I feel very absorbed by my current life.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

As many people have acknowledged, making art isn’t really a choice. It’s something I have to do to feel sane.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence!!! Somehow I never got around to it in grad school. The exploration of wealthy 1870s New York life, wry but above all precise—oh the tyranny of pleasantness!—and the way the protagonist Archer’s inner life secretly threads itself through the niceties of that world, the ways he fools himself about what he feels, it all feels so true even now.

Filmwise, I loved The Farewell, its mix of pathos and hilarity; and also the way it presents the audience with a situation they might not agree with (a family lie) but invites them to stay with it and try to understand it.

20 - What are you currently working on?

Recently I’ve returned to personal essays. I suspect that I have a creative systolic/diastolic system whereby I alternate between nonfiction and fiction. We’ll see!

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Cary Fagan

Cary Fagan is the author of eight previous novels and five books of short stories, including The Student, Great Adventures for the Faint of Heart, and A Bird’sEye. His latest is The Animals. He has been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Writers’ Trust Fiction Award, the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, and has won the Toronto Book Award and the Canadian Jewish Book Award for Fiction. He is also an acclaimed writer of books for children, having won the Marilyn Baillie Picture Book Award, the IODE Jean Throop Book Award, a Mr. Christie Silver Medal, the Joan Betty Stuchner—Oy Vey!—Funniest Children’s Book Award, and the Vicky Metcalf Award for Literature for Young People. Fagan’s work has been translated into French, Italian, German, Dutch, Spanish, Catalan, Turkish, Russian, Polish, Chinese, Korean and Persian. He still lives in his hometown of Toronto.

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

When I first began to produce and send out fiction, I had a difficult ten years of having book-length manuscripts turned down.  Just to make myself feel better I published a chapbook of two short stories which I gave away and sent to various people.  One of the people I sent it to was Timothy Findley and a few days later he phoned me to say he was going to mention me on CBC television as an up-and-coming writer.  (That’s the sort of person Findley was).  That was of course a real encouragement.  It didn’t change my life but it helped me through those difficult years.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

It’s a little mysterious, how the initial idea comes to me, but when it does there’s a sense of excitement I feel that makes me know it’s the real thing.  I may work on it right away but often I’ll wait months or years.  I usually start a notebook so that I can write down any thoughts I have and eventually I start finding scenes.  At some point I’ll be able to write down a scene list in order; that’s often what I use as the basis for an outline to get me through the first draft.  The better the outline, the better my first draft, but still I don’t want it to be too detailed.  Often I write the first draft by hand; after that it's on to the laptop.  It’s the second and third drafts where I reshape and expand the story, so that it becomes what it needs to be.  The drafts after that (another two to six drafts) are a matter of working on the weak spots, of pushing the end a little farther, of refining the voice and style.

4 - Where does a poem or work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

The last twenty years or more I’ve tended to think in book projects.  So if I start writing stories, I imagine myself building towards a collection.  This was true of my last one, “Great Adventures for the Faint of Heart,” and I think is why, although they are all different, there are some common thematic threads.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

Fiction writers don’t generally consider readings as important as poets do.  Fiction is more, I imagine, a voice that a reader hears inside themselves.  I usually only do readings after a new book comes out and I get invitations.  That said, I do enjoy reading the work to an audience, and getting a sense of their response to it. (On the other hand, I do a lot of presentations to kids in schools and libraries for my kids’ books.)

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I’ve been dismayed to see the role of the writer diminish over the course of my professional life.  That being said, I’ve never seen myself as a Richler, a Findley, or an Atwood—someone making large statements, in fiction or elsewhere, about where we are and where we are going.  I’m writing in a more minor key.  That’s the kind of writing I like best.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I know that some writers consider a particular editor crucial to their work.  This has never been true for me, perhaps because I’ve moved publishers every couple of books.  Even when I stay, the editor often moves on.  And as I only send a book out when I believe it is truly finished, I’m pretty lightly edited.  That’s not to say that the editor doesn’t help to make the books better and I’m grateful for their expertise.  Usually I’m a little anxious until I get the editor’s notes and know that we are on the same page and I can respond adequately to the issues raised.  Even when their impact is minor, it’s important for lifting the book to the next level.  I’ve been lucky to have worked with some very talented editors, most recently Peter Norman for The Animals.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

My old friend Norman Levine once said to me (I’m sure it wasn’t the first time he said it) that a bad review can spoil your lunch but it should never spoil your dinner.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to short stories to children's books to novels to picture books to non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

I write stories, novels, and books for kids—picture books and ‘middle grade’ novels.  That didn’t happen right at the start but occurred over time.  I now find that it keeps me writing.  When I put down the draft of a novel in the morning I can pick up a kid’s manuscript in the afternoon.  I love doing them all but certainly go through periods when my imagination is more attuned to one form or another for months or even a year at a time.  And by now I can’t pretend that all the work doesn’t inform each other.  My children’s work has influenced my adult and vice versa.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I usually have two writing sessions a day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon.  If I can, I’ll have the second in one of the cafes near my home, or wherever I happen to be.  I much prefer writing out in the world than at home. The ambient noise, the sense of being near people but not with them, helps me to concentrate. Plus the coffee’s better.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I usually have two or three manuscripts on the go so if something is not working I can put it down and pick up another.  I’ve published a couple of books that I put down for ten or twelve years before picking up again.  Reading also helps. 

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Gefilte fish?

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Music certainly.  I am an avid amateur (very much amateur) musician and jam with friends every week.  Music has often entered my work in one way or another.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

I read a lot; it’s one of the great pleasures of life, isn’t it?  At the moment I’m reading Colm Toibin’s new novel about Thomas Mann, Andrea Barrett’s book of stories Natural History, a book on early country music recordings by Tony Russell, a memoir by somebody who worked in a Paris restaurant for seven years, and a few different books of poetry.  (I do read a lot of Canadian books, just not at this moment.).  All of it feeds my own work and makes me want to write more and better.  And one day if I stop writing, then I’ll just be a happy reader.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I used to want to write plays as well, but I think that ship has sailed.  I’ll be happy if I can just keep on keeping on.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I like to work with my hands.  I’ve built a couple of instruments and would have enjoyed being a luthier.  Maybe a violin maker.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I decided that I wanted to be a writer when I was about 12 so there really was never another option.  Other than fireman.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Last great book?  Maybe Jon McGregor’s novel, Reservoir 13.  Last great film?  Perhaps Drive My Car.  My partner and I are trying to see as many films by the director, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, as we can find.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m finishing the second draft of a new novel.  And I better get back to it.  Thanks for the questions!

12 or 20 (second series) questions;