Lightly edited for clarity, this dialogue took place at Hemingway’s Bar in Toronto on November 28th, 2024.
Kevin: [whistling The First Noël]
Nina (arriving): Oh my god. They brought us blankets? Is this you?
Yeah, I put that there.
This is yours? This belongs to you?
I’m a steward of it temporarily.
Oh. Who does it belong to?
Well, whoever gets it next, I guess. I don’t know. Possession is a peculiar subject.
[laughs] My. Kevin, everything is a peculiar subject with you.
That’s true.
Because you treat it as such.
Well …
I’m going to keep my coat in my lap like the warm animal that it used to be.
…
Believe it or not I was here two months ago and at that time it was like, I haven’t been here in more than ten years. So this, to me, is like an alien planet. I don’t come here. I don’t know this place.
Right.
Except for the thing: I had to do a speech just two blocks north. And even then, getting here, I forgot that Yorkville existed.
Well, I do feel like it’s the artist’s injunction to see things as if for the first time in order to defamiliarize them for a reader.
Ha.
So you’re perfectly in line with that tradition.
Nina in Yorkville. Nina in Yorkville.
Nina in Yorkville: A Memoir.
—[laughs] Memoir. Yeah.
Doesn’t look—
—Um, so did you want to—
—Like they have tea.
—Have a snack, or did you want—
—Oh, I’m going to have clam chowder.
Oh, cool. Oh, this is the food. No, I’m going to have … What’s warming?
—Have something Hemingwayesque? They might have a warm something. They don’t have tea.
I could have some scotch.
That’s true. That is warming.
…
[whistles the first two bars of Für Elise]
Okay. Yeah, I think that’s what I’ll be doing. And some water.
(in a Corsican accent) Perfetta.
And then on the snack-front, maybe later. Your next thing is …
Six.
Your hard out is six or maybe five-thirty or whatever.
Um. My …
Okay. Interesting.
My next confluence will begin at six here, and so we’ve got an hour and a half.
Yeah, you don’t have to travel, so that’s good.
Yeah.
So, you like people watching, too?
Oh, yeah. It’s all research.
Do you like people watching while you’re talking, or while someone else is talking, and you don’t want to make eye contact with them while they’re talking?
You know, I think, as I’ve comfortably relaxed into myself, I realize that eye contact’s really intense for me, and so I actually like to have something to do with my eyes either while I’m speaking or while somebody else is speaking. I think I prefer to be looking elsewhere while speaking to someone because otherwise I might communicate disinterest in what they have to say.
Mm.
And I could be listening attentively wherever my eyes are going or even if my eyes are closed.
Yeah. I’m the same w—While talking, I have to look away; but when other people are talking, I like to look at their face.
Mm.
I don’t know why [sighs].
Well, this way we both get to see—
—Take turns.
—One another without—
[chuckles]
—Having to do so simultaneously.
Yeah.
And in that sense, as with any conversation—
—It’s perfect.
—It’s like we’re trading fours like a jazz ensemble of two people.
[laughs] So you’re good? You’re busy. You’re happy? Are you feeling happy?
All of those things, yeah.
Really?
I’d say.
So this lifestyle suites you. You don’t feel—
—At the moment.
—Jangled by it.
Yeah, at the moment—as long as meditation and exercise are consistent.
What type of each do you do? What type of exercise do you do?
Mostly weights. I’ve been weight-training pretty much daily for the last year or so—different muscle-group each day, kind of thing.
Mm.
And then meditation—For a time, while I was in my hometown and going regularly to the gym there, which has a steam room, I was trying to convince myself that sitting in the steam room is meditation. Not really. But I chant daimoku, it’s called—the repetition of a Japanese-Buddhist phrase.
Mm.
And sometimes silent sitting meditation. It kind of varies depending on the environment. I’ve been in monasteries of a couple different denominations this year and just kind of match whatever they’re up to.
Right.
Yeah. So.
So if you keep that up, you can handle the travel and the meetings and the jumping from one thing to another?
Caffeine helps too.
[chuckles]
Yeah.
See that’s the first thing I had to give up, caffeine.
Okay, yeah.
Yeah, I gave up cigarettes—No, cigarettes came first, actually: caffeine is the second thing I gave up. I’m back on cigarettes but caffeine—I couldn’t go back. Physically, my body would not let me.
Because it became too much?
Oh, just my nervous system—
—Yeah.
—Couldn’t tolerate it.
You’re already caffeinated? Inherently caffeinated?
I don’t seem that way though. I don’t think—
—You seem really sharp and agile right now.
Oh, really?
[a baby cries in the restaurant simultaneous to Nina’s turning her head towards it]
See what I mean?
I don’t think most people that know me would think of me as a caffeinated personality but I still can’t even handle caffeine. It becomes chaos very quickly: let’s put it that way. Maybe it required a lot of practice and control to have it be quiet and then a bit of caffeine and I just—I lose control immediately.
I see.
And, yeah. I could lose a half-day worth of work or productivity. It happened twice: accidentally had caf-coffee instead of decaf and lost four to six hours of my life. Like, it was wild.
Wow.
And this is from someone who—I did a bunch of other drugs as well. I’m familiar with drugs and uppers and stimulants and that kind of thing.
Yeah.
But caffeine was different, man. Them’s different. But I’m jealous. I’m jealous that you can still have it because, when I was younger, I remember one of life’s cheap pleasures was waking up and having coffee.
Mm.
Like, I would go to bed the night before and be like, I can’t wait to wake up tomorrow.
Mm.
That’s how much I actually really loved coffee.
Mm.
Yeah.
Yeah.
[the baby wails]
I found myself struck by sunlight and secondhand smoke and the smell of coffee the other day and it was that trifecta—
[chuckles]
—That I missed.
Sunlight was the first thing, you said?
Morning sunlight, coffee, and cigarettes. Now if I know a smoker nearby well enough I’ll just ask them to blow it in my face.
[chuckles]
I can’t get enough of it.
I didn’t bring mine today. I don’t smoke full-time anyway. But I didn’t know if we would have a drink or not. When I do have a drink, that’s when I smoke. But I left them at home so unfortunately I can’t blow that in your face—I apologize.
[chuckles] I happen to know there’s a tobacconist just this side of Hemingway’s, and so—
—Eighty dollars for a pack—
—Artisanal cigarillos, yeah.
Hand-rolled by a Brazilian.
There you go.
Yeah. No doubt.
And how are you?
Um … I’m okay, I would say. I’m not great but I’m definitely not bad. I haven’t been bad in twenty years, but yeah. I’m okay. That’s about all I’ll say.
Okay. Fair.
No, nothing’s going on. You don’t have to give me deep looks. This is a hard time of year in general for me.
Yeah.
And book stuff is not what I expected, I guess.
Mm.
Yeah, so there’s a little bit of a whiplash, I think—
—Hm. Tell me about that—
—For me. Yeah, I don’t know. That’s been going on since … I published last September my first thing ever. But leading up to that, that was also years of work in the edit.
Tell me about whiplash. This is interesting. I’ve not heard an author describe their experience after the publication of a book as whiplash.
Really?
Yeah, yeah.
What have they described? I just wanna know.
I have heard people talk about this sense of, in a very premeditated, careful, rehearsed way, offering a song to the Grand Canyon and hearing no echo.
Meaning what?
Meaning it was an anticlimactic—
—Oh.
I’ve heard that from poets.
Oh.
Yeah.
And what did they expect? Or what did they hope?
I think they probably hoped for an echo.
In what form? I’m talking very concrete.
No, please—yeah. Opening the door—
Lisa: Hi! How are you?
Excellent. How are you?
Hi!
I love that water bottle. It’s so cute.
Oh, thank you.
Yeah. Can I start you off with some drinks or do we need a minute with the menu?
I’m going to have a drink.
Yeah.
I’m going to have the Glenlivet. I’ll do a double. And then I’ll just have some water on the side. And for food I’m just gonna chill and sit back.
Absolutely. Do you want ice in there or do you want it neat?
Neat is fine.
Clam chowder for me, please.
Okay.
Thank you. That’s all.
Yep. Perfect.
I can imagine somebody would walk out of their apartment on the day the book had been published and just expect that people would be showering them with tangerines and handfuls of uncooked rice, congratulating them on having summited the mountain of themselves.
It is a summit, though.
Yeah.
I don’t deny that. Absolutely not. How did you feel when yours came out? Were you expecting that?
Well, my first full-length book came out during the pandemic and so I wasn’t expecting anything, although I was secretly hoping for all of the prizes and all of the money.
[laughs]
I wasn’t expecting that though.
[chuckles]
I mean, as I tend to do, I scheduled a book tour for myself, which then became a digital one, so I read digitally in different cities by summoning local openers from each of those cities.
Clam chowder should be out any minute.
Thank you so much. And I didn’t really expect more than that, to be honest. I’ve always felt, with any kind of publication—not embarrassed by it, but—as if this is one small cobble in a long road and to focus on it too much would be to neglect the road. And it feels like done work, too, by the time it’s in print, right? There’s that tension between how much of the published work you want to read aloud as opposed to how much you want to read that’s newer and feels maybe more reflective of the moment or where you’re at artistically and emotionally. So I don’t know that I had expectations but there were also secret, dashed hopes of … I was imagining my speech to give in Stockholm, you know?
[laughs]
Just anticipating that the Nobel Committee was going to call me—
[laughing] For poetry?
—And just bestow—Yeah, I mean I figured that they’d just invent a new category for the Nobel Prize and then just give that to me and then—
—The Kevin Category—
—Discontinue it the year after.
The Kevin Category.
It’s the combination of no expectations and that.
So did you think that your work, when you wanted all the prizes and wanted all the money, did you think your work was good enough? Did you believe that much in the work that you were like—
—I thought as a first book it’s a solid debut. If I’m capable of an objective view, I thought that it was a solid debut. But that’s not to countenance the field in which it was appearing: lots of people had solid debuts that year.
Yeah.
And at the same time I also appreciate that the value or quality of work is really subjective and—
—Yeah—
—I think, for instance, of an experience I had at a residency that I painstakingly applied to and then when I got there and had conversation with, and saw the offices of, the people who were organizing it, they were like, Basically everybody gets in. There was this one guy this one time but anyway pretty much anybody who sends an application … And sometimes being on juries and stuff and both sides of casting—
Rodney: How are we doing over here? I’ve got a clam chowder.
Thanks so much.
Can I grab you anything else right now?
I think that’s all for now, thanks.
Enjoy.
That’s perfect. Thank you.
[unintelligible]
That’s enough about me though. You tell me.
Tell you about what? The whiplash?
Well, let’s formalize things and I’ll switch on the recording, if that’s okay—
You weren’t recording?
…
You said so much. Your part makes it in too, right? I’ve seen your other Q&As where you would have portions of talk. You’re not going to cut that out and—
—I feel—
—Unless you want to cut it out.
I feel I can more liberally distill what I say than what others say but I love for this to be a conversation rather than—
—So you’d be willing to leave in your parts.
Sure. Sure, sure. Yeah. Yeah.
Except for the fact that you hadn’t recorded this last little bit.
Um … Well …
Can I say something to the recorder?
You can say anything ever.
So, in the past seventy-two hours I have not been looking forward to this interview.
Amazing. That’s where we start.
Yeah.
Don’t take it personally?
I’m just not—Oh, not about you at all. Interview, right? I’m just not in the mood to talk about writing.
Great. Let’s not talk about writing, then.
Would you be open to that?
Oh, come on. Let’s go! I don’t care. Interviews are stupid anyway. Let’s just have conversation. Let’s talk about anything.
Because talking about it is somehow damaging to me—
—Love it—
—So I have to space out—
—Fantastic—
—Yeah, and I had a couple events in the summer and I’m like, I can also just not talk about it for six to eight months and be really cool with that.
Fabulous.
But then we had this thing and the past few days I was like, I’ve got to see Kevin. I’ve got to see Kevin.
Three days is so good. Seventy-two hours. [Sings Cohen’s] Hallelujah.
[laughs]
So great.
But then, what do we talk about?
We’re going to find out.
Okay. How about this? Do you like talking about writing? Why and why not?
Um … I like clam chowder.
It smells amazing.
Well. I have to admit that, very often, and it might be coming from my own narcissism, if not megalomania—earlier described as a hope without expectation of winning all of the prizes in response to my first book—
[chuckles]
—That any conversation I’m taking part in has to be recorded and then published and then, maybe in a North Korea-like fashion, piped in through every speaker in every cafeteria the world over. It’s not quite as bad as that, but I do feel like the conversations that I’m fortunate to have, I want a record of. So, as long as—I’m happy to talk—or, more importantly and more sincerely—listen on any subject, but I do prefer for it to be on the record to some extent and then for there to be a conversation afterwards as to whether or not it can appear in print.
I wonder if you missed my question though. I said ‘about’ writing.
In that sense, I feel like—So, with that proviso, that I’d prefer for any conversation to take place in print—at this moment, anyway; I don’t know: maybe that says something about my capacity for intimacy or something like that, but—I would say, I’m no more interested in the subject of writing than in any other subject. But I’m interested in every subject.
Mm.
And it’s more about whoever I’m speaking with than it is about the subject. If you had like three minutes on the relationship between the cochlea and the seashell, I’d be as fascinated to hear about that as any considered statement you might have about poetics and maybe more. I’m thinking about this series in Toronto called Trampoline Hall, which provides platforms to experts to talk about subject matter in which they have no formal expertise but in which they’re interested. I think that’s maybe more interesting than hearing someone offer whatever they’re supposed to have an expert opinion regarding. And so in that sense, I might even be more interested in—especially talking with a writer—talking about something other than writing.
Right.
I remember there was a conversation in which Margaret Atwood was asked, What did you and Alice Munro talk about when you got together recently? And she said, We talked about car insurance.
[laughs]
And somehow that was way more interesting than anything they could ever communicate with each other about writing. So, that’s my way of not answering the question and then returning the question to you.
Okay. I can ask another question that’s in the same vein. And this explains why I ask. I struggle to talk about writing. I read other interviews or see other interviews of writers talking about writing. I feel deeply frustrated during and after the process and I have never once stumbled across any insight being forced to verbally in the moment with a stranger or semi-stranger.
Mm.
I’ve never actually uncovered anything valuable.
Love it.
Anything I’ve ever uncovered that’s valuable has always been alone, ruminating.
Mm, mm, mm, mm.
And having an interview today with you—We met before, had some fun, and this was the follow-up. And I just felt I don’t know that I want to talk about writing.
Love it.
So I’m asking you, Do you feel good when you’re talking with a writer about writing? Do you actually uncover something where you’re like, Wow. This was cathartic. I’m so glad I talked about writing. And that to me is foreign, so I want to hear about it. Maybe you remember the last time you felt a whoosh of discovery or illumination.
I mean … Sometimes I feel like experts of any kind talking about their expertise in the context of conversation with other experts, it’s almost like they’ve all got—this is an anecdote I’m imagining in sympathy with what you just said—It’s as if those experts were presenting a variety of vials in which they’d farted—
[laughs]
—Which were kept in the inside of one side of their jacket, and they pulled one of the vials out and, very considerately, like a sommelier—
[laughing] No!
—Sniffed at their own flatulence, and then corked it and then said, And now you. And then the other expert did the same in reply. And it was as if that constituted a conversation. How’s that?
That is not—Okay, I just want to be clear that that’s not my sentiment at all.
[laughs]
I hope you’re not trying to one up me or something.
No, no.
Never the farts. I’m not saying it’s flatulent. I’m saying, I don’t know how to do it. Don’t you envy people who know how to do things you don’t know how to do? Don’t you see the gazelle leaping over the log and think, I would love to fly through air like that but I’m the cumbersome elephant that stumbles and falls and smashes the log? Okay, I admit I don’t know how to fly. And other writers, sometimes they’re great at it and that’s part of them.
Mm.
That’s part of the mystique. And I’m like, Maybe I want to buy that book and it doesn’t have anything to do with the book or anything but you’re like, I’ve just stumbled upon an interesting person that’s very well-spoken.
Mm.
Anyway—
—That’s great. That’s great—
—Talking about writing just makes me feel weird all over.
Great, great. Love it.
Yeah. Although maybe six days from now I’ll be revisiting this moment and I’ll be like, Oh, I could have said that to Kevin. And that was the thing I was supposed to uncover and that I might never have uncovered if we hadn’t bumped into each other—but I needed six days and I had to be by myself in a quiet place that’s familiar to me. So maybe it’s worth it but in the moment I’m awkward being here. I would rather be this guy. This guy looks amazing already. I love the coat.
They’re both just like, Why are these two looking at us all of a sudden?
Yeah. But one smiled.
At you. Or maybe it was at me.
Actually they checked us both out and then they grinned. They smiled.
They mutually agreed that they didn’t prefer me [laughs].
[laughing] There was no preference. It was a moment of, And how do you do? And we said, We do well, thanks. And that was it. It was very simple.
Mm. Well, two things there. One, I’m not trying to one-up you. Although I can imagine—
—I meant the flatulent thing was definitely a step up from what I said.
Not a step up. It was a lateral.
[laughs]
It was a symphonic lateral—
—You thought those were equivalent? That’s insane.
Everything’s equivalent. There are no hierarchies. Why are you inventing them and then situating me at the top of them so that you can suffer like the oppressed beleaguered proletariat at the base?
No, I did not set that up either. You’re just spinning out of control.
I’m caffeinated.
[laughs] Yeah, that last place where you met the group, you had a few espressos? Seven or eight, or? Did they—
—Three consecutive cappuccinos but there’s a certain understanding at a certain point where they just hook me up to an intravenous drip and because—
—That’s what I was—
—We’re close enough to the paediatric clinic that—
—You had three cappuccinos?
That was my third tête-a-tête of the day, so—
—Oh my god—
—It’s been over the last four hours or something.
So we don’t have to talk about writing. I think we both agreed that it can be liberating to be writers who don’t talk about writing.
Love it.
Do you like writing the best or do you like all the other—You’re the multihyphenate, right? So I’m curious.
“The” multihyphenate? I don’t know about the definite article but that’s to refer to writing terminology and we’re not doing that.
[laughs]
I would say that I was just having a conversation with an actor this morning, for instance—Jack: he and I acted together when we were at school and he’s now in Toronto and working and started a little production company and—
—Good for him—
—He’s—Yeah, he’s great and he functions in multiple roles depending on context, you know? He’s an actor on stage sometimes and sometimes on camera; he’s sometimes a producer; he’s sometimes a writer or a director or runs a background-actor agency to help with provision of extras for filmmakers who come to town and are looking for that service. And so, he was talking about the difficulty of introducing himself in that way, saying, I have this background-actor company but I’m also a producer and I’m also an actor. And how people will try to fit him into whatever category pre-exists their conversation so that they can maybe more conveniently recall him later. And I think that just has to do with how much attention we afford to—I’m thinking of Anne Carson, who says, Looking closely helps—how much attention we allow to be sustained towards anything to realize it’s extremely complex. And so to refer to anything as anything is misleading. And so, in this context, we’re just having a conversation: so, I’m a conversationalist across the table from Nina at this moment.
I had asked you something and you just went everywhere.
You’d asked me about being “the” hyphenate.
Next time one cappuccino and you’re—
[laughs]
—Cut off. You’re cut off.
Someone reviewed the transcript of a conversation I had with Sarah Burgoyne, the experimental Montréal-based poet, and he said, You speak like I think on meth.
[Laughs] I think that’s a compliment, right?
That’s once again to create a hierarchy that doesn’t necessarily—It’s neither better than nor worse than, neither compliment nor insult, but it’s what he communicated.
So what was that quote that you just dropped?
Looking—
—Looking—
—Closely—
—Closely—
—Helps—
—Helps.
It’s actually John Cage, but Anne Carson quotes it.
That makes me think of my sort of living-to-rumination ratio; and I feel like I’m the sort of person, especially as I’ve gotten older—I’ve kept reducing the size of my life and the overall footprint because I was always just making more and more time for ruminating; and I think that I got to writing a bit later in life than others because it took me a while. I was focussed on living and not because I wanted to, but definitely because I knew that’s what I was here for. But now—I’m turning 42 in January—I feel like I’m at the stage where I’m like 20% should be living and I’m happy with a life that is 80% rumination.
Love it.
And I’m happy with the idea of writing at that granular, looking-closely level, you know what I mean? I think it’s very niche. And I’m totally okay with being niche. I actually fucking love niche. But I think some other people I’ve met, that ratio is definitely different. I feel like you live a lot more than you ruminate. I feel like, just to look at your passport, is like, Wow. This guy. You do a lot. Let’s just acknowledge you do a lot.
Um.
When do you have time to think about what you do? To process it before or after? When do you do that?
Well, in response to your 80-20 ratio, I was talking to a friend recently who was castigating herself for not being productive enough. And my response to her was, Don’t shame the pear tree three seasons of the year.
Hm.
You know? And I just talked with Jim Johnstone about that. He’s in a place where he’s really bringing a lot of stuff to fruition right now and it’s demanding a lot of him and there’s this sense of coincident fruition that might make for the appearance of being busier than one is on a day to day basis. I really think of the practice that I’m in the midst of as being one of crop rotation. There are some things that take a long time to germinate and other things—
—Mm—
—A shorter period of time. A couple of years from now I’m going to be allowing the fruition of projects which have been in development for four, five, or more years depending on how you define their beginning. And I’m thinking of John Patrick Shanley here. He was asked, How long did it take you to write the play Doubt? And he said, in essence, There are two ways to respond to that question. One is, It took six weeks. Another is, It took forty-three years. And that itself is limited to an individualistic conception of the origin of anything, which might not be the most helpful way to frame things.
I like Shanley.
Yeah, totally. Tell me about that.
He did a very weird surreal adult fable that’s widely panned but I saw it first at the age of nine and over the years have kept rewatching it, so now it’s fully a part of me. Have you heard of Joe Versus the Volcano?
Heard of, but I don’t know anything about, it.
I don’t even have the time to get into that. I don’t want to … No, I don’t want to say this because it’s in an interview.
You can—
—You said I could cut anything, right—
—Yeah, completely. Nothing will appear without your—
Okay. Okay. It’s a deeply, deeply, cheesy, shamelessly open-hearted movie. And that’s why it was panned. But it was just the right amount of camp and I saw it at the right time and it’s been three decades since and I still watch it once a year and the innocence of it … I don’t know. I just felt like rewinding thirty years. I must have been ten-ish; Shanley was probably twenty-five or something. Right? Or was he—Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter.
Matters no less than anything else.
There was a type of innocence that felt both very old and very young. You know how, as you get older, you just kind of return to some things from when you were—Yeah, that sort of thing? And it’s weird to be middle-aged because the young doesn’t feel too far away but the old definitely doesn’t feel far away either and that movie … I don’t know. I don’t even want to ask you to watch it because I feel like—
—Oh, no. I don’t take any recommendations of any kind. But you’re welcome to offer them—
—Because it’s not—No, but I wouldn’t. But when you say Shanley, I know he was famous for Doubt and some other things. I know he did a lot of theatre. But to me it was just this oddity. Anyway. I like Shanley.
You asked when I have time for rumination. I’m usually up really early to meditate and I spend a couple hours in the morning at the gym and do a lot of pacing between sets and thinking.
So the early morning hours is your quiet time.
I think so, yeah. Sometimes evenings winding down. I think there’s often a lot of rumination that’s going on behind the scenes regardless of whether you’re conscious of it or not. I think that maybe—binaries are boring, but—if there are two types of rumination and one is conscious and the other is unconscious, I’m probably in a constant state of unconscious rumination and occasionally in a state of conscious rumination. Although I also feel like—Can you be ruminating on an experience you’re participating in? Maybe not. Maybe that’s a contradiction in terms. But I do feel like the more present I can be, the more the distance between experience and rumination narrows.
Okay.
And maybe then there’s greater overlap and maybe the ideal would be ruminating and experiencing simultaneously.
[chuckles] I’m not capable of that. My brain’s too small.
I don’t know if it’s about size. I think it has something to do with transparency.
No, I just need to be alone to ruminate.
Okay. That’s it. There you go.
And experiencing to me is—
—Wonderful—
—The loss of aloneness.
Okay. That’s great. That’s great. Yeah, yeah.
[chuckling]
I’m probably like 91% solitary.
Yeah. That’s … Maybe that’s what I meant by living and ruminating, but not—Maybe I did mean … Solitude seems a little simplistic because sometimes I’m not with someone but I’m in a place where I don’t feel alone. Anyway—
—No, please. That’s great. Fascinating.
No, I don’t think I was going anywhere special with that.
Okay, okay.
Yeah, but I think what interested me when I looked back on my life was watching myself shrink the experiencing portion. Feeling like I needed more time with everything. Feeling like, by the time I’m very old, I will probably be somewhat of a recluse.
Yeah.
Yeah, that just seems like a natural progression, the way things are going. It’s not like I want that to happen. I kind of want to still participate in this, all of this. But I can’t help that, like, everything good happens when I leave it. But I have to have visited it in the first place.
Mm.
So, it’s more of a dosage situation. I’m trying to microdose the world and microdose reality and then have the rest of the time to sober up and make sense of it and once in a while write something.
Love it. Nice. Appreciating we’re not talking about writing, but to the extent that you just invoked the word, I wonder where in that process of microdosing to sobering up the writing happens.
I can’t write during experiences.
No.
I definitely need … I’m the person for whom 99% of writing has already taken place and 1% is the typing. The typing is the last step. That’s why I’m not one of those people—You know the writers who force themselves to write everyday or have certain quotas and want to write 500 words a day or whatever? That’s great but I tried it as well and it just didn’t work for me. So I realize that it’s just a very long gestation and then the writing is a bit of a … flow state? What is another word for that? Maybe flow state is good enough. You know what I mean.
Sure, sure.
It’s a bit of a state that happens and it comes out in these chaotic rushes and then I clean it up later.
[…]
[Read Part two here]


Nina Dunic is a two-time winner of the Toronto Star Short Story Contest, has been longlisted by the CBC Short Story Prize four times, and was nominated for The Journey Prize. CBC Books named Dunic in its 2023 Writers to Watch list. Her debut novel The Clarion (Invisible Publishing) won the 2024 Trillium Book Award, was longlisted for the 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize, was selected as Best Canadian Debut by Apple Books, and was a Globe and Mail 100 Best Book of 2023. She has a forthcoming collection of short stories with Invisible Publishing in 2025. Nina lives in Scarborough, ON. Find out more at ninadunic.com.
Publisher: Invisible Publishing (September 5, 2023)
Paperback 8″ x 5″ | 208 pages
ISBN: 9781778430282
Kevin Andrew Heslop (b. 1992) is a multidisciplinary artist from Canada.
He made his poetry debut in 2021; curatorial, 2022; directorial, 2023; screenwriting, 2024.
In 2025, Heslop's third installation, of and(with Leslie Putnam, Centre [3] for Artistic and Social Practice), and a nonfiction debut, The Writing on the Wind’s Wall: Dialogues about ‘Medical Assistance in Dying’ (The Porcupine's Quill), are forthcoming alongside new work with The Fiddlehead, Parrot Art, The Seaboard Review, Astoria Pictures, The Miramichi Reader, and The American Haiku Society.
Dialogues he conducted during artist residencies in Serbia, Finland, France, Brazil, Denmark, and Japan will appear in two volumes as Craft, Consciousness: Dialogues about the Artswith Guernica Editions in 2027 and 2028.
Kevin is currently living in São Paulo to research his first feature film, a biopic about Zé Celso. Social media-shy, for more about Kevin’s practice: kevinandrewheslop.com.