Why I Wrote This Book: Issue #43 — Dead Writers Takeover Issue!

Dead Writers is a collaborative fiction project of novella-length stories by Jean Marc Ah-Sen, Michael LaPointe, Cassidy McFadzean, and Naben Ruthnum. In this issue of Why I Wrote this Book, each author tells us why they wrote their piece!

Naben Ruthnum, “Placeless Delights”

I wrote Placeless Delights because I was interested in the task of writing a literary biography for a completely marginal writer; not the author of a forgotten classic, but one who through charisma, management of the correct political moment, and the endemic failures of taste that plague publishing in the 21st century, put out a terrible book that was instantly forgotten. 

I wanted to keep this writer a cipher, to have him depicted in the story by people who had viewed him as a problem in life and who continued to view him as a problem in death. The lack of fairness in how he’s perceived and depicted was exciting to me, and not something I wanted to upend or question within the story itself. 

Placeless Delights is directly inspired by a particular Henry James short story, one in which the dead writer is rightfully revered and his ghost indisputably real. I went a different way and I hope the result is compelling.

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Naben Ruthnum is a Toronto-based author of fiction and criticism. He is the author of Helpmeet, The Grimmer, and A Hero of Our Time.

Michael LaPointe, “The Events at X”

I wrote “The Events at X” in the summer of 2021, in the immediate aftermath of the discoveries of mass graves at residential schools across Canada. It seemed to me that, among white settlers who identify as liberal, and even progressive, the process of how we “other” the Indigenous subject was robustly theorized, but less well understood was how we “other” the perpetrators of genocide. In a myriad of subtle ways, even those whites who acknowledge the reality of genocide (those who don’t are beneath contempt and I won’t bother with them here) nevertheless find an escape-hatch to resist a personal identification with the perpetrators. They were religious, we say; or they were men; or anyway it was a long time ago, whereas of course the liberal white settler of today is vastly more enlightened, virtually another kind of human altogether.

If truth is necessary before reconciliation, it seems to me that we’re stalled by white settlers’ deep resistance to finding their own reflection in the faces of the perpetrators. As evidenced by the liberal response to the revelations of mass graves, we point the finger in every direction but at ourselves, leading to an almost farcical abnegation of responsibility, and the perpetuation of the conspiracy of silence that smothers this country like a coat of its characteristic snow.

“The Events at X” is my attempt to systematically shut down every possible escape-hatch, and risk a personal identification with the perpetrators. At best, of course, it can only be a supplement to the testimonials of survivors of residential schools. But one final, and rather insidious manifestation of the conspiracy of silence is the notion that only an Indigenous subject can—or “should”—write about Canada’s systematic program of genocide. This is often a well-intentioned effort to centre Indigenous voices, but over time, it has the cumulative effect of placing the burden on the survivors to articulate a program of white design—a program totally alien to their way of life, and hostile to it—while the white writer gets to keep silent, and indeed feel virtuous for their silence. No piece of literature can ever rival an authentic testimonial, but it seems to me that the time is long overdue for whites to take ownership of their own creation—speak to it—and stop discovering yet more crafty ways to create a safe emotional distance. “The Events at X” is an effort to close that distance, and trap the white reader in a truth we wish we could escape, but cannot.

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Michael LaPointe is the author of The Creep (Random House Canada, 2021). He has written for The New Yorker and The Atlantic, and he was a columnist for The Paris Review.

Cassidy McFadzean, “Getaway for Peace and Tranquility”

I started my story in Dead Writers when I visited Sicily in 2019. The first draft of Getaway for Peace and Tranquility closely aligned with reality but part of the fun of revising came from heightening the moments of anxiety and terror that the newly sober narrator experiences at a creepy Airbnb. I wanted to capture the anxiety of facing the world head-on, without the buffer that, for certain individuals, alcohol can provide. The story was initially much longer and I sent it to a few novella contests but didn’t have any success in finding a publisher. I put it aside, thinking I could perhaps include it in a short story collection one day. When Jean Marc reached out, asking if I had any stories to contribute to a series of books he was putting together, I immediately thought of Getaway. I revisited the manuscript, shortening it and tightening the language and plot. When Jean Marc paired it with Michael and Naben’s contributions alongside a story of his own in a horror-inflected collaborative project, it felt like the perfect fit. Increasingly, my fiction has played with the surreal and the speculative, influenced by writers like Mariana Enriquez, Samanta Schweblin, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Sayaka Murata. I think Getaway demonstrates my interest in the unsettling and inexplicable, as well as an inability to make sense of the world, which to me feels intrinsically strange.

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Cassidy McFadzean is the author of three books of poetry: Crying Dress (House of Anansi, 2024), Drolleries (McClelland & Stewart, 2019), shortlisted for the Raymond Souster Award, and Hacker Packer (M&S, 2015), winner of two Saskatchewan Book Awards and finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award. Her fiction has appeared in carte blanche, Joyland, Maisonneuve, The Malahat Review, and Prism International.

Jean Marc Ah-Sen, “Praise Dissection Discussion Doubt”

For my contribution to “Dead Writers,” a piece called “Praise Dissection Discussion Doubt,” I was trying to work through what certain influences meant to me and how exactly they were shaping my development as a writer. I think writers are sometimes at a loss when it comes to the question of what we are to do with our heroes, and how we can productively channel them through our own projects beyond a citation here or there in interviews or ripping them off wholesale. 

In my twenties I became obsessed with “The Fall” and in part to understand the mechanics of how a book like that was working, I wanted to write something in a prolix register and in monologue form to see if I ended up somewhere different than Camus’s Clamence. But then halfway through the experiment, I was also cogitating on Stephen Potter’s “Upmanship” books and Bertrand Russell’s “Satan in the Suburbs,” and so the piece started being inflected with all of those things too: devil worship, scheming for advantage, moral crisis.  

I’ve come around to the position that you just have to let your influences redefine what you think is possible in your discipline or convince you that questions of feasibility aren’t altogether important to begin with, just as long as you are being pushed to be responsive in some way.     

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Jean Marc Ah-Sen is the author of Grand Menteur, In the Beggarly Style of Imitation, and Kilworthy Tanner. His writing has appeared in Literary Hub, Catapult, The Comics Journal, Hazlitt, Maclean’s, and elsewhere. The National Post has hailed his writing as “an inventive escape from the conventional.”