You’ve published poetry, children’s fiction, literary fiction and non-fiction. Do you consider yourself a writer of one genre more than others?

A number of years ago, a colleague gave me a copy of Robert Walser’s Microscripts. These microscripts—found after Walser’s death in 1956—were thought, at the time, to be indecipherable, written in some kind of secret code. After sitting in a drawer for years, some scholars got a hold of these microscripts and realized they were tiny rough drafts of Walser’s stories. 526 of them. The lettering is one or two millimetres in height and written in the kurrent script, a form of handwriting that was used in German-speaking countries until the mid-20th century. I found this all very fascinating but what I really took away from Walser was what he said about all of his writing being like the bits of a “long, plotless, realistic story.” All of it connected because it all came from the same place: him.

I was reluctant to write a children’s novel because I didn’t think of myself as a children’s book author. I thought of myself then as primarily a short-story writer. That’s what I loved most. And so I tried not to write a children’s book until it was too late and I’d gone and written The Girl Who Could Fly. But once I had, I realized that it was really not so different from anything else I’d written. All of the concerns and obsessions that find their way into my writing for an adult readership were also present in this novel for kids, just as they had been in my poetry collection, Red Bird. That’s when I started to think of my own writing as being bits of a “long, plotless, realistic story.” It’s all connected because it all comes from the same place: me.

All that to say, no, I don’t consider myself a writer of one genre over another.

The stories in this collection appeared widely in literary magazines across Canada. How do you bring a collection of stories together that have appeared in public across time and in different venues? Do you have a sense from the beginning of their cohesion?

I rarely write anything without thinking of it as part of a book-length project. From the very first story I wrote for Astrid, Aghast (“I’m Gonna Fly”), I knew I was writing a collection of stories—and not just an individual story. That has been the case for each one of my collections, both fiction and poetry. I think, and maybe this is the wrong way to think about it, but I think that for me the cohesion (of the stories as a collection) comes from the time and place in which the stories were written. So that even when some stories might seem, on the surface, to be unrelated or unconnected, there is a thread that runs through them all because they all came from a specific time in my life and were written under similar conditions.

Of course, there were some stories that were written during the years I was working on Astrid, Aghast—some that were even published—that were not included in the book. And there is one story in the book that was written a very long time ago that was included. So there goes my theory.

Themes like absence, intimacy, and the ordinary meeting the uncanny seem to people this collection. What attracts you to structures of presence and absence?

My first book of stories is called People Leaving, so I guess presence and absence are ideas I’ve been writing about for a while now. I think it’s not so much that I’m attracted to writing about these themes or structures as it is that they simply reflect what I’m wrestling with at any given time. A number of people in my life died while I was writing Astrid, Aghast, and those absences are definitely reflected in these stories, even the stories that try to be funny—or especially in those stories that try to be funny.

As for the uncanny… I recently read Freud’s essay “The Uncanny” (Das Unheimliche) as part of some research I was doing for an essay about eels. The young Freud spent a summer working in a lab in Trieste where his only job was to find the testes on male eels. He dissected more than 400 eels that summer, but never found what he was looking for. (The testes of a male eel don’t really develop until the eel reaches sexual maturity.) As for that essay, Freud’s unheimlich, as defined by Patrik Svensson in his The Book of Eels (where I first came across Freud’s essay), is defined as “the unique unease we experience when something we think we know or understand turns out to be something else. The familiar that suddenly becomes unfamiliar.” That idea has so much literary potential, doesn’t it? It made sense to me to have some of my characters be confronted with the uncanny one way or another. I even included an eel in one story. The eel’s name is Paul.

Even for stories that don’t explicitly signal their where and when, do you have a particular time and place in mind when setting a story?

Yes and no. I’m not quite sure why it is, but I’m often wary of naming the place where any given story is set. That said, I almost always have a specific place in mind in my stories—I just don’t name it. I grew up in Western Quebec, and so that is one place I’m sometimes thinking about in my stories. (I’ve also lived in Halifax, and I have spent a fair amount of time in both the Yukon and Iceland… So those places also show up—named or unnamed—in my fiction.) I have complicated feelings about where I’m from, and I think that is part of the problem. I wrote an essay for Maisonneuve magazine last year called “I’m Thinking of a Place” that tries to address this. I’m a work in progress.

I’m curious if you can speak to some of your literary influences, on this story collection or otherwise. For example, your own Substack is named after a significant Alice Munro collection. How did her innovative use of narrative structure impact your writing, if at all?

There are five authors that immediately come to mind when I think about influences on Astrid, Aghast in particular: Lydia Davis, Dorthe Nors, Gunnhild Øyehaug, George Saunders, and Diane Williams. These are all authors who are doing new and interesting—and in some cases, unexpected—things with the short story. Their stories are wonderfully weird (Øyehaug’s story, “Small Knot”, is about a baby whose umbilical cord can’t be cut, and so he remains tethered to his mother for his whole life); some are short but somehow capacious (Diane Williams’ story “Keepsake” is composed of just 23 words that leave one thinking about the meaning of keepsake); some are hard to parse (in Dorth Nors’ “The Wadden Sea” a woman points into the fog “like it was a piece of psychology”); some are deceptively straightforward, emotionally resonant, and unforgettable (I’m thinking here of the title story in George Saunders Tenth of December); and many of these stories make you reconsider what a short story is or can be (some of Lydia Davis’s stories read like lists, letters, overheard conversations, poems, or dreams.) These are all authors whose books I’ve read more than once, especially while I was working on Astrid, Aghast.

I was just speaking with someone recently about an Alice Munro story that I used to teach… back when I used to teach. I used her story, “In Sight of the Lake” (from Dear Life), as an example of a story that breaks rules or upends expectations. The story concludes with an “it was all a dream” ending—which is exactly the kind of thing writing instructors, myself included, implore their students not to do. But somehow Munro pulls it off. I’ve often wondered if she wrote the story as a challenge to herself to see if she could write a compelling story that used that tired old trope. My students found the premise obvious and were not impressed. Since that time, and in light of recent news, my reading of Munro’s work has changed of course. How could it not?

With your latest release rapidly approaching, what’s next for you creatively?

I’m finishing up work on a collection of essays that I’m pretty excited about. It’s called Everything Is Material, Everything Is Interesting. The essays are about reading, writing, what it feels like to have a hole in your heart, skateboarding, eels, Iceland. That kind of stuff. In some ways, it feels like a departure—but of course, in other ways, it’s more of the same… all bits of my long, plotless, ongoing realistic story.