12 or 20 (second series) questions with Kit Dobson
Kit Dobson lives in Calgary, Treaty 7 territory, in southern Alberta.He is the author or editor of eight previous books, including
Malled:Deciphering Shopping in Canada
and
Field Notes on Listening
, one ofthe CBC’s top non-fiction books of 2022.
We Are Already Ghosts
, hisfirst novel, is scheduled to be published in May 2024.1 - How did your first book changeyour life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does itfeel different?
My first book was an academic book, Transnational Canadas, published in 2009. It changed my life in many ways, first andforemost by showing me that I could actually see a book through to publication.That book still brings me the occasional note from readers, for which I amgrateful. My most recent writing has shifted toward creative work, so it’squite different. The most recent examples are my 2022 nonfiction book FieldNotes on Listening and my forthcoming first novel, We Are Already Ghosts.The work now feels very changed. I have the confidence of having seen otherprojects through, which is great, and I am continuing to challenge myself innew ways.
2 - How did you come to creativenon-fiction first, as opposed to, say, fiction or poetry?
Spending a lot of time in universityshaped my initial writing. So it’s shifting from academic writing that broughtme to creative non-fiction and then to other modes. My first creativenon-fiction book was Malled: Deciphering Shopping in Canada. I initiallythought that I was writing an academic book. It took a discerning reader to letme know that I was trying to fit a creative project into a critical frame – andthat it wasn’t working. With that book, it was a matter of shedding aprotective layer (my academic voice) in order to let that book be what itwanted to be. Fiction has been harder. My thinking was that I’ve read hundredsand hundreds of novels; I’ve written essays and criticism about dozens of them;maybe I could write one. Turns out it’s really hard, as any fiction writer cantell you. Having now endeavoured to complete a novel has enriched how I readand write about all of the fictional works that I encounter. I have tremendousrespect for anyone who manages to write a novel.
3 - How long does it take to start anyparticular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is ita slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, ordoes your work come out of copious notes?
It varies so much! I work on more thanone project at a time. That means that if I get stuck on one project, I canflip to working on another – until I get stuck again and make another shift.It’s a process that works for me. So the forthcoming novel has been about nineyears in the making, but in the middle of that I paused and wrote FieldNotes on Listening, which took about five years. I kept editing the novelwhen I got stuck with Field Notes in turn (and I have more projects inthe works, ones that I’ve kept working on in fragments). All of that is to saythat my writing is a slow, laborious, and at-times painful process. Firstdrafts look nothing like their final published forms. I have a notebook inwhich I scribble notes, plot timelines, do character sketches, organize ideas,and draft in longhand, then I rewrite drafts into my computer, then I take apause, then I print out drafts, scribble all over them, and then rewrite fromscratch on the computer all over again – multiple times, as necessary. It isnot a tidy process, but it is one that I am pretty happy with.
4 - Where does a work of prose usuallybegin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into alarger project, or are you working on a "book" from the verybeginning?
For whatever reason, the scale and scope of the book worksfor me. I tend to think in book-sized and book-shaped projects, for good or forill. I may put out some smaller pieces from that project along the way, but findthat I am always working on a book from the get-go.
5 - Are public readings part of orcounter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doingreadings?
I enjoy doing some readings because I am concerned withfostering and building literary communities. Readings can be one way ofsupporting that process. But this question is perhaps a version of one that Ioften ask people who write, which is: do you prefer to write or to havewritten? That is to say, do you prefer the process or the product? While I dowrite because I have a goal of sharing an idea or of presenting an argument toreaders, if I am honest I prefer the process. There is nothing better for me thanbeing at home, at my desk (which is formerly my grandparents’ farmhouse diningtable), with a coffee, during a cold, snowy day, and writing for an hour ortwo. That’s the best. I do readings for the sake of community, friendship, andconversation – but my writerly self (who is rather an introvert at heart) ishappiest when writing.
6 - Do you have any theoreticalconcerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answerwith your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
My answer to this question will varyfrom project to project, but I am always thinking in terms of theory, society,and the political. In the broadest of terms, I concern myself with thinkingabout the world we live in, analyzing its shortcomings, and trying toarticulate how we might learn to think, see, listen, and live differently. Mypersonal goal is to leave my own little corner of the world a little bit betterwhen I go. I hope that I can do that. Whenever anyone tells me that they haveread a piece of mine, my answer is some version of “I hope that it was usefulfor you in some way.” I really do mean it. I don’t think that I am aparticularly interesting human, but I do think that we can have meaningfulconversations with each other through words. To me, that’s an amazing thing.The current questions are wide-ranging, but I am at this moment very concernedwith polarization and social fragmentation. The literary has a role to play inbridging between divides and I work in that spirit.
7 – What do you see the current roleof the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do youthink the role of the writer should be?
Writers absolutely have a role to play in larger culture. Ihave been following the conversations about book bans and censorship withinterest lately. I taught a course on this subject this past year, one thatfeatured some of the most controversial books of the twentieth and twenty-firstcenturies. If books – and by extension writers – didn’t matter, then therewouldn’t be this intense energy being directed toward banning and censoringbooks. I’ve spent many years having to defend books and literary studiesagainst the charge of being boring or passé. These days it's the reverse. Republicansin the US are threatening literal burnings of books with LGBTQ+ and BIPOCcontent and similar attempts to ban books are afoot in Canada. To me, this signis one among very many that books continue to play a vital role in culture writlarge. Books matter as a way of sharing vital information and for formingcommunities. I am a passionate believer in the importance of literary works andI believe that this role is a good one – if fraught – for writers.
8 - Do you find the process of workingwith an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Editors are crucial. Anyone who wishes to write andbelieves that they do not need an editor is, in my view, not ready to be makingtheir work public. I say this because such a resistance means that the writer isnot ready to accept feedback and criticism (which, believe me, happens when onepublishes a book). The process can be difficult, yes, but it is essential. Igave the example already of a reader – who became my editor – who let me knowthat Malled wasn’t working because of the box into which I was trying toput that manuscript. That’s one example. The editor for my latest book is Naomi K. Lewis, who is a brilliant writer, reader, and editor whom I admiretremendously. Naomi’s insights were crucial, and I do my best to maintainpositive relationships with anyone who has ever served as an editor for any ofmy projects.
9 - What is the best piece of adviceyou've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Don’t fall in love with your ownwriting. That piece of advice was given to me by Judith Mitchell, the professorat the University of Victoria who taught the introduction to literary theoryseminar that I took more than a quarter-century ago. I was frustrated by thatadvice at first because I wanted every word to count. I realize now that it wasan invitation to the recognition that one can edit one’s work without worryingabout “losing” important or valuable words. Most of what I draft doesn’t seethe light of day – and that’s a good thing. Just because one has written asentence doesn’t mean one needs to keep that sentence. Let it go. Becoming lessprecious about my writing has been tremendously helpful.
10 - How easy has it been for you tomove between genres (essays to creative non-fiction)? What do you see as theappeal?
My moving between genres has been anendeavour to respond to how best to share my arguments, ideas, or visions.Essays serve one kind of audience and creative non-fiction serves another. Myacademic training focused relatively little on thinking about audience, sothat’s something that I’ve been meditating on in depth recently. That’s not aslight against my mentors or my training; they taught me fantastic andwonderful things about how to think and how to exist in this world. I wouldn’tbe able to do the work without them. But I suppose that I wasn’t ready to learnto think in depth about audience until more recently. It’s been that shift inmy thinking about audience that has helped me to move between genres.
11 - What kind of writing routine doyou tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you)begin?
I wish I had a routine! My daily lifeis moderately chaotic. My day begins with helping everyone in my household toget set for the day, walking the dog, and so on. I answer emails from mystudents first. I plan my teaching, I do my marking, I go to meetings. I keepscholarly tasks on campus moving along. I coordinate future plans, touch basewith fellow writers, colleagues, friends. On good days, I squeeze in somewriting early on (sometimes quite early). When deadlines start to loom, I dealwith them. I think it may be easier to think of my routine in terms of seasons:fall and winter I am typically doing all of those things that I just listed ata full-out sprint. Spring and summer I get more writing done, but it remains astruggle. I look forward to a time when I might be better able to calibrate myrhythms, but I haven’t managed it lately. I do insist, though, on takingweekends away from my desk. I’ve been through enough rounds of burnout in mylife to know that I need to maintain a level of balance. I have had cycles ofburnout that have taken years for me to recover from and I never want to findmyself there again. So self-care is also very important to me, as best as I canmanage it.
12 - When your writing gets stalled,where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Inspiration is a fine word by me,partly because it is connected to breathing. I head to the woods and get abreath of fresh air. I go outdoors as much as I can and that is what grounds mypractice (literally and metaphorically). A good hike with a friend will do morefor me than any amount of trying to force my writing when I stall out.
13 - What fragrance reminds you ofhome?
Pine, spruce, cedar. I am fussy aboutsmells. I am actually fussy about almost all sensory inputs. I cut the tags outof my shirts because they itch and I can only tolerate certain fabrics. Samefor smells. If it smells like a forest in Alberta or BC, then I can enjoy it.Otherwise I struggle with fragrance. Most fragrances tip me into a kind ofsensory overload. Same with loud noises and bad lighting. My partner (rightly)tells me that I am not the easiest human to deal with.
14 - David W. McFadden once said thatbooks come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work,whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Books definitely come from books –that’s a cornerstone to my practice. But yes, books come from elsewhere too. FieldNotes on Listening came from other books, but also, and very importantly, thatbook came from the landscapes of Alberta, and northern Alberta in particular.That book is a result of over forty years of returning to the same landscapeand then slowly learning words that could attempt to convey that experience.Music, science, and visual art can inspire me in ways similar to books, but I’dreally like to emphasize the importance of returning to land and environment,especially in my most recent work. My previous non-fiction book, Malled,also involved being in specific spaces – in that case, each of the shoppingenvironments about which I was writing. I literally wrote the initial draft ofthe first chapter of that book in Calgary’s Chinook Centre mall on Boxing Day.
15 - What other writers or writingsare important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I am often asked what my favouritebook is. I thought for a very long time about this question before I settled onVirginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. It’s a novel that I return to everyfew years and I get something else out of it each time. My own novel is anattempt to mix stylistic elements of To the Lighthouse with bpNichol’s playful poetics in an Albertan setting. I have an extremely long list of keytexts in my life – touchstones to which I return and new books that devastateand inspire me – but maybe that’s a whole separate conversation.
16 - What would you like to do thatyou haven't yet done?
I would like to slow down. I couldcome up with a more zippy answers, but slowing down speaks to where I’m atright now. I return to this challenge periodically. One my commitments is to bein the forest as much as possible. Every summer for the last few years I havemanaged nearly a week of being fully off the grid, but it seems like a drop inthe bucket in an otherwise very busy life.
17 - If you could pick any otheroccupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think youwould have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
Well, it sure wouldn’t be anastronaut. (My friends know that I have a perhaps ill-founded antipathy towardsour celestial über-Menschen because they are always looking down on us.Besides, my eyesight isn’t nearly good enough.) I work at the University ofCalgary and so I am also a professor, or at least that’s my job title. I don’ttend to think of myself as a writer. Instead, I usually think of myself assomeone who writes. Back in the day I signed up to write the LSAT exam and to goto law school, but I don’t think that I would have been good at it. My baselinelevel of anxiety is too high for that profession.
18 - What made you write, as opposedto doing something else?
Increasingly I will say that the best– or even the only – reason to write is that one couldn’t not write. Ithink that that’s my reason: I couldn’t not write. It’s a thing that I do. I doother things also, but I write because I couldn’t do otherwise.
19 - What was the last great book youread? What was the last great film?
Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’reBriefly Gorgeous is the most recent book that I read that absolutelyknocked me flat. What an amazing book. Sad, devastating, and beautiful. Icannot recommend it enough. The film Portrait de la jeune fille en feuis probably the last great film; its nuanced reworking of the story of Orpheusand Eurydice made it one of the most touching and simultaneouslyheart-wrenching films that I have seen in a long time. Both are not exactlyup-to-the-moment references, but I come to some things later than others do.
20 - What are you currently workingon?
With my novel We Are Already Ghosts set to bepublished in May, I am going to dedicate some of my energies to having thefollow-up conversations that that book may lead to, for a start. Behind thatbook I have several academic projects that I am working on, none of which arereally in such a state that I can say too much about them yet. But more thanany of those things, I am working on finding small cracks of time that mightallow me to slow down. I might never complete another novel, I don’t know(though I have one in the works). I am working on community, on relationships,and on figuring out how to become a better person. I’m a work-in-progressmyself, after all.
