12 or 20 (second series) questions with Véronique Darwin

Véronique Darwin has published stories in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern and PRISM International and was runner-up for the 2024 Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph, where she completed a mentorship with Sheila Heti. Her humour pieces and essays about writing have appeared in Geist, carte blanche, and Porter House Review, and she has written book reviews for EVENT, The Fiddlehead, and the Literary Review of Canada. She writes, teaches, and makes theatre with friends in the mountain town of Rossland, British Columbia. Mom Camp is her first book.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
It’s my first book, so I’d say it changed it entirely. Writers who have published books always advise you not to expect your first book to change your life, but I’m going to let it.

2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?
While I’ve tried to connect with poetry, it’s prose’s formal continuity—either in fiction and non-fiction—that most resembles the way I experience consciousness, which is what I think of as writing and reading: the delivery of a consciousness through text.

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?
Projects build up and on to each other like competing vines and I’m the house. It’s hard to see from the window but sometimes I go for a walk around the perimeter.

4 - Where does a 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’m excited to not be able to answer this, because I think each project need its own process. Like each person has a personality, each project can only be itself, and so I’m constantly meeting it where it’s at, probing gently.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Yes, I’d love to. I’m always starting up a writing group or collaborating on a musical.

I’ve lived in a small town for quite some time, but am moving to Vancouver, where I hope to be a part of regular communities of writers interacting with each other and their readers.

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’m very curious about narrative distance: point of view and how it can be better manipulated to reflect and examine consciousness, which is the great mystery of being human.

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?
Writers are reflectors, predictors and collectors. We have to be a little selfish, reclusive and observant while also engaged and meddling. At least, this is my personality and I’m a writer.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
My experience working with Leigh Nash at Assembly Press was phenomenal. Every edit was a carefully positioned query that opened up a window into the soul of the work. That being said, I think you need to learn to be your own editor until you know what your project is.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
My dad used to walk by me reading and tell me to look up from the page every once in a while. He meant it literally—I’ve since continued to progressively lose my eyesight—but I took it figuratively.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (short stories to essays)? What do you see as the appeal?
I find it easy and generative, though this makes me a little bit of a squirelly writer. I store nuts here and there and run around shouting about it. In the end, I’m trying to cultivate an energy that allows me to both sit down and write and also send off what I’ve written, and if it’s going to be by losing my chill, so be it.

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’ve been a full-time teacher for the past decade, and it took me a while to figure out how to make that work. It does right now: I wake up at 5am and write (or do writerly things) for an hour and a half. Then I try to return to the desk or the work at some point in the evening. I’m quitting teaching so we’ll see what happens.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I turn to books that exist already. I also turn to my notebooks. Or I just get my fingers going on the keys or my hand wrapped around a pen. It’s always in me, somewhere.

13 - What was your last Hallowe'en costume?
Oh! I hosted one half of a progressive Halloween party, where your costume had to evolve between houses. Three friends and I were construction workers who turned into the bejewelled Louvre robbers. It was a timely costume.

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’d actually like to say no. Of course the world influences me, but I’m writing a book, and I couldn’t agree with McFadden more.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Miriam Toews and Sheila Heti are two Canadian writers who have taught me, through their books (and Sheila’s mentorship!) so much of what writing means to me. I’m always finding new crushes but I’m loyal to those authors I found early.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Write a novel! Like, not a fragmented one that is also an interconnected short story collection.

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 going through it right now: what’s not a teacher? Then I think about a college instructor or university professor, but that’s a teacher. I’d like to be a student for a while (but that’s a teacher).

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Books! I want to make what I love. I want to give back and see my book cuddled up on the shelf.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I’m reading Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume series the day they publish in English—we’re now at 4 of 7 volumes and they’re not slowing down. I’m trying to watch 100 films this year but am at a scant 20 and it’s May. My recent favourite was Peter Hujar’s Day (Ira Sachs 2025). It changed my journalling practice.

20 - What are you currently working on?
That novel! And also an inside-out text about my abandoned first novel.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Ryan Skrabalak, Goes on now except)

 

I couldn’t hold lots of things. I could hold people but how in hand how people. What peopling. Idea of what not to hold. Land cast deeper into unknown more known, more demarcated instance, less we knew. Less the memory of the place. It held lots of things and it did hold people. From far I walk on mountain shrunk, dry purple descending closest to eye world. Eye held things, temple of phrases. Margin fractal that’s how memory holds, it held people and land but congealed. Shadow emulsified which held the non-light, the profession of desire. Syllables into the planet, they hold the DNA of the words. Our lives held on the secret in the word. Articulate lives. When escaping with the birds held in the air. I should have poured your water, that which held you. (“Flow state”)

From Kingston, New York poet, editor and publisher Ryan Skrabalak comes the full-length Goes on now except) (Brooklyn NY: Beautiful Days Press, 2026), produced as “Beautiful Days Press #15,” a title that follows his debut, National Lube (speCt!, 2024) and chapbooks including The Orchids (above/ground press, 2025) and ASSEMBLED CLIMATE (Oxeye Press, 2026). Curiously, Goes on now except) begins with more than two pages of blurbs, which is slightly distracting (but not the worst thing) before a table of contents that reveals a structure as a kind of call-and-response: thirteen extended poem-sections that begin with the title section, with the same title repeated alternately, until the final section, with interspersed sections titled “Topographic lattice nothing,” “Realpeople mixolydian culvert (in 16mm),” “Stochastic roygbivcurve,” “Gnawa nebula antipolis (dendritic version),” “Deer lung programme” and “Universal human remote.” A call-and-response, but also a book-length suite of individual fragments, prose poems, lyric sketches and individual lines built up as an extended, ongoing kind of lyric structure. Blending meditative stretches and gestural sketches, punchy lines and a sense of ongoingness, of lyric cadence and an adherence to the very sound of the recombinant, repeating line and image. At the beginning of the collection, as he writes:

Write a music. Write slow a music more of with more no world, with things arranged. Things rearranged in no. world with no question (past, as night) in the mode of your fog. so that the fog was suited for your music and you made it with. Not owned. That’s your sense of this world, that music (past, suited for night). Vague fog. Which we find trampled with familiar music. Feeling this form in the sky, then the question

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

of the sky, sky music.

Perhaps the notion of the recombinant, utilized here for purposes of mangling sound, lyric, measure and meaning, is less overtly structured and one set with a particular flow, but the effect is striking, either way. The very blend of repetitions manage such clear, gestural sweeps, akin to individual monologues, if you will, the performative element of the prose poems providing the lyric intersperses a kind of Greek chorus, offering asides to help further the main body of text. Each section, also, a lyric sketch-form in italics, offering that section’s table in contents in a kind of fragmented verse. Are these poems, or simply markers? Either way, the structure provides a pull, a through-line, across the full body of the text, stretched out taut in both directions, even through and across such stagger, staccato phrases and repeats. Or, as in the fourth section, as he offers:

      Step out extending upon shit aware of vibrating lie a thought
invoicing the duplex wind . man . The sun .
      structure of this overuse of dream
they’re all country . They’re all
 duplicated with a heaven
of       SHOW HIDDEN COMMENTS

Kyle Flemmer, The Wiki of Babel

 

I was built by Skanska at a cost of £333 million

I was provided with two machine gun companies

I am near resonance

I later ran a joiner’s workshop

On August 1, 2015, I became a UN Special Rapporteur

I had urged the purchase of the mountain

I placed it with all the other pigeons

I belong mainly to the district

I protested in a telephone conversation

One day, I kill a ninja from a different family

During Lenten services, I tap prayer sticks to keep the rhythm

I received generally positive reviews

After the Rwanda genocide, I returned to Rwanda

In 1927, I was elected a Fellow (“About me”)

I’m admittedly a bit behind on the work of Calgary poet, editor and publisher Kyle Flemmer, the author of Barcode Poetry (Calgary AB: The Blasted Tree, 2021), Supergiants (Hamilton ON: Wolsak & Wynn, 2025) and TzAR: Pixel Art Anthology (The Blasted Tree, 2025) (as well as a mound of chapbooks), with the latest full-length title being The Wiki of Babel (Calgary AB: University of Calgary Press, 2026). As poets such as bpNichol and Steve McCaffery and Derek Beaulieu and Christian Bök and Amanda Earl and Kate Siklosi and Dani Spinosa and jwcurry and Hugh Thomas (among many, many others) have worked elements of translation, mistranslation and recombination, Flemmer incorporates a further layer through digital manipulation and elements of chance, offering a variation on prior procedural works by such as Jackson Mac Low—including the recent publication of The Complete Stein Poems 1998-2003 by Jackson Mac Low, edited by Michael O’Driscoll, with a foreword by Anne Tardos (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2025) [see my review of such here]—Ottawa poet Grant Wilkins [see his latest title here] and Toronto poet R. Kolewe—including the recent A Net of Momentary Sapphire (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2023) [see my review of such here]—or the infamous collaborative apostrophe (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2006) by Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler, “the first book ever written with a search engine” [see my review of such here]. The notion of the procedure, of course, being both the means to a new kind of end as well as a processional end unto itself, blended together to shape fresh and unexpected ways of considering how words and meaning are shaped and comprehended; how information is collected and stored, and how it connects to other information. As he offers as the opening of his introduction to the collection:

The Wiki of Babel is a collection of poetry by Canadian writer and artist Kyle Flemmer. It was published in 2026 by University of Calgary Press. The poems in The Wiki of Babel are composed from text fragments copied from Wikipedia through a series of chance operations and word association games that make use of the hyperlinked structure of wikis. It is a work of conceptual writing that explores the aesthetics of collaboratively-authored hypertexts.

The collection includes five series of poems that use a variety of browser-based tools and selection procedures to navigate, excerpt, and rearrange text from Wikipedia articles. The Wiki of Babel addresses themes of collective knowledge, information organization, and reader interactivity.

I’ve always considered the best kind of writing one that allows a collision between unexpected words, sounds, ideas or structures; one that allows, through that collision, the pure elements of the poem to form in the reader’s own comprehension of those collisions, and Flemmer’s The Wiki of Babel is an ambitious assemblage of the multiple languages of the Biblical Tower of Babel (in which a scrabbling group were struck by G-d to speak in multiple different languages, thus no longer being understood by each other, therefore seeming to all speak in a “babble”) and the wealth of information shaped and collected and hyperlinked across Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (and this title reminds me that Vancouver poet Rob Manery had been working on a hyperlinked poem/poem project back in the mid-1990s, which makes me wonder whatever happened to that, if it ever saw completion). Organized into cluster-sections, Flemmer’s engaging, delightful and playful collection of collage-lyrics is structured via sections “Suggested languages,” “Alternate histories,” “Current events,” “Community portal” and “Canadian hypertext,” the final of which includes some fun explorations through language via Canadian classic novels, including Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers (1966), Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (2001), Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), Marian Engel’s Bear (1976) and Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners (1974). Consider the first third of Kyle Flemmer’s “The Diviners,” that reads:

writer who grew up in Manawaka, Manitoba
confused with the real-life town of Maniwaki, Quebec. 

not far south of Route 117 (Trans-Canada Highway
route between southern Quebec and the
      Abitibi-Témiscamingue
economy continues to be dominated by resource extraction
      industries
such as farming, logging, fishing, forestry and
timber, fuel wood, wildlife habitat, natural water quality
moisture, range of temperature, and light intensity. 

electromagnetic fields, capacitive methods, and the more
      traditional
one of the four fundamental forces of nature
scientists hypothesize that a fifth force might exist
much weaker than electromagnetism or the nuclear forces
of the mass of a common proton
independent of the composition of the matter. 

particles (or combinations of particles) that act as if
in which case they are called mesons