12 or 20 (second series) questions with A.D. Sui

A.D. Sui (London, ON) [photo credit: Yoah Sui] is a Ukrainian-born, internationally raised speculative writer, Nebula winner, and Aurora and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award finalist. They are the author of The Dragonfly Gambit, The Iron Garden Sutra, and more than two dozen short stories. A failed academic and retired fencer, they spend most days wrangling their two dogs and tending to their myriad tropical plants.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

I’ll focus on the first book published. The Dragonfly Gambit was a fun book to get started with. It eased me into publishing and working with an editor on a long-form project. It then went on to win the Nebula for best novella, which was wild. Our Infinite and Inevitable Ends will be my third book published and it feels a lot less panicky, and a lot more deliberate. I’m starting to get to a place where I’m gaining a grasp of how publishing works, of which gears need turning and when. Maybe, I’m even beginning to enjoy the process. 

2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?

I grew up reading nearly exclusively fiction, and I am an awful poet. I think there was always a gap in what I was reading where I wasn’t seeing myself in these works, and while they were good works, I was still left wanting. I came to writing the way many people do, through fanfiction, which in itself was an exercise of creating stories that I wanted to see on screen, just with existing IP. It took many years for me to have the guts to try something original. You know the rest. 

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?

I tend to draft very quickly. Usually, I’ll plan for a week and then hammer out the first draft in a month. If I stop, I lose momentum and then I lose interest, and then the manuscript goes to the graveyard with the other projects that died at 30k words. I try to draft lean. Most of my speculative manuscripts are about 90k on first draft and then grow to maybe 110k or a little longer on subsequent drafts. I rarely change plot points after the initial draft, but I will dive deeper into characterization and environment in subsequent edits. 

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 think I know what the story is after I finish plotting. Some stories are short stories, some are novellas, others are novels. I strongly prefer novels. I’m not sure how people write short stories. I try, I really do, but they are so difficult for me that I’d rather write a lot of long-form projects instead of a few short stories. The pacing is completely different. The density of prose is different. It’s a completely different medium to work with. 

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I can do public readings, but I much prefer to just gab about the book instead of reading from it. I do read my drafts out loud to myself as I edit, but I’m not a super strong public reader. I can’t do voices or anything like that. I am far too serious. 

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?

Most of my work centers themes of grief, and loss. Recent works have started to speak far more to climate change and its consequences, which in a way, is also about grief and loss. 

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?

I believe it’s whatever we decide it is. If we want to be entertainers, then we are entertainers. If we want to be fortune tellers, then we can be the crystal ball. There is no manual on how to be a writer. The only requirement is that you write. While writing, in of itself, isn’t advocacy, it can inspire advocacy and can still have strong messages to relay. 

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I have been very fortunate to work with editors who shared my vision for the book and who allowed me a lot of creative freedom to fine tune all of the elements. So far, I’ve had nothing but great experiences working with editors and I hope this trend continues!

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

You can’t edit a blank page. Honestly, probably the most useful thing when I hit “writer’s block” (which I do not believe actually exists). 

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (short stories to the novel)? What do you see as the appeal?

Ha! I laugh and then I cry. Difficult. Very difficult. Although the difficult part for me has always been writing short stories and not the novels. Short stories have a great way of training word economy and tightening my prose. In a short story, each and every word needs to justify its existence. In a novel, I can relax a bit and meander, but in short stories, I simply can’t get away with that kind of spending.

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 tend to aim for word counts instead of hours at the laptop. I’ll do 2-3k words a day during drafting, depending on what I want the final wordcount to be and the rest of my time I spend reading and gallivanting about. 

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I go for a run! Most plot holes usually get resolved by the end of a 20km run. 

13 - What was your last Hallowe'en costume?

I have never dressed up for Halloween! I have, however, once worked in a haunted house as a creepy tree trunk. 

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 take a lot of inspiration from anime!

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Outside of writing, I tend to read a lot of academic papers. Usually, this is because I’m going down a rabbit hole of something that’s sort of important to my daily life, like iron supplementation. I am in a very privileged position where I have access to a lot of primary literature on pretty much any topic. So, I can do deep dives into many everyday topics.

Recently, I’ve been nerding out on nutrition during endurance races, so that’s been fun!

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I want to follow the caribou migration across Canada.

But in terms of writing, maybe do an epic fantasy based in Ukrainian folklore. 

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 used to be an academic, but due to the hiring freezes post COVID that didn’t pan out, or maybe I just didn’t allow it to pan out, but here we are. I think in a different world, I’m a professor, doing my research and teaching my lectures, but that’s a very different world.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I think there’s a massive power to being able to create stories that you wanted to read growing up. That’s it, really. My goal with writing is to fill that niche. Selfish, I know.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Playground by Richard Powers. In terms of film, I’d say Past Lives.
 
20 - What are you currently working on?

I have several books under contract, each at various stages of development. So, I’m doing a little of dev edits, and a little of line edits, and some pass pages, and some second pass pages. It’s a tasting menu of edits!

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Benjamin Friedlander, One Hundred Etudes

 

By a clumsy
Caress, stands on
Ceremony, not on 

Legs, and speaks,
But under duress.
Thirty: A LITTLE 

BOOK for Robert
Creeley ANSWERING MACHINE
A slurred question

Given that Orono, Maine-based poet, editor and critic Benjamin Friedlander has been publishing full-length poetry collections for nearly four decades, I’m rather late to the game, just now going through his One Hundred Etudes (Washington DC: Edge Books, 2012), the first of his books I’ve properly sat down with [beyond a title he more recently co-edited]. “Prophecy History, driven // From prayer,” Friedlander writes, as part of the book’s thirty-third etude, “lets / The private utterance / Declare its public // Aim: the difference / Between what must / Be and is, [.]” The opening of the collection offers itself as “ONE HUNDRED ETUDES / En hommage à / Louis Zukofsky,” referencing the infamous Objectivist poet Zukofsky’s epic masterpiece, “A” (the first elements of which began being published in the 1940s, with the first complete edition produced through University of California Press in 1978, and a corrected edition produced through New Directions in 2011). One hundred, as Friedlander offers, individual lyric compositions prompted by a particular Zukofsky project, attempting to respond to technique via technique. The stop and start of Friedlander’s line breaks, three lines per stanza, three stanzas per page, offers a curious effect, simultaneously staggered, staccato and continuous. “NATURE / Golden ants gather // Around a brown / Beetle’s crushed armor.” he writes, circling the ends of his thirtieth etude, “MNEMONIC DEVICE for // Jackson Mac Low / My very eccentric / Mother just said // Up now please.”

Capturing some three hundred pages of clipped, extended, continuous sketch-lyrics, Friedlander’s stanzas purposefully bleed into each other; numbered, and with the suggestion that each new etude begins mid-poem, mid-stream; titled within the body of the lyric, with complementary numbering system at the bottom of each page. There’s a curious effect of such a dense lyric, layering and collage, from bolded text and dedications into clipped notes, as though stitching together moments of fragments together to form each poem. One might be better to refer to this, even, as a continuous book-length lyric, through one hundred individual jumping off points into or through this shared, lyric pool. I would only hope that someone more familiar with Zukofsky’s work would attend a proper comparison between the two, to see just how attuned Friedlander’s work remains in conversation, both with his declared source text, and the myriad constellation of all else that may have contributed. Either way, One Hundred Etudes is composed very much a “love letter” of sorts to form, and to Friedlander’s old masters. The single page of “twenty-nine,” set amid multiple pages across “twenty-eight” and “thirty” reads:

Surface on a
Toll road with
Numbered exits. Twenty- 

Nine: CAPTION FOR
A PHOTOGRAPH for
David Levi Strauss 

The orphan frown
Of a war-
Torn town, healed

Anna Veprinska, Wound Archive

 

 

 

Last night your bones ached
next to mine:

 

 

 

 

 

so                                 this is love.

 

 

 

The second full-length poetry title by Calgary-based poet and academic Anna Veprinska, quick on the heels of her debut, Bonememory (Calgary AB: University of Calgary Press, 2025) [see my review of such here], is Wound Archive (Guelph ON: The Porcupine’s Quill, 2026), a book-length sequence of curved, carved minimalism across open space. “Emerging scarred,” she writes, early on in this unpaginated assemblage, six words filling the cracks of this particular printed page, “accountable, reach- /// ing //////////////// for god.” Whereas an archive suggests past tense, one might see the subject matter of Veprinka’s lyric are more ongoing, set across a temporal boundary in which her present perpetually remains, especially across the boundary of what the back cover describes: “[…] the wound left by the concurrent ending of a relationship and the beginning of a chronic invisible illness.” Comparable to the late Vancouver Island poet Phyllis Webb’s Naked Poems (1965), as Ottawa poet Cameron Anstee suggests in his back cover blurb, for their shared use of allusion, brevity, spacing and emotional impact (both poems speaking to and around a relationship as well, although Webb’s piece set around the beginning, whereas this piece articulates the end), Veprinska’s lines are scalpeled, setting lines that slice as well as suggest, set purposefully on the stretch of the open page. “Heaving self //////////// congealed with prayer: //// touched, ////// edged.” Each word, carefully and delicately placed. Across her book-length poem, Veprinska writes a fragmented, careful archive, an exquisite extended lyric, around illness and recovery, wounds and the heart, and of being lost, and becoming found, again and again. This is a deeply satisfying and rich poem, and one to be approached and read with equal care.

 

Offered

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

to the sterile, narrow known.

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Rebecca Wood

Rebecca Wood (she/her) lives with her plants and craft supplies in Toronto, Ontario.  Her poetry, and creative nonfiction explore what it means to exist in a body with multiple chronic illnesses and episodic disability. She has always used writing to make sense of her inner and outer world and is unapologetically enamoured with lengthy luxurious lines of alliteration. 

Her work can be found in Poetry Pause, The Whitewall Review, Room Magazine, Transition: Canadian Mental Health Association Magazine, Feels Zine, Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature, Corporeal, and Pinhole Poetry.  Her debut poetry collection Multimorbid was published by kith books in May 2026. Find her on Bluesky @bextatic.bsky.social and on Instagram @knots_and_clay

Website: www.rebeccawoodwrites.ca   Find Multimorbid here: https://www.kithbooks.com/shop/p/multimorbid   Ebook version: https://www.kithbooks.com/digital/p/multimorbid

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book Multimorbid just came out with kith books in May 2026 so I feel like the change is still unfolding. This collection is about the overwhelm of navigating multiple diagnoses, multiple doctors, multiple medications, all while immunocompromised and isolated. The experience of releasing this book has given me the opportunity to reflect on how my relationship to that overwhelm has changed. It has also revealed that writing a book is a great way to see what lessons I keep learning over and over again as I navigate chronic illness and the medical system.  It has been really interesting to experience how it feels to have people interact with poems I wrote years ago. My most recent work plays with similar themes but I feel different in my confidence with my poetic voice. 

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I write both poetry and non-fiction, though my prose leans towards the poetic too. I like that poetry lets me express feelings, ideas and experiences that might be painful, impossible, or vulnerable in a form that allows for brevity and choice of what I expose and what stays open for interpretation. I also love playing with rhythm and language and finding interesting ways to explain what I am grappling with. 

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?
I will often have an idea for a piece and will spend time thinking about it while procrastinating actually sitting down to write. Once I get myself to start writing the first draft usually comes out in one sit. With some pieces the first draft is similar to the final shape. Sometimes the draft will include notes about what I am trying to get across but can’t quite figure out yet. Sometimes I need to leave a draft alone and clarity comes later. Once pieces begin to feel like they belong together as part of a bigger project it is like the project started without me. Finishing the project is the part that can take more time than I would like. 

4 - Where does a poem 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?
A poem usually begins for me from a feeling, experience or concept I am trying to work out, understand or explain. Sometimes words or phrases get stuck in my head and a poem will build from there. I tend to write short pieces that end up combining into a larger project but once the larger project reveals itself I will start to see what it needs and I will write to fill in those gaps.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Reading and getting feedback in workshops and writing groups has been a huge part of my creative process. I find it really helpful to clarify if what I am trying to communicate is actually coming through. When I am experimenting with a form or with word play it is delightful to hear when it lands for listeners/readers. I have had the opportunity to do some virtual readings and am just starting to have some more in-person reading opportunities with pieces from Multimorbid. Reading finished poems out loud to a group of people feels more like the outcome of my creative process being witnessed rather than reading as part of my creative process in action. 

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 am often exploring questions of existential realities like fragility, uncertainty, and mortality in my work. I ask and answer questions at the intersection where existential theory meets the experiential reality of having a body through my experience navigating medical systems and interventions while living with multiple chronic illnesses and episodic disability. 

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?
I think the writer’s role is to foster connection by capturing experience in words so that readers can either see their own experience reflected in the work or can be exposed to a wildly different human experience. 

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Working with an editor has been essential for me to push my work beyond what feels comfortable or easy. It is difficult to be pushed, but working with an editor (especially one who is approaching my work as an advocate for the reader) has helped me identify where I am holding back, where I am not quite conveying what I intend to convey, and where I need to speak up for my poems that feel absolutely finished. 

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
You don’t have to write every day in order to be a writer. 

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to creative non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
When I feel inspired to write about a topic it is often clear to me what genre is a good fit. Sometimes I will start in one genre and then decide to shift. Poetry offers the option of obscurity when I don’t feel like revealing too much. Creative non-fiction allows me to bring poetic descriptions into prose about my lived experience. There is a piece in Multimorbid called “Somewhat Obese but Otherwise Well” that I initially wrote as an essay but then reworked into a poem that was published in Room Magazine. When my editor first read the poem his comment was, “This feels like it wants to be an essay” (which I thought was very impressive forensic editing) and I accepted the invitation to change genres again. The essay as it appears in the book is more effective than the initial attempt because of the process of playing with it in multiple genres. 

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 am not an early-riser and fatigue tends to be present in my day-to-day so I don’t keep a firm routine. The advice to write every day is not accessible to me but I definitely think about writing every day. Sometimes there is momentum where I will have an idea and I will get a first draft out in a burst. Sometimes I have an idea of something I want to write and I procrastinate sitting down to do it. I have notebooks, and notes on my phone, and pieces that start strong and then trail off with point form notes at the end that list what I want to go back to. I attend a writing group once a week where we have about 20 minutes of writing time and the opportunity to workshop with each other. That is the most routine part of my writing.  

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
If the stalling is because I am spending a lot of time thinking about writing rather than actually writing I make myself open the document and read through what’s there. That can be enough to spark some new work on a project that has felt stalled.  I also find reading, listening to podcasts where creatives talk about their process, and watching well-crafted tv, film and stand up comedy inspiring. I am also learning that when I am putting pressure on myself to write! more! faster! that pressure might actually be a signal to let myself rest. Let the ideas simmer. The writing will come back. 

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Cinnamon toast.

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?
A lot of my work comes from applying a poetic lens to medical and pharmaceutical science. I don’t always understand every scientific aspect of the interventions I am experiencing or exactly how every biological system of my body interacts but it can be an inspiration for me to try to work it out the magic of science experientially and poetically.  I am also inspired by nature and will write unapologetically about moss and magnolias, and ferns unfurling, and thunder and sparkle flecked pebbles. Exploring nature and playing with other forms of creation like pottery, crochet, knitting, and cross stitch all feel like they influence my capacity to play with words. 

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I read a lot of creative nonfiction in the form of memoirs written by comedians. Jenny Slate’s Little Weirds, Strong Female Character by Fern Brady, Misfit by Gary Gulman, Subculture Vulture” by Moshe Kasher and Everything is Horrible and Wonderful by Stephanie Wittels Wachs have all felt meaningful recently.  It feels important for my life and my work to read other disabled writers . Having a body can be lonely and reading work by writers like Rob Macaisa Colgate, Audrey T. Carroll, torrin a. greathouse, Brandon Wint, Amanda Leduc and Therese Estacion help me feel connected to community. 

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I’d like to do a writers residency somewhere beautiful, read at a festival, publish a book with a Canadian press, and fall in love with someone new who is a little scared and a little excited about how they might show up in a poem. 

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?
It would be a dream to make a sustainable living with writing, creating, gardening and managing my health. That would occupy me. If I had to pick another occupation to attempt travelling around to visit people as the human companion to a therapy dog sounds pretty great. 

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I have always been a writer and have always done it in addition to whatever else I am doing because writing feels necessary for me to write in order to make sense of existing. In the last 5 years I have allowed myself time and energy to focus on my writing and as I have become stronger in my voice and more confident in sharing my work with others I have felt clear that no matter what else I am doing, I am a writer. 

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I loved the book Unearthing by Kyo Maclear and the collection of short stories Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory by Raphael Bob-Waksberg. I’m not sure I would qualify it as a great film but the last movie I watched was Pitch Perfect and I still get goosebumps when Anna Kendrick sings “Don’t You Forget About Me” as a romantic grand gesture in the finale number. 

20 - What are you currently working on? 
I’m currently working on a project that uses poetry and creative non-fiction to explore and explain my experience of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) for treatment resistant depression this past fall. I documented my treatment with weekly viators and I have been writing my own memories of experiences with electricity, lightning, and power outages, alongside researching and writing about the history of rTMS and how its development is connected to humans figuring out the physics and harnessing of electricity from electric eels to parlour tricks, to electric kissing parties in the 1950s. 

12 or 20 (second series) questions;