Carter Vance is a writer and poet originally from Cobourg, Ontario, currently resident in Gatineau, Quebec. His work has appeared in such publications as The Smart Set, Contemporary Verse 2 and A Midwestern Review, amongst others. His debut novel, Smaller Animals, was released in November 2025.
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 was a chapbook of poetry released in 2017, which was definitely a
smaller release though it did get some notice at the time. It was honestly a
very surreal process in some ways – I submitted to it directly to a publisher
without much knowledge about the process and certainly little expectation that
I would be successful. It didn’t feel real until I actually had the paper copy
in my hands. Though I wouldn’t say it was life-changing in a broad sense (I
still had to wake up and do my day job after, you don’t get rich writing
poetry!), it did give me the confidence to continue pursuing other longer-form
projects.
The process of writing and ultimately publishing my new novel has definitely
been different. For one thing, I planned it as a conscious singular project
from the beginning and I was engaged in a deliberate process of submitting it
to publishers for over two years after the manuscript was substantially
completed. In that sense, it was a project I had greater confidence in and that
I believed was worth other people reading from an earlier date. The fact that
it’s getting a full print run and a bigger push from the publisher is
definitely a change from my first book, which was with a very small independent
press based in Windsor.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I actually started thinking about writing poetry as song lyrics at first, maybe that made it more comprehensible to me when I was in high school. I was (and still am) a big music fan and I wanted to be able to write songs and play in a band and thought I would start there. That dream didn’t really end up working out for various reasons but it was a bit of a gateway. The first pieces of writing that ever really resonated with me emotionally in a big way were actually song lyrics. I would pour over lyrics sheets and online transcriptions of songs looking for the hidden meanings – it felt like I was in on a secret code in some way.
That led to some of my writing getting noticed by a teacher in high school, who encouraged me to think of it more as poetry and that I could attend readings in my home town or submit pieces to the newspaper or other outlets. It took a bit of convincing for me to do this, as I was in some ways a very shy teenager. But with encouragement I ended up really liking it and seeing some (however minor) success.
I actually moved into doing a number of different forms of writing after that. I wrote short stories and won a contest at a local library, a friend and I co-wrote a play that was put on at our school. I ended up coming back to poetry after a break from writing at the beginning of university because it was easiest for me to get my mind around, especially without active collaborators at that time. But I’ve dipped my toe back into fiction and creative non-fiction over time since then, and the novel is kind of a culmination of those efforts.
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?
It very much depends on the project. For poetry, I tend to find it’s a matter of inspiration striking and just getting pen to paper quickly. I will usually do some small edits when I transfer from handwritten to typed for poems but beyond that the finished product is quite similar to the first draft.
For short fiction or non-fiction, I tend to edit my drafts as I go, which can be a bit of a frustrating process, but it does mean that my first draft is more-or-less as I want it to be once completed. That said, I try to welcome feedback from others so it may go through some changes on that basis.
Writing the novel was a bit of different process – I had a general outline or roadmap of the way I wanted my story to go, where the characters would start and end, and it kind of became a matter of filling in the blanks and getting from point A to point B. I wrote some of the middle chapters before I had an idea of how they would link together, so, I had the key events and added some of the connective tissue afterwards.
The novel also went through a more extensive external review process than any other previous work I have done, both formally with my publisher and informally with friends and colleagues. This was particularly helpful in refining the development of the characters in the novel, and making them more well-rounded and naturalistic. Readers were able to see gaps in character motivation and journeys that were not immediately apparent to me.
4 - Where does a poem or work of fiction 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?
For the two chapbooks of poetry I’ve published previously, they were not originally conceived as complete collections and were assembled on a thematic basis afterwards. The commonalities or shared ideas behind the pieces maybe weren’t apparent to me in initially writing them but became moreso after looking back and seeing how they could fit together. For the most part, this is how I’ve proceeded with previous projects, just writing what makes sense to me at the time and then looking to see how the parts could fit together later.
With the novel, I knew I had a wider story I wanted to tell, so I took a different conceptual approach and wrote down an outline of what I wanted to happen and who my key characters were before I started writing the novel itself. I wasn’t necessarily sure of how long it was going to be or what level of depth I wanted to go into the backstories or other aspects of the novel, but I knew it was going to be a “book” in the sense of a longer-form piece that I hoped would be published that way.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I haven’t actually done any public readings in a long time, probably since high school. Not out of any particular lack of interest in doing so, just haven’t had the context to do so and have been busy with other aspects of life. I would like to get back into doing it, so, if anyone has recommendations on where to do it, I’m more than happy to take suggestions.
That said, I do think it can add to the process to get feedback about what works and doesn’t about the pieces you’re working on. I definitely remember refining some of my short stories and other pieces based on public feedback when I still did readings. And definitely for any works that’s meant to be performed, as opposed to just read (like a play), public readings or performances are key to determine if the work is connecting in the way you intend as the author.
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?
The key question to any form of writing, any form of art at the end of the day, in my opinion is, what shall we do and how shall we live? That can take many forms, but it is the question that I find animates the writing that I really connect to in a deeper way and what I try to convey in my writing. I think everyone wants to believe that they are living in a good, moral way, or at least trying to as best they can and we look to various things for guidance in that. For some it may be religion, for some it may be cultural codes and ethics, for some it’s being active in politics or public life, for some it may simply be doing right by your family and friends. I’ve tried to make a mark on things in different ways through my life thus far, and I’m sure I’ll find new ones as I grow older, but my writing in one small way to do it.
The first draft of the novel was written in 2019, during a time I was working on a development project overseas. The separation from my previous life in Ottawa gave me the chance to reflect on what the city, the politics and the people had meant to me and develop the themes and characters in the novel. I felt that I wanted to capture and preserve some of what had happened to me and my peers in a form that could speak to others.
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?
This is a particularly apt question when, as it is so often remarked, reading, particularly reading for pleasure, is on the decline. The traditional answer to this question would be to say something like writers are meant to illuminate truths that others cannot see or cannot articulate and bring them to a wider audience. But that relies on the notion that the wider public is, in fact, reading what the writer writes. The space which the writer occupies is definitely a shifting one in the current cultural landscape and we’re speaking to a smaller audience than we might be comfortable with. In that sense, perhaps the role is shifting to something more akin to a keeper of the flame for the things that are important, in the hopes of keeping them alive for the future. Or maybe we are just tellers of tales to keep the world a bit brighter and more colorful than it otherwise would be.
I don’t give myself a greater air of importance than I warrant, I don’t expect my writing to become a bestseller or change the world. If I bring some illumination to someone’s life and if I cause them to feel like they’ve been seen or I’m able to broaden their horizon or change their perspective, that’s enough for me.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I’m fortunate in that I can pick and choose to a degree on how much I engage with outside editors on my work as creative writing isn’t my day job. It’s mostly up to me how much or little outside input I solicit and how I use it. That said, I would say it is a bit of both on the difficult or essential front. It can be hard surrendering a piece of your work to someone else’s hands, particularly if it’s a personal one or something that you want to remain in a certain way. For certain things, mainly poems, I tend to want them to stand on their own, warts and all, in the original way they came out of me.
That said, the process of formal and informal feedback has been most helpful in developing my longer form writing. For the novel, my initial manuscript was given more shape by comments from a number of readers, including my good friends Teresa Yang and Aoife Sadlier. My grandfather, probably the most avid reader I know, was also an early reviewer and provided a number of suggestions which shaped the final flow of the story. In addition, my publisher provided more technical and flow-based edits which caught certain errors that I hadn’t noticed. In all, it’s a much stronger work for their input, even if it was sometimes hard to hear that their interpretation of what I had put on the page was different from my intention.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
A university professor once told me (paraphrasing), that there are two kinds of thesis: the kind that is perfect and the kind that is done. That has really stuck with me in guiding how I write. There will be always something more to add and in a sense a work of writing is never truly “done” as the engagement and interpretation of every reader is part of the work. It’s helped me to keep this in mind when I struggle with completing something and whether it’s ready to go out into the world, that the only way something is ever perfect is as an unfinished entity, because it contains the possibility of perfection still within it. In that sense, I prefer to think of my published works as being “released” rather than “finished”, in that I’ve turned them over from my mind only to that of the wider reading public.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
The biggest challenge in moving from poetry and short fiction to writing at a novel length has been in the process of keeping the longer term vision in mind while writing and examining how my charters maintain (or don’t) their consistency over the course of the work. With short fiction and poetry, there’s less road to run where the plot can be lost, so to speak, and I didn’t have to go back and re-write as much as a result. The other issue I struggled with was how to retain reader interest over a longer work, where to put the chapter breaks so that each section of the book felt like a complete thought while still pulling the reader through to the next chapter and feeling like the end of the whole work had to be gotten to. This is where working with an outside editor was helpful to see where key themes or threads may have been getting lost and where they needed to come together better.
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?
The routine varies quite a bit based on what I’m working on at the time and how much time and I have to dedicate to writing and how intensely I can work on a project. At the height of working on the novel, I was writing for about 4 – 5 hours per day total, mostly in the evenings, watching the sunset, but this was at an unusual point in my life. For the most part, when I write now, it’s more sporadic and takes one of two forms. The first, more with poetry, is a more spontaneous inspiration, where something will click in me, whether it’s something in the news or just something about the world around me, and I’ll feel the urge to really put pen to paper on it. This is usually written on the bus or while I’m running around. I’ll get the fragments first and then build out the whole piece around that.
The second approach is more if I’m writing a short story; I’ll have a few ideas written down and then let them percolate until I find some time to really sit down and hammer it out. I try to complete this in one sitting, at least for a first draft, just to avoid losing momentum. For me, it’s most important to keep that going, as I feel like a weight is lifted when I’m done. It’s not that writing itself is a burden, far from it, but just the feeling that I haven’t gotten everything out I want to say at the time tends to weigh on me.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
This is probably a very cliché answer but
the thing that helps me the most when I get truly stuck is going for a walk. I
find it helps to be able to move and feel my body existing in space again,
especially if I’ve been sitting writing for a long time, and feel more
connected to the world around me. This helps to anchor my thoughts a bit and
let the ideas for where I want to go next flow more clearly.
If I get really stuck, I find talking to someone else about where my thoughts
on a piece are going can be helpful, to see their reaction and get feedback on
where may be the logical next step. As well, sometimes listening to music gets
the thoughts moving in a coherent way again.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
My grandmother used to have a candle in her kitchen which was a very strong, very artificial smell that was supposed to mimic apple pie. It didn’t really, and I honestly found it overwhelming when I was younger. It’s a very particular smell that doesn’t exactly smell like applies or cinnamon, or even the two of them together, more like a cross between a strong cleaning product and Christmas morning . But, as much as I found it off-putting at the time, it was also the fragrance of a place that always made me feel safe and loved, no matter what else was happening in my life. Especially since my grandmother died a few years ago, I sometimes will get a hint of something that smells similar to that and it makes me feel closer to home.
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 continue to be hugely inspired by music in my writing – I usually am listening to something while I write, whether it’s for work or outside of it. I tried to pay tribute to this a bit in the novel by having my characters listen to specific albums while working, something that’s fairly common to me but I don’t often see referenced actively in fiction. Music influences my writing in some less obvious ways as well, I think about the rhythm of words in a musical frame sometimes, or how they might sound set to music, what music might accompany dialogue if it were heard in the context of a movie, and so on. Thinking in a musical frame sometimes helps to unblock a particularly difficult piece of writing.
Visual art and film also inspire some of
my writing, again in terms of thinking about how images I write about might
appear on screen or in the mind of a reader. I’ve also tried to capture
feelings that I’ve had while observing art in some of my poetry. I remember a
particular time I was a bit awed by a clock sculpture at the Musee d’Orsay and
wrote about my feeling after that. It’s maybe not necessarily a direction
inspiration from visual art by trying to invoke the same reaction by using
words.
Finally, I wouldn’t necessarily say my work in inspired by nature in a direct
sense, but I often find being in nature or just outside helpful to clear my
head and focus more.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
In terms of stylistic approach, I am most indebted to Adelle Waldman (particularly her debut novel The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.) and Sally Rooney (particularly Normal People), as well as an older novel by the name of Prague by Arthur Phillips. All these novels deal with characters in transition in their lives, as well as sense of generational ennui. In some sense, they have a debt to “lost generation” novels, such as Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (which is one of my favourite books since reading it in high school) and Milan Kundera’s Life is Elsewhere, though I don’t know if I would dean to place my work in such august company.
Outside of those direct inspirations, I’m a huge fan of Kurt Vonnegut (particularly Player Piano) and Raymond Carver for short fiction (most of my high school short stories were, in retrospect, fairly blatant attempts at Carver knockoffs). For non-fiction and historical writing, I love Tony Judt’s work (particularly Post-War), and that of Eric Hobsbawm, who managed the unique feat of making sometimes dry historical matters sweeping and magisterial.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
In terms of writing, I would like to write a long-form
piece of non-fiction. I’m not sure what it would be about but I’ve entertained
the idea of going across the country and writing about the neglected or
forgotten spaces in the land and how the people there live, what their
frustrations are. I feel like in some ways I come from one of those in-between
spaces, not quite a city, not quite a town, not quite in Eastern Ontario, not
quite in the GTA. It’s in those in-between spaces sometimes dreams are found,
and sometimes they die. Of course I would need time off from my day job and a
travel budget to make that project work.
Outside of writing, probably more things than I can think of, but the one that
comes to mind right now is learning a another language (beyond English and the
bit of not-entirely-functional French I speak). The ones that immediately come
to mind as the most useful would be Mandarin or Spanish but I’ve always been
attracted to learning a regional language, like Romanian or Kurdish. To me, learning
another language in a deeper way is like having a whole curtain of the world
lifted and being able to access a new piece of it previously unknown to you.
Both in terms of literature and art but, in a deeper sense, worldview and meaning-making
are contained in a language. It’s a pity I can only see the world from a
limited lens in that sense.
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?
With the caveat that, unfortunately, my
writing isn’t my day job, I’m very interested in sustainable agriculture and
have a lot of family history in farming. I would probably go into something
related to that, if I had the chance to change careers or do everything all
over again. The older I get, the more I find I like being outside, being in
nature, working with my hands. It’s sort of ironic given how much I often just
wanted to be isolated when I was younger, but I suppose I just hadn’t found the
right way to be engaged in it.
Either way, I really do admire the people who keep the whole thing running in a
deeper sense and I think we could all do with being more actually connected to
the systems that sustain us rather than just being out of sight, out of mind. I
also just think it would be interesting to try and work with types of plants or
animals that aren’t typically found in Canada and see if there could be a way
of producing them. I’m particularly interested in teff grains and alpacas,
probably two of my more esoteric interests.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I’ve always wanted to make art, to make something that causes people to stop from whatever they’re doing in the hustle and bustle of their day and think about something bigger. Unfortunately I’ve never been good at painting or visual arts and though I love music as a listener I’ve never been able to dedicate enough time to learning an instrument to make music myself (and anyone who has heard me try would attest that I couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket vocally). I think I settled on writing to make my impact because it simply came more naturally to me. I’ve always liked reading, even from a very young age when it was X-Men comic books and elementary-level histories of Ancient Egypt and Rome, so I thought that maybe I could bring some of that .
I was also told when I was younger I was “smart for my age” or “talked like an adult” so maybe that convinced me I had enough of a way with words that people would listen to me. I think it was just that early encouragement that convinced me that this was something worth pursuing, when maybe I hadn’t received the same with other things, or felt like they weren’t for me.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I just finished reading The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth, which is a fascinating book. I’m not sure if I would say it’s great in an unqualified sense, it’s written in a highly particular style that takes getting used to, but I really felt it effectively portrayed the challenge of living in a time of immense, profound change through a historical lens. It deals with the Norman Conquest of England and the resistance to that, written in a language meant to evoke Olde English. Maybe not for everyone but for the adventurous reader it’s a fascinating take on a post-apocalypse story.
I’ve been watching a mini-series, adapted from the novel by Antonio Scurati (which I haven’t yet read but want to), called M: Son of the Century, which deals with the rise to power of Benito Mussolini. I love historical dramas but this is one of the most compelling I’ve seen in a while. Not staid or stage-like at all, really has lots of propulsive energy. Mussolini acts as a narrator to the series and often breaks the fourth wall to address the audience directly, a surprising amount of dark humour. A lot of masterful camera work and use of light and shadow to draw out the world.
Beyond that, I recently watched The Worst Person in the World, which is a charming little Norwegian film about a woman experiencing something of a quarter-life crisis. Definitely would recommend if you like the works of directors like Noah Baumbach.
20 - What are you currently working on?
In turning my mind to future projects, I have an idea for a historical novel set around the construction and fall of the Berlin Wall that I’ve been considering writing for a long time. Perhaps having this initial novel published will be the spur that finally causes me to put pen to paper on it, but I feel like I should do more research on the topic first. I’m also continuing to write poetry and the occasional piece of creative non-fiction.
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