Owen Toews’s debut novel Island Falls (2023) is hard to describe. Half tale of unfolding friendship, half clinical report of a segregated mill town in the Canadian prairies, the enigmatic text plays with genre and form, raising questions about how space is produced and contested. The result is both charming and unsettling. Characters wrestle with how to respond to the violent structures that surround them and never really figure it out. In the end, we’re left to ponder the thorny relationship between trying to make sense of things and actually creating something better. Overall, the effect is galvanizing. Toews invites the reader to join him in the murk by asking timely political questions without prescribing answers. 

Toews’ training as a geographer is evident in Island Falls—the stark descriptions of the mill come from his post-doctoral research in rural Manitoba—but he also shows a natural narrative bent. The text reveals a clear affection for weirdos, an interest in human foibles, and a willingness to experiment; all qualities that point to an exciting new fiction writer. As the central characters navigate their lives in New York, Toews continues the political exploration he started in his first book Stolen City: Racial Capitalism and the Making of Winnipeg, which paralleled settler colonialism’s shape-shifting tendencies and local histories of resistance.

Taken together, the two books are a jolt to complacency. In both, Toews confronts us with the wily machinations of racial capitalism, but also attunes us to its ruptures. The more clearly we can see the inner workings of systems that warp and partition us, he seems to suggest, the less inevitable they become. His books offer a subtle challenge to push past familiar outrage in order to see things differently, posing an open question about what to do with what we find. The world, we’re reminded, can always be made anew. 

In this way, Toews takes the possibility of writing seriously. At the same time, he’s not self-serious, or solely interested in how ideas might translate into practice. The characters of Island Falls are written generously: they muddle through grad school, attempt to organize, move between tiny apartments, and play basketball. Politics, after all, only matters because people do.

This seems like a fruitful place for a writer to be working from—ambitious in scope, experimental in approach, and aimed at an audience of other people who want to transform things. Toews is leading by weird, refreshing example. Not only is it useful to make space for these tricky questions outside institutional parameters or the limits of genre, but it also seems fun. 

Toews was born and raised in Winnipeg and currently resides in the West end of the city. He received his PhD in Geography at the City University of New York, where he was a Fulbright scholar, and held the University of Alberta Grant Notley Memorial Postdoctoral Fellowship for research in politics, history, economy and society of Western Canada. Toews is a member of Bar None, an abolitionist prisoner solidarity group, and the DIY museum collective Winnipeg Arcades Project. He has contributed to Briarpatch Magazine, worked as a non-profit researcher, and occasionally comments in local media on political happenings in the city. 

We met at a noisy bakery on Winnipeg's Portage Avenue, and talked about the ethics of storytelling, political organizing, abolition, and keeping a writing journal. 

 

 

 

I’m trying to find the balance between being complicit in the ways that dominant structures want us to forget people who are disappeared through the normal working of these institutions, and on the other hand, appropriating people’s stories that don’t belong to us.

 

 

 

Gabrielle Willms: Island Falls is your first published work of fiction, but it began as a post-doc research project. Can you tell me more about how this project started?

Owen Toews: I was trying to figure out what happened to shanty towns in Manitoba in the 20th century, predominantly informal Métis settlements like Rooster Town. I went from town to town, or places where I’d figured out they had informal settlements to try to understand the way the economy of those towns worked over the course of the 20th century, particularly post-World War Two, in concert with different forms of racism.

GW: Was this building on earlier research? 

OT: For sure. The fate of Rooster town in Winnipeg, and how that was bound up in postwar suburbanization was really interesting to me and something I wanted to look at more deeply. Then, personally, I came to the realization that Rooster Town was one of many, many places like that. I was trying to figure out how this postwar consolidation or expansion of white identities was working through the destruction and displacement of places like Rooster Town.

GW: So you went to lots of other towns around Manitoba? Were people able to speak to that experience? 

OT: Yes. The other interesting thing was that a lot of the places I went to were right next to First Nations reserves. So that’s another layer of racialized partition. I was seeing this as a city person—I don't know very much about small town Manitoba—so seeing this pattern over and over again was really striking to me.

GW: What did these patterns reveal about how these economies developed and worked in concert with a postwar racialized order? Did you figure out something about how this process worked?

OT: I would say that broadly speaking, there was a real, felt improvement in life chances and stature for working-class white men in these resource towns in those decades—the 1960s and 1970s. People remember that to some degree because the towns themselves were being transformed. To me, it seems like a sort of belated emancipation from the Depression and eating potatoes out of the fields and being labour militants. And from a life in which war had loomed large. It’s a sort of arrival. And it’s related to quote-unquote becoming white. Ukrainians and Poles and so forth being treated more or less like WASPs when before they had been vilified as ungrateful, outside agitators. At the same time that this was going on, in town after town, I learned that the informal settlements, largely but not entirely Métis settlements, were destroyed in this period and replaced with new suburban-style neighbourhoods for the newly upwardly-mobile workers and their families. So places where people were making lives outside of industrial capitalism, to some degree, were cast as outmoded and dispossessable once again, in this new context. And people were marked as such and some people’s newfound whiteness and sense of being capable and deserving was formulated in contrast to a new racist image of Métis Indigeneity. Métis settlements and their residents were portrayed as unfit for the new towns and undeserving of infrastructure and permanence. And then the third thing is that even, and still, at this time, people living in the First Nations next door are promised a substantial slice of the pie, in the form of a job quota, for instance, and then those promises are systematically broken and the totally predictable response to that—people protesting outside the gates of the mill—is construed as fresh evidence of First Nations peoples’ backwardness and standing in the way of progress. What is most interesting to me is how this pattern was so similar in town after town and how people formulated their sense of themselves through it, and how that period is remembered as the good old days, in many ways, across the political spectrum.

GW: How did this research evolve into this sort of experimental work of fiction? What made you move away from specific research to this more abstract, allegorized description of these towns in Island Falls? 

OT: Well, the writing process was very frustrating for me, as I think it probably is for most people. After years of developing this research, I was like, “Okay, my last attempt at this is going to be writing down the basic facts as simply as I can.” I wanted to at least get that down to share a zine with other people maybe, so that’s where the report sections of Island Falls originated.

GW: How did the other narrative sections develop with Jan and the narrator? 

OT: Because it was this sort of composite, identifying the basic patterns of many different towns that I had visited, it wasn’t strictly factual or non-fiction anymore. So that led me to getting more into fiction. 

GW: Were you thinking about genre and format as you developed its final form?

OT: I wasn’t thinking about it. I thought it would be a self-published zine. I have to give credit to my friend Jenny Heijun Wills who I sent it to, and she was like, well since this is already fiction, you should expand it a little bit. Add some characters and some kind of story. I didn’t feel confident enough to try publishing a novel without being pushed. I guess I should also say that I had actually attempted that before and then thrown it out.

GW: Interesting, the same novel or something else? What drew you to writing fiction initially instead of continuing with non-fiction or academic work?

OT: I had written different versions, at different lengths, of a short story about Jan. Then I expanded it one more time into the narrative sections of Island Falls. What led me to fiction was my failure to become good at writing nonfiction. I was trying to write non-academic nonfiction and I couldn’t figure it out. 

GW: The nested format you ended up with draws attention to the conditions of research and writing—why it’s so difficult, what it’s really for. What are we supposed to make of this kind of meta-commentary? 

OT: I guess that was my way through feeling that I had failed. To present the attempts as attempts and not to claim that they had succeeded. It is a cop out, for sure. I don’t have to stand behind them that way. But now that I think about it, maybe it is a way of slipping out from under the kind of legal dynamic that operates in the university, of having to make an argument and stand behind it. It feels more honest and more the way I would want to be in conversation with friends and fellow adults.  

GW: How much of that narrative experience was mining your own experience? I noticed some seemingly autobiographical elements, like grad school in New York.

OT: Definitely. I used my whole life, not just going to graduate school in New York, but also people I knew as a kid growing up.

GW: How did you navigate that? Both research and storytelling obviously bring up questions around the ethics of narrative and representation. I’m curious about what this text offered—did fiction feel more permissive to explore some of your questions? 

OT: That problem that the narrator of Island Falls talks about with Jan, the problem of what to do with stories of people that have really affected you, was something I was trying to figure out. In Island Falls, I was trying to thread that needle, for better or worse. I don’t claim or assume to have pulled it off, but I was trying to find that balance and include people’s stories but in a more opaque or two or three levels removed kind of way. 

GW: Were you thinking about audience in that sense? I’m wondering how you think about accountability to those who might be implicated in your writing.

OT: I don’t have a strong sense of the right way to do it, other than the way I think the narrator puts it. I’m trying to find the balance between being complicit in the ways that dominant structures want us to forget people who are disappeared through the normal working of these institutions, and on the other hand, appropriating people’s stories that don’t belong to us. I don’t know if there’s even one way to do it, but I guess I think it’s important to try to find one.

 

 

I’ve always been struck by the kind of disjuncture, or dissonance between the story of our country that we're all taught in school and the reality of the city that we can see with our eyes, and our other senses. That bugged me. It’s like a psychological high wire act here to not be bugged by it.

 

 

 

GW: A lot of your work deals with similar themes of settler colonialism and racial capitalism in Manitoba. What would you say are the central questions that animate your work? How did you land on them?

OT: I’ve always been curious about Winnipeg. I grew up here, and I’ve always been struck by the kind of disjuncture, or dissonance between the story of our country that we're all taught in school and the reality of the city that we can see with our eyes, and our other senses. That bugged me. It’s like a psychological high wire act here to not be bugged by it. I think that’s always driven me since I was a kid. Then in University, I was a research assistant for Jim Silver, who’s a professor at the University of Winnipeg doing a lot of community-based research, and I was talking to lots of Indigenous community development workers about Winnipeg, who were so generous with me as a young student. A pattern that kept coming up in those conversations was that colonialism is not a thing of the past, and it's happening in this city. I took that as a prompt to try to figure out what exactly urban colonialism and race looks like in Winnipeg.

GW: Did it feel like that discussion was happening at the university, particularly around how colonialism operates in urban space?

OT: I don’t think it felt new. I think that’s a feeling we all have in Winnipeg, right? That’s maybe what Winnipeg brings to writing on colonialism. Modern, ongoing colonialism is visceral and undeniable here.

GW: It does feel like a useful place for these conversations. Most of your writing has focused on Manitoba or Winnipeg. What’s your relationship to place? How does coming from a background of Mennonite settlers factor into this?

OT: It’s a good question. I’ve always been fascinated by Winnipeg, and I don’t really have a personal connection to anywhere, but if I did, it would be here. And I want to respond to the idea of being a Mennonite settler, because I don’t have a good connection to my Mennonite ancestors. I don’t claim that identity, but of course I have to claim it because that’s the fact of where I come from, but it’s not who I am. I feel a similar way about the term settler, which I know is a loaded word for a lot of people. I had this conversation with Ruth Wilson Gilmore when I was a younger student, which has always stayed with me. She basically asked me about my background, and I just said White. And she took me to task for that, because that’s not actually where anyone comes from. Whiteness isn’t an actual identity that has an authentic basis in reality, which is what I think she was trying to teach me in that moment. I feel similarly about the term settler, which is an imposed identity by the architects of settler colonialism to make people think of themselves as settlers and function in that relationship toward other people. There’s a kind of loyalty to empire in that identity, so I think there’s a similar balancing act where we are encouraged to identify as settlers, and our ancestors were encouraged to see themselves as settlers, but if we have a future-looking orientation, there’s no future in being a settler.

GW: In relation to this question of place, why did you choose to study geography? What makes this a useful lens for your political questions versus other fields?

OT: I was just really interested in cities at first, so I was reading whatever I could find. I just found that the best stuff was written by geographers and Marxist geographers, like David Harvey and Neil Smith, and anthropologists, like Setha Low, who ended up being my advisor. I was like, “Okay, geography is where it’s at.” But in a more practical way, why I've stayed with it is that you can do historical geography and look at the past, but it feels future-oriented to me. It's how we make and remake places. By understanding how places have been made, you can understand how they could be remade differently. I guess cities feel like a place where that's happening at a greater pace or in the most interesting way.

GW: You mentioned Ruth Wilson Gilmore. How was it working with her? How does her thinking about abolition geography show up in your work?

OT: The way that Ruthie studies prisons as material infrastructure has been really influential for me, and her concept of abolition geography is similar to what I was saying about making and remaking places differently. She writes about freedom being a place—it’s a very materialist understanding. Abolition geography is not just about absence, but the presence of a new material world. She’s also a theorist of racial capitalism, and she kind of pushed me to think of settler colonialism as a specific iteration of racial capitalism.

GW: What’s useful about putting settler colonialism within this framework, rather than as a distinct system?

OT: Well for one, I think it’s accurate. The settler colony of Canada is one outcome of British imperialism that shaped many corners of the world. So, colonialism here is in relation to those other colonies and post-colonies. And then obviously, the British Empire wasn't its own siloed thing—it was in relation to other empires that shape other parts of the world. So, we see that the whole world is being produced from this. I think it’s helpful, in terms of trying to remake the world, to consider resemblances, and that it can encourage coalition building. In my case, relying on settler colonialism was leading me to think in a settler-native binary, which also isn’t accurate, in terms of everybody who’s sharing space and in relation to each other. There are many people who don’t fit into either of those categories, so it felt like a more robust and full accounting of place to think in terms of racial capitalism and the ways that the racialization of settlers and natives is only possible in relation to other forms of racialization happening in the same place and the same time. I always think about that in relation to the early industrialization of this country or Winnnipeg or the Prairies—there always had to be this third category of migrant labour that wasn’t Indigenous, but also wasn’t an enfranchised settler.

GW: Something that I notice in your work is this attentiveness to histories and narratives that may have been deliberately hidden or reduced by the frameworks we often rely on. I learned so much about Indigenous movements and resistance in Stolen City, for example, that seem absent from dominant understandings of this place. Island Falls, similarly, is attuned to these moments of rupture in apartheid geographies and partitions, and how people always seem to exceed the oppressive structures they live under. I guess I’m wondering how you unearth these histories, and what it offers to share them?

OT: Well, research methods [laughs]. I’ve been trained as a geographer to think about the different ways space is produced—in a top-down way, through official channels in a lived way, by people just being in the space. I also think about space in terms of counter-planning and planning for the future of our environment in an oppositional way. Thinking about all these different threads and how they combine to make a place is the way I was trained to write. It is quite freeing, in a way, because everything is making space. It permits geographers to include a lot of different things. People might make space, for example, by writing poetry or constructing an imagined idea of a place.

GW: Right, a more interdisciplinary field. I’m interested in this notion of space as “imagined.” Your work has this way of showing the desires that shape a place. I feel like there’s all this projection in Winnipeg, for example, by both conservative and progressive forces, that is never fulfilled, which makes it a compelling place of potential and also disappointment.

OT: For sure [laughs]. So much frustration and disappointment. No one's quite realizing the world that they have in their mind.

GW: But would you say you’re trying to articulate a vision? Is that a goal of your work, like here’s the thing we could imagine together?

OT: I mean, that’s what abolition geography is about. Even thinking about the mechanisms of governance of something like Centre Venture, which I look at closely in Stolen City—it’s this new invention for remaking the city and there are aspects of it that could be recycled for something radically different. I always think about this insight from Clyde Woods—a geographer who wrote Development Arrested, this amazing book about the Mississippi Delta, that I kind of modeled Stolen City’s structure off of. He describes community organizing as a politically neutral term, by which he means that a community of capitalists that exploits and oppresses a place is organizing, just like the community they’re in opposition to. We’re all part of different classes and blocs, constantly meeting and planning and trying to make the world differently.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

GW: I was struck by that line in Stolen City. An important reminder that everyone’s up to their little meetings.

OT: Right, which can open things up to being interrupted because we see our opponents in motion as opposed to this monolith.

GW: That reminds me of something that you emphasize in both Island Falls and Stolen City—how the state is a key enabler of these capitalist and neoliberal forces. I was also struck by Jan and the narrator’s shared ambivalence about neoliberalism as a sort of a simplistic explanatory framework for the current moment.

OT: The lesson that I feel like the whole colonial development of this part of the world teaches us is that before there can be any free market or capitalist accumulation, the state is always going in first to create the conditions for that.  This is also, I think, a hopeful thing in terms of thinking about the way that state power could look different. It also just exposes the lie of free market ideology. But the question around neoliberalism is specific to Jan, coming from this company town, where the partitions are so stark and close to each other and felt everywhere and, and yet invisible. The idea of a good job, I think for Jan, just becomes an absurdity—something that is connected to wild partitions between people with good jobs and people who don't have good jobs. 

A lot of my experience with organized labour is shaped by adjunct instructors organizing in New York at CUNY, including the way that the professor’s union had this completely paternalistic relationship toward us. But that is also tied to Jan pushing back against this idea that the goal should be good jobs which, in that context, means pushing back on the idea that the goal should be for adjunct instructors to be on par with professors. He’s coming from a place where job security was so contingent on being surrounded by insecurity. I don't necessarily think it's defensible. It's not a position I would take, but I think it makes sense in the context of Jan’s experience.

GW: It feels like there’s some vigilance about a tendency on the left toward nostalgia for a previous era when things were good, even though things have never really been good for most people.

OT: Absolutely, which is not to distance myself from fights for better working conditions and pay, but more so in terms of an overall political horizon. I think the way I wrote it in that paragraph was mentioning these constant caveats people make “that the good old days had not been so good for everybody,” but then don’t take them seriously. People continue on with this nostalgia rather than trying to totally reimagine how we could organize ourselves.

GW: How do you think about negotiating a balance between those things? Like, what does it mean to organize practically against massive, entrenched forces in a place like this, while also retaining that political horizon? 

OT: I think of something Ruthie [Wilson Gilmore] says a lot which is, as an activist, don’t make the mistake of fighting for something you’re going to be in a position of fighting against in 10 years. It’s important to actually work toward the world that you want to see. I think there are lots of inspiring practical small abolitionist projects that are about mutual aid, in the sense of meeting people’s needs directly, but that consistently keep that future vision or political horizon in mind.

GW: Do you see writing as part of your organizing? How have organizing spaces shaped your approach as a researcher?

OT: Well, most of my organizing experience has been organizing the prison rideshare through Bar None over the last 10 years. And one thing I’ve learned is how hard it is to do things. It’s very humbling for anyone who’s actually trying to do things to change the world. With writing, it’s a way to keep that long view, to keep in mind how plastic the world is, when it may not seem that way in the midst of day to day organizing to help people out. 

GW: At the end of Island Falls, the narrator writes that Jan has failed in his attempts to capture the stories of where he comes from. It’s an interesting note for the book to end on. What are we to make of this failure?

OT: Well, if we think about it from an organizing perspective, organizing is about failing all the time. It actually almost never works, and for whatever reason, we don’t write a lot about failure. Maybe there’s more writing than I think, and I just don’t know about it. But it felt important for me to actually write about failure.

GW: It can be hard to feel optimistic about organizing, but you also point to all these rich histories of movements and resistance in your work. Are there things happening that you’re excited by, here or elsewhere? 

OT: What comes to mind is Cambria Harris and the Search the Landfill movement, which is difficult for me to talk much about, other than to say, we’re living in their world. Her and her family and friends and community and the larger movement aligned with them are setting the terms for everything right now in an amazing way. It’s so obviously personal for them, so I don’t want to make any sort of political claims about their work they wouldn’t necessarily make, but it seems like we’re all just living in the future they’re making for our community, and I’m just grateful for them. When I was writing Island Falls, it was also a time of Wet’suwet’en resistance, and the Black Lives Matter and George Floyd uprising. It really did feel like a powerful time of revolt, in all these different, incredible ways. 

GW: How do you think about the trajectory of these moments of rupture? They seem to gesture toward a totally different future, but it feels challenging to know how to leverage or seize their power. 

OT: With the George Floyd uprising especially, it felt like the world was being transformed in ways that my friends and comrades and I could never have imagined. There were lots of conversations like, “Wow, I would never have imagined abolition being taken seriously in our lifetime.” It feels like we’re living in the time that uprising created, and of course, it's been co-opted and silenced and forgotten in a million ways. But, it’s also being lived in these other ways, because it happened. I’d never lived through periods of revolt like that, but it got me thinking about Cedric Robinson’s book Black Marxism, which is, in a lot of ways, about enslaved black people revolting for abolition of slavery. Revolt comes up in Island Falls a bit as well. It made me feel that there’s just a lot of practical power in revolt—demands for abolition were being taken seriously because they were made in a time of intense revolt, and this idea of the future would never have been taken as seriously without what was happening in the streets. 

GW: It’s interesting to think about more spontaneous revolt versus the sometimes tedious work of organizing or developing the ideas that might then be taken up. What do you think about this relationship between revolt versus organizing, and how they feed into each other? 

OT: That’s a great question. It does seem like there is a reciprocal relationship, where day to day organizing lays the ground for revolt, and moments of revolt push forward what it is possible to do in a day to day way. I am in love with revolt the way Emma Goldman was, as the true expression of our humanity, strategic or not. But fucking shit up feels strategic in many different ways. Not only in that way of forcing society to take seriously things that were systematically not being taken seriously, but also in allowing people to feel their own power, to get a glimpse of their true power.

GW:  What are you noticing right now in Winnipeg and Manitoba, in terms of the forces you describe in Stolen City, and the shifting character of settler colonialism? You’ve written about a community vision for Portage Place. Now that’s been sold to True North to develop, but there’s also new ownership of the Bay by the Southern Chiefs’ Organization. 

OT: Overall, I think the same thing is happening with the gentrification of the city centre. I mean, the Bay building is very cool—there are always interesting cracks and departures from the overall direction. It feels like for better or for worse, in a very boring way, the hockey team is almost like an avatar for the city’s future. So the fact that the hockey team is waning in popularity seems to signal that the hockey-centric idea of the city’s future perhaps doesn’t have the same life that it used to.

GW: Right. It’s interesting to feel this projection about potential futures here from developers and politicians, say, that actually just never comes into existence, because it involves erasing forms of life that actually exist downtown. Winnipeg seems fascinatingly kind of resistant to gentrification.

OT:  Because I think it’s a contradiction of the racial order, where the city centre had to be profitably disparaged to make the suburbs attractive to people. And that’s still the dominant feeling, which is such a racist feeling that developers are trying to overcome in order to sell condos.

GW: I’m curious how you’ve negotiated writing about that. The conditions of the racial order in Winnipeg feel brutal, but life continues in these neglected and policed spaces in remarkable ways despite this, some of which you speak to in Stolen City. 

OT: Trying to make a life for yourself downtown is obviously not easy or in and of itself resistance. But I found it interesting when I was writing Stolen City, thinking about things like dollar stores downtown that sell everyday items and the fact that these are demonized by city planners and developers who don’t want affordable retailers to be downtown because they serve the existing population. Clearly, the idea of the future of the city isn’t for it to be full of Dollaramas, but it feels like that’s an interesting case of that dynamic. People are buying food and diapers and clothing, living ordinary lives, and this is totally troubling to people who are trying to remake downtown in the image of the suburbs.

GW: Right, that makes me think of the way your work is also critical of how progressive institutions or spaces can fall into narratives of social or racial uplift, which can feel like the opposite side of the same coin.

OT: Right, we see this a lot with the NDP, in the way that they claim to be tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime, and try to have it both ways. A lot of my thinking about this comes from my partner, Bronwyn [Dobchuk-Land, Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Winnipeg]. It’s like this basic feeling that so many people on the left have that people are committing crimes because they’re poor, and so the crimes have to be policed and punished, rather than thinking about policing and punishment as something that’s mutable or a specific political decision. With that former mindset, the NDP solution to crime becomes a sort of uplift—like getting people educated, getting people jobs. There was that instance of such fiery racism during the election of Bowman that I write about in Stolen City, where Gord Steeve’s wife used all this typical racist language about people downtown, but at the same time, her tirade was peppered with calls for education and the language of social uplift. It just showed how easily those two things can sit together. The common denominator is that people are seen as lacking something, as not having their shit together, as in need of correction or healing.

 

 

 

GW: I appreciate the reminders in your work about how this kind of racial order warps everyone. Like, the character Jan seems to feel damaged by growing up in this apartheid town under white supremacy. I’m wondering how this kind of understanding plays into possible conditions for solidarity.

OT: Well, Jan’s dad dies in a way that wasn’t built into his class position, but it happened because it’s allowed to happen to people in that place, which feels like an early gesture toward that dynamic. The ways that racism is structural and ultimately everybody is vulnerable to different degrees to these structures that play out and are legitimized racially, but aren’t experienced exclusively along racial lines. The other thing I think about when you ask that question is being encouraged to forget, and the ways that life never plays out neatly along these partition lines. People’s lives are bigger and more complicated than how they get talked about. 

GW: You’ve carved this independent space outside of academia. How did you end up doing that? Why did you decide to work outside of the university? 

OT: I never intended to stay at the university.

GW: Why not?

OT: Doing a PhD paid me more money than I had ever made, so it was like saving money while reading. But I never saw it as a means to an end, I guess. It seems to me that the university intensely pushes people toward quantity over quality, and there are a lot of pressures that get in the way of becoming good at writing. Teaching and writing are treated similarly in that, the quality doesn’t actually matter. For me, trying to do the best writing that I could—there’s no perfect institution or circumstance—but it seemed not to be the right place. Although, obviously, lots of people still achieve this.

GW: Is it hard to write independently?

OT: Well the funny thing is that I’m a “faculty wife” for all intents and purposes, which is a term I came across from this book from the 1940s. My partner Bronwyn is a professor, which enables me to write. Otherwise, I would have to work for wages all the time, which obviously people manage, but it definitely gives me more time for writing. 

GW: What’s your writing practice? Do you write daily? 

OT: I’ve found a writing diary to be useful. Everyday, I write down—What time is it? What have I been doing instead of writing? What do I hope to do today? What did I do today?

GW: So you’re able to understand what factors make it easier to write, or chart your progress?

OT: It’s charting the progress and helping me see the recurring frustrations more clearly and avoid them. 

GW: Do you have a reading practice?

OT: Yes, I read everyday. Some people try not to read other things while they’re writing their own thing, but for me, reading is a really important part of writing. It gets me going to be able to write. You can feel like there’s more pressure to write than read socially—there is, definitely—but I try to remind myself that the reading is just as valuable as the writing.

GW: Do you read more widely than what you’re working on? What are you reading right now?

OT: I like to read widely. I just read Clayton Thomas Mueller’s book Life in the City of Dirty Water, and I just really loved it. The way he writes about his phase as a raver was so good. And I just love to read anything about Winnipeg. He’s writing about being a club kid in the 90s — I think he even uses the term “danceboy” at one point — and it’s a scene that I don’t have personal experience of but just sounds kind of magical. All these warehouse parties and after hour parties and gay bars. He’s experimenting with inventing himself and it’s pretty great.

GW: Are you planning to continue writing fiction? Are there people or models that you’re kind of influenced by in fiction right now?

OT: Yes, I’m writing fiction. I would never claim to have a good grasp of what other people are doing, so it’s more like, oh this is neat. Lots of stuff gets called experimental fiction, so I’ve been interested in what that means for different people. 

GW: Are you doing more research-based writing?

OT: I guess I’m using my own day to day life as research for the current thing I’m working on

 [laughs]. 

GW: Ooh, intriguing [laughs]. Can you say any more about it? 

OT: It is a diary of a neighbourhood, sort of. It is framed around a search. There is a guy who talks with his five-year-old daughter and with his grandmother. 

GW: Do you ever think: I really want this person to be able to read my work and understand it? Do you have a particular reader in mind, or are you more writing for yourself? 

OT: It’s hard to put a term to it, but I have in mind people who are serious about transforming our society. But it makes sense to me when people are like, I just write for myself, and then I assume that other people will be into it.

GW: Do you think your writing will always have a political bent? I guess even so-called apolitical art still has a politics to it.

OT: Yeah, I think about this all the time. I think all art is political, and there’s no such thing as an innocent or neutral place to be writing from.