Photo credit: Andrew Battershill
Interview by Emma Cleary
I am so grateful to Suzannah Showler for making time to talk with me about “Most Nights,” winner of our Grouse Grind Prize for V. Short Forms, published in our WONDER issue (60.1). What strikes me about “Most Nights” is the attention the story gives to the level of the backyard, the level just above the city’s canopy of roofs––Showler moves the reader toward the horizon and into a kind of intimate space so beautifully. Read on to learn more about the story’s evolution, the Dark-Sky movement, and some awesome raccoon facts! You can order a copy of the WONDER issue here.
Emma Cleary: Could you tell us the story behind the writing of your prize-winning short form piece, “Most Nights,” and its relationship to your novel-in-progress, Quality Time?
Suzannah Showler: My answer to this question is basically an endorsement of hoarding non-functional scraps of writing forever and never ruling them out. Getting from “Most Nights” to Quality Time is a bit like tracing the genealogy of early human species or something: crossbreeding, dying out, etc. etc. I wrote a slightly longer, sloppier version of “Most Nights” several years ago—back in 2015 or 2016, I think. I sent it out once or twice, nothing took, and I stashed it away.
The novel (which I drafted mostly in the first pandemic summer—thanks, CERB!) originally came from smashing together the premises of two totally different short stories which had been lingering in my “failed/unfinished work” stash since as far back as 2011. As the work evolved, it felt like what I was writing was set in the same world as the flash piece I also hadn’t done anything with. So, I dug that out, and the raccoons from “Most Nights” became the third pillar of the novel. In the end, I think every sentence of “Most Nights” appears pretty much verbatim in Quality Time, but they’re spread out across the manuscript.
EC: I’m very excited for your novel, which you describe as being about time theory, romance, cults, and raccoons! Can you share something that excites you from your research so far?
SS: Rather than abuse anyone with dorm room bong-talk about the time philosophy of Henri Bergson, I would love to share some exciting raccoon facts. Did you know that racoons can rotate their hind feet 180 degrees? This is why they can run down trees headfirst (most animals as heavy as a raccoon can’t do that). Also, raccoons get two thirds of their sensory data through tactile sensation. That’s why they seem to wash their food—they’re not really washing it, they’re just feeling it out. Also, racoons masturbate. I saw this once on the streets of Toronto.
EC: I really enjoyed your article on making contour drawings in the context of the pandemic over at Maisonneuve last year. How has this practice informed your writing?
SS: Thanks for reading that piece! I’m not doing the contours daily anymore, but I do use them in some of my creative writing classes (I’m a contract worker at the University of Ottawa). I’m teaching on Zoom, and in one class, we start each session by pinning ourselves and doing a contour self-portrait. Then once we’ve each captured our own image, we all ritually click the “Hide Self View” function so that no one has to spend the next hour-plus watching their own face perform selfhood. I’m absolutely convinced that this is one of the most mentally degrading aspects of Zoom life.
In general, I’ve become a lot more invested in performing rituals like this—whether it’s around writing, or teaching, or just being a person. Sometimes I feel self-conscious about the element of preciousness that asserts itself in these kinds of practice models (i.e. the ways they might not only ritualize but fetishize creative work). But I’ve been really trying to let go of this way of thinking as much as I can. I’m trying to see investing in processes over products (like in a real, offline, non-performative way) as a kind of anti-capitalist deprogramming effort rather than just being precious. But also, like, maybe art just actually is precious, you know? Not in the sense of being fragile or self-serious, but in the sense of being valuable and rare and worth protecting fiercely.
EC: What creative objects or practices are you reading, watching, listening to, or feeling passionate about right now?
SS: I’m going to take “right now” quite narrowly and mention a couple of creative objects I’ve encountered in the past twenty-four hours that I’ve loved. Yesterday, my friend Sheryda Warrener took me to Artspeak, a non-profit artist-run gallery in Vancouver, to see an installation by Woojae Kim called “I Am Porous. And I Am Moved By You.” I won’t be able to do it justice here, but the installation is built around the very slow, intricate production of a Korean fermented rice wine called Makgeolli: cultivating specific microorganisms, feeding the fermentation, and so on. There are so many beautiful, subtle details in the installation. The whole thing is this really beautiful testament to time and process, which happen to be two things I’m pretty obsessed by. I loved seeing this booze-making practice contextualized as art.
The other thing I’ve felt artistic passion for in the past twenty-four hours are works by my students. In one class, we just had a show-and-tell session where students presented Artist Books they’ve been making for several weeks. I was totally blown away by how beautiful, thoughtful, conceptual, and ambitious the work was: they were trying new forms, experimenting with different media, and really pushing themselves to do unexpected things. It was so wonderful. One of my students, Rebecca Rama (who granted my permission to mention this), created a Living Book; she had some classmates contribute to a Google Doc where she’d been playing around with typographical variations and ideas about ownership, ephemerality, and space for several months. She let her compatriots add their own drawings and words to the document over the course of a week, and then, during the Zoom show and tell, she deleted the whole thing in front of them to close the loop and end the Living Book’s life cycle. It was wild, and lovely, and sad. Such commitment! I am so here for that kind of thing.
EC: What are you working on at the moment? Where can we find you next?
SS: I’m working on a longform nonfiction piece about the Dark-Sky movement, a.k.a. the effort to mitigate light pollution to conserve darkness and the view of the night sky. Darkness is going extinct! It’s bonkers! That might seem like a superficial thing to be focused on in the age of climate crisis, but my thesis is basically that the dark is a gateway/training ground to radically overhaul our relationship to the natural world.
Suzannah Showler is the author of two collections of poetry and a book of cultural criticism about The Bachelor. Currently living on the unceded territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation, she writes for magazines and does contingent labour teaching creative writing classes at the University of Ottawa. “Most Nights” is the antecedent of Quality Time, a novel-in-progress about time theory, romance, cults, and raccoons.