← New Books Network
Loading summary
Transcript57 lines
- [00:00]
A
Are you dreaming of the perfect prom?
- [00:02]
B
But there's just one thing holding you back. Speak English, Mom.
- [00:07]
A
Welcome to Ethnosync. Ethnic Modification. What is this place? We help you reach your true potential. How are you feeling?
- [00:17]
B
It's good to be white.
- [00:19]
A
Hey, new girl.
- [00:20]
B
Hey. Look at what you've done to yourself.
- [00:22]
A
For a new plant to grow, the seed has to die. Slanted. Rated R. Only in theaters March 13th.
- [00:29]
B
Side effects may occur. Close your eyes. Exhale. Feel your body relax. And let go of whatever you're carrying today. Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-contacts. Oh, my gosh. They're so fast.
- [00:46]
A
And breathe.
- [00:47]
B
Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste.
- [00:55]
A
Visit 1-800contacts.com today to save on your first order. 1-800-contacts. Hi, everyone. I want to tell you all about another podcast I think you'll enjoy. College Matters from the Chronicle. College Matters is a weekly show from the Chronicle of Higher Education, and it's a great resource for news and analysis about colleges and universities. You'll hear sharp discussions with Chronicle journalists offering fresh perspectives on the latest salvos from the Trump administration and keen insights about how faculty and students are adapting to technological changes. College Matters also features incisive interviews with newsmakers, including recent conversations with Chris Eisgruber, Princeton University's president, and Rick Singer, who is best known as the mastermind of the Varsity Blues admissions scandal. Check out College Matters wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:50]
B
Hello, everyone, and welcome to nbn. I'm your host, Holly Gattery, and I am joined today by Dr. Connor McDonald to talk about his remarkable new long poem, which was released with the Hamilton, Ontario publisher Walls I Can Win. What we know so far is it was released on October 7, 2025, and as I said, I am looking forward to talking to Dr. Donald about this, mostly because I have never written a long poem. The idea of a long poem intimidates and baffles me. And his long poem is really beautiful. Welcome to the Show, Connor.
- [02:29]
A
Thanks, La. Please, please stop referring to me as Dr. McDonald.
- [02:34]
B
So sorry. I'm reading off your bios.
- [02:37]
A
I know. Yeah, no, and I don't work in. I don't work in sellers and you anymore. I managed. I got fired from there as a volunteer, so that's a pretty big achievement. So, yeah, the bio is Fluid.
- [02:51]
B
Yeah. I do remember hearing that being fired as a volunteer in a bookstore is a very prestigious accomplishment. Congratulations.
- [03:02]
A
By a guy called Peter Sellers. So there's definitely something in that somewhere.
- [03:07]
B
Yeah, exactly, exactly. So, yes, we will skip that part of your bio, but for our listeners. MacDonald is a poet and physician at the Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto. He is the author of two collections of poems and three chapbooks. His poetry has appeared in various Canadian and international publications as well as noted medical journals. He is an associate professor at the University of Toronto and editor in chief of HACE Repertory, a narrative based medicine lab publication which seeks to engage and promote the voice of the patient in collaboration with. With their health carers. He is frequently invited to as an international lecturer on pediatric preoperative care, error prevention and opioid stewardship. There we go. And he is currently the vice president of the Canadian Pediatric Anesthesiology Society. Wow, I struggled with that. Connor, welcome.
- [04:05]
A
Yeah, I specifically wrote that bio two years ago, so I. It would trip you up today.
- [04:11]
B
I mean, they're not difficult words in and of themselves, but back to back to back. A little bit of a fun fact for our listeners. At the end of my tongue removed, it was completely unnecessary. I just panicked and I can't feel it, which means I cannot pronounce certain words correctly. So that was definitely an exercise for me. But I'm up the ass. So, Connor, let's jump right in because I feel like there's a lot to unpack in this poem. There's also a lot to enjoy. What I was not expecting from this collection was the level of cheek honor. There is some serious cheekiness to this collection. But before we get into that, I'd really like you to tell our listeners about where it started for you.
- [04:58]
A
Okay. That's really intriguing. Cheek. I'm looking forward to that one. I guess maybe three, four years ago, um, when I was getting ready to contemplate kind of next manuscript, et cetera, found myself following a lot of. Part of my morning routine is to look at BBC News, the Guardian, things like that. And one of the things that I was starting to notice with increasing frequency as we were getting increasingly frequent horrible stories like school shootings and other things like that was the way the news had devolved to basically just this. Just in. 20 people are dead somewhere in a school in this town. What we know so far is. And what you know so far is essentially nothing. It's essentially just getting this big huge headline up there that just kind of. You have to wait hours for any Further detail or any sort of, you know, people consult the news not to be consistently terrified and made more and more and more and more anxious people consult the news to find out what's going on. But the whole world has accelerated to a point where a thing happens and a second later you're aware that the thing happened, but you're not aware of the context and you're not aware of how it is playing out. You're not aware if it's already finished and you're not aware if it's like, are people still in harm? Are people still unsafe? And that is just an ongoing level of anxiety and stress that plays into what anxiety is. Anxiety is a fight or flight reaction. And you make a decision based on the information you have at the time. But there is no reason why the news, which is going to be full of difficult headlines at the best times anyway, but there's no reason why that has to be this clanging, flashing red bell that's going off to the side of your head every 15 seconds with something new and horrible. So I kind of thought, oh, I might write a suite of poems that all begin with the phrase, what we know so far is. And I'll follow the news for a few months and I'll jot down some ideas and I'll kind of see where that takes me. And so I think that's one of the reasons then that it started to become this kind of culture wide illusional thing very early on when I kind of gave the poems, which weren't really single poems anymore already. And they were very, very different in form and length and things like that. And kind of early readers were like, one person in particular was like, this is a long poem. You should concentrate on this is a long poem. And with the recurrent phrase, what we know so far as. So I did that. And as I was doing that, I realized that I was also beginning to comment not only on the fact that, you know, this information is just thrown at us. It's like if you just wake up in the morning and someone like throws a pie in your face and goes, people are dead, you know? And I was kind of like, okay. Like we had a moment a few weeks ago in the hospital where I arrived to work and parked at 6:45 or 6:50. And I was walking through the car park underground and this bell and alarm is going off and it's saying, you know, code blue and icu, cold blue and icu, which means that a child is arrested and is being resuscitated. And as I came up to the ground floor, I met one or two of my colleagues, and we were all arriving at the same time. And one of them said, jesus, as soon as you walk in here, it just starts, you know? And I was like, it's like as soon as we entered the building, it started screaming at us because it's angry that we came here. And I think one of the things I reached, kind of not an end point, but I reached the point by which I was happy to communicate the idea of what's being transmitted to us. What I didn't have and which came out throughout the time that I worked with Paul, Paul Vermeersch, who edited this film for Walzack, and Winnan Buck, writer. What really came out during those two or three drafts was the idea of how we receive this, and the idea almost that the language that is being thrown at us is like a weaponized meme, that it's something that's been in our genes since day one, and that it's something that keeps evolving to keep us further and further apart. And so while the clamor, the level of clamor and the level of conversation and the sound and the noise all increases increasingly with that, we're not understanding anyone anymore. And that's why there's like one or two short paragraphs at the very start of the book, like a prologue, that are kind of explaining the idea of how a virus mutates, and to the point that we almost recognize the words that are being thrown at us, but they're being thrown at us in a way that's slightly new to us, and we're no longer capable of. Of absorbing them, and we're no longer capable of having the conversation. And so therefore, increasingly, we're just screaming at each other. And as you know yourself, Holly, the gorgeous image on the front of the book about the person plummeting through the air and that kind of motif that goes through the book is the idea of somebody falling through the history of language. And as they're falling through it, of course, it's like time travel, they're inadvertently altering it as well. And it's essentially like just kind of the history of falling through language and getting to a point where we've never had so many communication devices now as before. But increasingly, we're not communicating at all. And therefore, at the end of all that, what we know so far is that.
- [11:04]
B
Such a great explanation, and I think you touched on why I find the collection, as I call it, some of you might have a different word for it cheeky. And it's not like the whole collection is Che of cheek is cheeky. But there's this really what I. What I found to be breathtaking, rippling irreverence that I. Yeah, it's very puckish. Yes. And I think it's a. As a re. As a reader of the poems, it gave that irreverence gave me room to breathe. When you're talking about some very difficult subjects, it's kind of like when you're at somebody's funeral or you're listening to a Remembrance Day ceremony and something absurd happens and you're. You're in this moment where you might be crying, but then suddenly you just kind of. There's this kind of barked laugh that you can't have. So I was wondering about. If you could talk about that. Mean, I don't want to say it's a stylistic choice because I know that with a lot of writers, myself included, I'm not making a choice, it's just what happens. But I talk about that balance between talking about some very serious issues, you know, the opioid crisis. As an addict myself, I really. I was really invested in. In that part. But of course, you're not only talking about people who are addicts. It's in a broader scope than that. But even through that section that there was that ripple of irreverence that again, just gave me that room to breathe and not feel so scared that I was closed off to receive message in that particular.
- [12:35]
A
If you could just help me a little bit in that particular say section that you're using for an example, what would be, if you can remember, like the little examples, whether they were word choices or whether it was a pun or what were there. What were the things that actually gave you that room to breathe?
- [12:52]
B
I don't have an exact example comes immediately to mine, but what I do know is that when people start talking about drugs, addiction, anything like that, I'm admittedly ready to be misunderstood. I'm immediately ready to. On defense. But perhaps it is something about the capacity in which you. You deal with these issues and themes as a professional. With you, there was an element of where. Of safety, where I felt like I was in good hands and that I was safe. And so there was that ripple through it. But I mean, I also know that part of. Maybe this is part of it more. You can speak to this more than your professional capacity, but I know that you have a personal history with. With dealing with opioid harm reduction and the after effects of prescription opioids as well. So I felt immediately safe, although I didn't know that until after I read the book. And then I thought, well, am I reading too much into this? Like, I don't know. So that's why I love you to talk about it.
- [14:03]
A
Sure. Okay. We went from cheeky to addicts very quickly, but let me see. Well, I guess the first thing I would say is the opioid. I've chosen my own kind of pathway of research at SickKids for at least 15 years now. And I started off looking into medication safety and medication error and very quickly hopped across to opioid error and opioid safety. And then a lot of that was inpatient based. And then very quickly moved to the idea of opioid stewardship. And is there a way that the hospital is contributing to the crisis by pouring a whole bunch all these drugs out with prescriptions that aren't used and then just stay in homes and then become quite dangerous little ticking time bombs? So I certainly have an academic approach to it. I have a genuine, like, if we can do well and if we can do better, then let's try to do that. That tends to be my way most of the times in my research and other things, I'm always asking, what's the new question? What's the next question? And trying to address that in as equitable a way as possible, like leave no one behind. I've lost friends to drugs and I lost one or two very close friends to unintentional overdoses. And I think then what you maybe sense is I tend to bring all parts of myself to my work and I tend to bring all parts of myself to my writing. Not something I used to do, but I think as I have allowed the physician part of me and the researcher part of me to sit in the same room as the writer when he's writing. I was concerned for years that people would think I was just trying to trade off my sick kid status or whatever you want to call it, as an angle and a way in to sell books. So for the longest time I really just tried to just write anything except that kind of stuff. But Also, you know, 10, 12 years ago, I realized that one of the reasons why my anxiety was so high and my work related stress was so high was because I was going to work and leaving very important parts of me at home. So I was leaving the comedian at home. I was leaving the, you know, the guy that will turn around and say the gallows sentence when no one thinks you should say it. But Everyone in the room will laugh. I was reading all of that at home because it felt you're made to feel it's unprofessional. You're made to feel it's inappropriate. And one of my ways towards better mental health and wellness from the people who were helping me, the professionals, was you can't get up and go to an incredibly stressful job where people might die and only bring part of yourself there. The parts of yourself that aren't there are cowering at home, feeling helpless. So I got better at that with regards to work. And then I just realized at one point, probably a year or so before starting to write this book, that I needed to do that in my writing as well. And not like, okay, Connor, write like a doctor, but instead just like, sit down and be as open to everything when you're writing as I am to when I'm working. It doesn't matter what comes in front of me and work. You know, I'm not related in a backstory that will somehow make me feel as if somebody is less deserving than somebody else. I don't make those decisions. I years and years and years working in intensive care units as well. And I just like, what's put in front of me is, okay, this person is sick. I need to take care of them. I need to find out what's wrong with them, and I need to make them better. And I think that pervades. There's a. I'm quoting one or two other people here rather than just tooting my own horn, but I think there's a humanity. And I think what you're possibly coming across, and maybe some of the sections as well, on the difficulties of being a physician at times, there is a humanity in there. And I realized that one of the things that I probably wanted to write throughout my career is it's not easy to do this job. And the person who's doing this job might be very, very scared while doing it, but that doesn't mean that they're less well able to do. Means that they've actually stepped up at a time when they're not feeling great and they still do an incredible job and they go home and they may actually be a little bit weaker for that, for having given themselves to someone else. So I have been someone who's always run towards the flames rather than away from them. And I'm somebody who brings my humanity to my work, to my writing and to my life. I allow anything and everything to be on the table when I'm writing. And I'm very lucky that my writing. I don't need to pay bills and buy food from my writing. It doesn't have to fund that. So I am allowed to tackle things in whatever way I want, not feel that I need to compete with the current market, that I need to be either more political or less political or more aligned to one thing rather than another, and instead just sit back and go, you know what? This is all pretty crazy. This is all really difficult. It's difficult for everyone here is what we know so far. And what we know so far is that we're going in the wrong direction. I don't sit there and go, I'm the doctor. I have the diagnosis and the cure. But I do kind of sit there and go. Just as a person and as a human and as a physician who takes care of some of the sickest kids in the world, sometimes I feel all of this very, very acutely. And then I look at the world and I see how other people are behaving with each other, and I'm just like, how can we do this? So I don't know. I think when I die and when it's all done, and I don't mean legacy, but when people just kind of go, what was he trying to do? What was he trying to say? I think I was just trying to say, this isn't easy, but I kill myself every day trying to do it anyway. And I don't know where the cheekiness or the puckishness comes from that. I was just about to say, haven't addressed your question. I think when I let all that humanity in Hale, I'm also letting my humor in. Because in order to get through all this crap, you have to be able to turn around for a second and go, oh, that's ridiculous. For example, a couple of months ago, on the electronic emergency board that tells us what cases need to be done and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And there was this. There was this baby, and the name of the baby was Dante. And it was an emergency surgery, which very serious surgery. And he weighed 6.66 kilos. And I just turned around and I said, look, can we not just round up and give this kid a fair chance? And a couple of people laughed, and a couple of people like, what the fuck are you talking about? And I was like, dante, the Descent to hell. He weighs 6.66 kilos. Come on. It's like the universe is stacking the odds against him. We need to do something here. And that was my way of getting myself ready to go in and take care of him and to be his surrogate parent and his surrogate shepherd and to worry about him, but to not worry about him to the point where I'm paralyzed and I'm of no use to him. So I'm sure it's a coping strategy from when I was a very young child that, like, humor got me out of scrapes and humor got me more attention and humor helped other people feel better when I could see that they were feeling bad. And I don't intentionally sit down to be funny or cheeky, but I do sit down with the intent of if you know, when a word combination or a different way of looking at it where it presents itself, I will twist the hell out of that and make sure that I make the most of it that I can. And that's why this book is full of places where even though it is a single long poem, there seem to be these natural pauses and there seem to be moments for the readers to get a breath and there seem to be moments where like, oh, he's gone onto a different subject now. I guess I can stop here for a while because I had so many, so many, so many people come to me and say, I'm reading this. I'm loving this, but, you know, I'm bringing myself down to four or five pages a day because I think that's the pace I need to read this at. And I'm like, yeah, that's probably even quicker than the pace I wrote for that. But yeah, when you sit down with it and open it, it's like, whoa, okay, this is a barbaric yawp.
- [23:01]
B
Well, I mean, I did want to try to ground my, my claim and my, my belief. So I have so much of your book dog eared that when I was saying, oh gosh, so much of these, I don't know where I should pull from, but when you were talking, it reminded me of a section and, and what I was really thinking of when. When I remember taking a really deep breath and just. It was. It's on page 59 for those of you following along at home. And there's one part where you say if, or you write, if only we could all be little girls a while holding ends inside the clocks, but we are weeds instead, when we could have been timeless trees. Like that gives me goosebumps, Connor. So I felt safe then, but I also felt like you were acknowledging the threat. And so again, there's that duality. And, and you know, at the beginning of this section, it says maybe we should have been Maryland but we arrived pre abused instead Star crossed addicted a little nymph foe we transformed to robins above circular saws overlooking waterfalls so that's number one an example of how packed your language is. Like you. You cannot rush through this book. You need to stop, slow down, not address this book. You would the way you would address, address or deal with or engage with a social media feed where you're scrolling, scrolling scrolling slow down don't do you know it's fighting against the news.
- [24:37]
A
Do you want to. Do you want to spend a minute or two with this section actually, seeing as you've picked it out?
- [24:42]
B
Yeah, I would love to. It's one of my favorite sections and that's how I came to it because first of all, star crossed addicted a little bit nympho. That's cheeky, Connor. That's cheeky. And so like. So that's one of the reasons I picked it out. It has the safety and the cheek that I'm referring to. But I was trying to find a section that had both of those things.
- [25:04]
A
Okay, so listen. Yeah, that's a lovely choice actually. And you know what? Next week when myself and Paul are having our little co launch in the East End, Paul Vermeersch. We're each reading a bit from each other's work and that's the section that Paul is going to read from mine. He actually asked for that section.
- [25:22]
B
Oh well, it's the one that I had dog eared in on a scrap of paper. Okay, I'll be honest, it's a Kleenex thrown in there too.
- [25:29]
A
Whatever is at hand. So listen when you go to the notes at the back of the book. So this is section XXIV and it says this is an update of participation in passive views, the second place 2019 Vallum Award for poetry, which might have been the one Kez won actually. But it's also participation in Passive Fuse parentheses Twin Peaks in under two minutes. So this was when I was going through a phase a few years ago in my first book I wrote there's a poem called we are Shine, which is the entire two hours of the Shining written as a Greek chorus. And I watched the Shining three or four times in a row. Kept pausing and kept writing down lines of dialogue, but also kept writing down ideas as they occurred to me while I was watching the filaments slowly getting madder. And it Jen became this just completely different thing. And it's actually great fun to perform, except it takes eight minutes. But I decided to tackle something else like that. And my favorite, favorite, favorite TV film media verse is the Twin Peaks universe. And I was very profoundly affected by Fire Walk With Me, the film very much affected by the kind of the destruction of an angel. It's not enough just to kill her, you have to destroy the angel so that the sacrifice can be maximized. And I don't think that's something that came out in the series, but it's something that really came out in the film for me. And it has generated a lot of talk since. And I was one of the few people who actually liked and loved the film when it first came out because it was just the gradual, the gradual destruction of Laura Palmer. And so to me, the entire Twin Peaks universe is not about anything else except the universe that destroys a teenage girl in order to feed itself. And so I did my research. I watched all of the original series. I started by watching Fire Walk with Me. I did it chronologically. So I watched Firewalk with me. I watched the original series however many 20, 30 hours that is 50 hours I think it is actually. I watched the three hour weird film that's made the ties in between the two of them. And then I watched the 18 hour series of revisiting Twin Peaks, the season three thing. And all the time I watched it, I was writing things down, writing things down, writing things down, writing things down. And it was probably about 40 or 50 pages of different ideas and notes. And then I just went, right, I was trying to Write this like 30 page poem high. And then I was like, no, this is fucking stupid. This is ridiculous. So I was just like, condense it, condense it, condense it, condense it. Which is why it's parenthetical. Twin peaks in under two minutes. So I went through 60 or 75 hours for what is basically a one and a half page poem. But bringing everything back to the opening kind of images of the girl stumbling down the mountain, the girl wrapped in plastic and very much expanding it just a little bit to allow it to be there is someone else whose heart is broken that holds the other half of that heart locket. And very much having gone through the experience of sitting and watching it for all that time, also feeling like an observer of pain and just a witness to this pain. And if I didn't have this demand for this type of, not some entertainment but interaction with culture, would that amount of pain have happened with or without me watching? Anyway, um, and so I just very much care. I. I have these like two or three, four or five images in my memory and in my sense memory and in my cells that are just like. Like that framed picture of Laura Palmer at the end of each Twin Peaks credits. And the music all was just. And. And I remember the phenomenon. I was in university and people were coming in the next day, having watched it and just freaking out and stuff. And I would go home at the weekend and watch it with my family because they taped it for me. And I think I have this weird knight in shining armor freaking aspect to me where I see something like that and I want to liberate it, I want to rescue it. I want to tell more of the story than I've been told already. And there are one or two other poems of Forget Galway in. My first book is about a woman in real life who went through a lot with. And so, yeah, I just. I take these cultural moments and I go. We all consume it one way, but it has penetrated me and pierced me in quite another way and to the point where I'm almost making this real. I'm almost anthropomorphizing these characters and making them real. And if I feel it so strongly, are they feeling it that strongly? And what can I do to liberate them from this? And the only way I can do that is accepting some blame for the situation they're in, because the situation they're in is so that I can sit down and watch it. So, yeah, I mean, if you like, I can read that poem.
- [30:53]
B
I was gonna ask you to. And I'm gonna preface it by saying, I know this isn't the Coca Cabana or Karaoke bar, but would you have the.
- [31:01]
A
No, I was delighted when you said that. And this is something. And this is a good example of not everything written for this book was brand new. There were things I went back and took out of the past that hadn't been published elsewhere, et cetera. And I was like, oh, this is interesting. I can work with this. And then I would add to it, et cetera. And it's really interesting because I've already read this poem a few times at public readings. And there's no pencil marks on this because my reading copy of this, my latest book, is full of pencil marks and corrections. And if you're going to read it, read it this way instead of that way. This page is pristine. So I've been reading this and I have not been changing it. So, yeah, okay. So this is essentially Twin Peaks in under two minutes as experienced by me maybe about three years ago. When we were unmade, we were scrutinized to death. Maybe we should have been Marilyn, but we arrived pre abused instead Star crossed, addicted a little bit nympho. We transformed to robins above circular saws overlooking the waterfalls Brushed ashore by current flow and lonely as foghorns we hung around to roll the girl over Were there when another girl stumbled into town Fell down the mountain Gripping half a heart locket in one hand. The germ of a mole on a team is like half heart locket's left in hock Flimsiest details of a promise split into jagged approximation of halves and half knots have and have to twinkling terror of debutantes and hand me down garters and hands off the goods Such clammy praise is a plunging ache that scabs and scars but never heals. The world has gone from velvet blue to blushing bruise and here end all the nerves. Small seeds of darkness are taken root and there the synapse congeals. When old wound heals, the sun will reveal it. When healers fail, the dirt will conceal her. Nobody knows what she needs from tv. We are the absent mass at the center Watching the agents chase the perverts. We are what killed, what kept her living A most impotent agency Dualities beyond make believe Terrible doubles making trouble for everybody concerned. Theirs is a fury asking old questions of soft new flesh. Will he come for me next when he's done with her? What we know for sure is no, you're safe. You're men. Next will be another woman, a blonde in high school using drugs and crying out for help, who delivers abundances of food but never eats herself. She is half the high school girls we know, but all of her family's daughters. If only we could all be little girls a while holding hands inside the clocks. But we are weeds instead, when we could have been timeless trees. Grammon Bozjia wrapped in plastic, holding fast to inert darkness, pressing tyrant robins onto spinning blades.
- [33:58]
B
Thank you, Connor. I mean, just. It is irreverent and I think refreshing also to have somebody say what we know so far is no, you're safe. You're a dude. Fine. You know what I mean? Like, I meet it safe with someone who will recognize that.
- [34:14]
A
Yeah, no, no, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Marilyn, you know, Marilyn Monroe. It's not the first time that someone has been abused and then just tossed out a window or whatever. And yeah, it's. I was kind of chuckling when I was reading this because there's a few lines that come up as well that I stole from other poems and I was like, oh, Yeah, I stuck that in there. That's interesting. Yeah, but just that idea of the half heart, the split heart, that somewhere there's someone who did love deeply, who has that other half. And I think that's something that lynch did. Like, he really tried to make his way around the town to all these different people that loved her and were kind of. But were also besotted with her. But there was some genuine, genuine, deep love for the character. But she. It's like she was just earmarked for destruction, you know? And there are some things that we just observe happening either in reality or in media. And it could just. That thing will never happen to us. And that was that whole idea of like, yeah, you can come away from that thing. You're really freaked out and you're really scared. And again, it's part of the whole news thing. It's like, okay, well, I'm probably not going to be a victim of a school shooting because I have no reason to be in a school. And so how then do I actually absorb and process the stories about that kind of thing? I'm processing it from a different lens. I'm not a parent, I'm not a teacher, but I am a physician in a hospital that is preparing itself to have a code and a policy for just that kind of, you know, scenario. So it's just, yeah, just inserting myself into these different places and kind of going, why do I feel so strongly about this? Or why does it elicit such strong emotions in me? And at the same time then going, what can I do to make myself feel better about this? And maybe the case is, Holly, like you're pointing out that maybe those moments make other people feel better, too. And even the line that follows that, you know, you're a man, the idea of, you know, half the school's girls because, you know, there's a lot of girls, a lot of boys, but she's the family's only daughter. And that whole thing of, you know, bringing the story down to this one singular person who went through this awful thing, but we're consuming it as if it's the latest in a series of these things, but that one person still had to go through that thing. And, you know, the stuff I'm working on at the moment, like, there's a line I used put into a poem a few days ago, and it's very honored, but I think it's like the lines go something like, some births are violent than most deaths. Some births are more violent than most deaths. And it's not to be intentionally dark or intentionally creepy or intentionally anything. It's the truth. Some births, if you stand there, if you're out enough births, some of them are like, geez, that was. I didn't think we were going to make it out of that one. While at the same time, some people get to die in a bed surrounded by their family and have this beautiful end of life. And so it's kind of just acknowledging those. Those times and those moments. It's like, this is a very violent moment. Most people think it's very beautiful.
- [37:30]
B
Yeah, well, having had four kids, I shouldn't complain. I had. I'll shut up. I had easy births. I'm just going to stop right there. I'm not going to complain about something that was relatively fine.
- [37:42]
A
Good, good. Applaud.
- [37:44]
B
Yeah, yeah. But I. I do know. I do know. Horror stories obviously will spare the audience, though, as I'm sure.
- [37:49]
A
Of course. Yeah, they can read the book if they want. The horror. Yeah.
- [37:54]
B
And I mean, I'm sure you have horror stories, too. But one thing that I think that that particular section that we were just talking about is what carries over for me and what you just expressed that I found really powerful about the whole collection is the idea that just because something doesn't affect us directly doesn't mean we shouldn't care about it. And your whole collection is a pro.
- [38:21]
A
That's a great line. Sorry to interrupt. That's a great line because when I started doing this, I was worried that I was losing empathy. Thank you for reminding me of that. When I first sat down and I read another story like that, like another school shooting, and I'm like, almost. I wasn't blase, Holly, but I was like, whoa, hold on a second. This is becoming normal. This is being normalized by myself. So that is a big reason I wrote this book. And it's really cool of you to say that and really stupid that I forgot it, but you put your finger right on that there it was like me checking myself and going, dude, wait a minute. You know, every cesarean section is a new experience. Might not be for you, but it is for that person. And exact same with all of those stories. I was like this. I cannot allow my cells to accept this as normal information.
- [39:15]
B
Yeah, well, I mean, I do want to, like, point out that to me, this whole book felt like a hymn to a reawakening of ourselves from the apathy of the barrage of news that does desensitize us. I mean, it's. I think it's easy for all of us to become numb to it. And this, this. I keep calling it a collection. It's one long poem, but there. There are separate sections in it. I'm want to talk next about a section on page 63. And it's eight, I believe there's eight at the bottom. It's a very short kind of middle of the page centered section. I find that, you know, this. Your. Your book points directly to the fact that we're becoming numb. And it's understandable we're becoming numb because what we know so far is, my God, make it stop. Make this onslaught of horrible news stop. I mean, sometimes it feels like feeling numb is the only way to protect yourself. But when we turn our away from the suffering of others, we. We deny our own humanity. And it seems that your book is really working on a subtle and soft reawakening of self. Which is. Which is what I felt. So this section I'm talking about, what we know so far is. We need a pause. Now, I'm sorry to do my request again, but would you read that for us? It's on page 63 again.
- [40:35]
A
Oh, yeah. Yes. And this is. So you're right. It's a long poem that's about 85 pages, 80 pages long, but it's broken into 30 sections. And each of those sections is in Roman numeral. And There are also 10 little hinges that are planted carefully throughout the book. And those hinges, they're shorter pieces and they tend to start with a line from the previous, and they kind of twist it a little bit and then ends with hinting at what's coming next. And so I had this idea that if somebody takes a break and they walk away and then they come back and they go, okay, so I'm going to start at this little hinge, number eight. Now, that it will help them remember. It will help them remember what they had read. But actually, subtly, it'll also change the context of what they had read, which is really kind of one of the things that's going on. And the hinges are also the places where I mention natural disasters or huge accidents that have claimed large amounts of lives as a way of just like putting those there. And they kind of get twisted through time as well. Okay, so section 8, page 63. What we know so far is we need a pause. Deep water Valdez, ported Beirut. So many generations unmade with a word. Even though the Irish have no word for no, even though the plural of word is sword, and will be for another millennium at this rate of imitation, those born only to sleep forever are worn for weeks, swaddled in the hems of women, until the first horizon is passed. The the second is only seen from the beach through spiral shells once every few thousand years.
- [42:23]
B
Yeah, that's another section that just gives chills. And then I want to reiterate to our listeners, I mean, I think one of the power of poetry that's really well done is it. I mean, it demands you slow down. If you try to write that poem, if you try to sprint through it, you'll miss everything and you'll be poor for it. So this leads to my next question, and it's something I often ask Po often ask poets who write really distilled poetry, because I understand all poetry is fairly distilled, especially compared to prose, But I think there are some poets who distill harder than the rest. And I'd say you distill pretty hard. How do you do this? I mean, maybe this is in the editing process, but what does it look like to you when you're looking at a poem and you're trying to kind of bring it down to its earliest bit?
- [43:14]
A
So I am a notebooker, like Kez. I remember you were talking with Kaz as well. And I have lots of different notebooks on the go and a different notebook for each project, or sometimes two or three different notebooks for each project. So I can develop it in two or three different ways. I don't work off the laptop. I work with notebook and pencil, and I just sketch and write and sketch and draw and write and put ideas and lines down. And then I go back to the notebook, and then I go, oh, that line there works with that line two pages back, and it starts like dough, like play doh or like modeling clay, it starts coming together into a cohesive idea. But because the language is coming from different days, different moments, different parts of the notebook, the singular idea is almost being presented in more than one form or with more than one voice. And so I keep doing that, keep doing that, keep doing that, keep doing that. And then when I think a piece, whether it's an individual poem or whether it's a section or a chapter, whatever, especially with the poetry, when I go, okay, now the real refining begins. That's when I first type it into the laptop, because I want to see how it looks on a white background. And I start kind of going, that's not the shape I want to see. When I open that page, I want to see a different shape. And I will start changing the language. The enjambments all of those other things. And so, as you can imagine, there was an absolutely gargantuan editing process that went. This book was like, the final draft edit was probably about a year. And I think in the essay that I wrote on this in the woodlot, which Don McDonald referred to a few days ago, I think I had said, like, there was one draft that I thought, oh, my God, I've done it. It's great. Well done. Yay me. And then I did another draft, and I absolutely hated it. And there was like, 20 pages in the difference. Like, one was 60, one was 80 pages. And I'm like, oh, my God, I've destroyed it. And I was talking about going back to earlier drafts to try and find the germ of what I liked before that. And I just found as I refined and edited, refined and edited, refined and edited, I was just tossing more and more stuff out and stuff, that at the start, I thought, oh, I cannot be without this. This must be in the book. I just found that I was just viciously taking a side to it and just throwing stuff over my shoulder, go, don't eat that, don't eat that, don't eat that, don't eat that.
- [45:56]
B
That.
- [45:57]
A
And just, I think then that allowed me to have some central motifs that are. That they repeat, they return, but they also. They revolt and they evolve and they mutate. And you keep coming across some of these phrases. You go, oh, I read that before, but that's not quite what I read. And it's bringing you through. It's very difficult to bring someone through 80 pages and expect them. It's like throwing someone who hasn't trained into tough mudder and say, off you go. You know, it's like you write something because you want people to read it. So therefore, you have to enable the reading of the piece. You have to actually make it possible for people to read it. And there are drafts of this that are unreadable, drafts of this that come across like a person in an incredibly manic phase with flight of ideas and tripping over themselves, which you can't experience in 80 pages and four hours. But it's no harm letting that in every so often for a line here and there. So I think there are probably drafts of this book that sound like they were written by different people. Hale. And one of the things that actually came together near the end was allowing those different people to have their say here and there every so often. And again, getting back to that whole thing of acknowledging that there's more than one thing to Me, there's more than one voice to me. I'm not just a physician and I'm not just a writer. And most importantly, I'm a husband. That is the most important job I have. And so allowing all of those different voices. I take care of children, but I'm not a parent. And how does that change the way I think about the future of the world? I'm not looking at two teenagers thinking, Jesus, what's it going to be like for them in 30 years? But at the same time, I'm taking care of everybody's teenagers and babies every day. So, you know, it's just all the voices essentially come from the same vocal cords, but it's just another example of me creating another Greek chorus. I think I really enjoyed the editing phase of this, but I have to say as well, it would be, it would be churlish not to say that the final editing of this book, the final eight months, was at a time of significant, I would not even say anxiety, mental duress, but mental health. We had a very, very, very sick young family member, my brother's life, who went from not feeling well to getting a diagnosis to dying within 12 months. She's one of the four people. The book is dedicated to Patrisse. And there are times when I was reading this drafts of this book, Holly, and I was in tears because I was like, I could see, I was like, jesus, Connor, you're almost psychotic there. I could see weeks when I was writing, when I was in an unrecognized venlafaxine toxicity. My mental health drugs had accumulated in my body because I was started on another cholesterol drug and I could see it in my writing and I was like, jesus, that is the ravings of a madman. I could see it in my notebooks too, but I could also see it in my emails and I could see it in my relationships. And I could see a two month period around that period where two or three people who knew me very well and were very important to me stopped talking to me. And I was just like, God, yeah, they were talking to a madman in many ways. And so the madman comes out in this book as well because I couldn't go to work and show the madman. And I was trying as hard as I could in normal society and polite society for the madman not to come out. But I was being poisoned by a drug that I didn't realize and it was no longer actually treating my anxiety and it was doing quite the opposite. And at one point I thought I was Going mad. And then myself, my doctor, sat down and were like, oh, my God, no. This drug is. You're full of this drug. So I had to wean off that drug and not take anything for anxiety for, like, three months and even went to Patrice's funeral in that state. And it was only when I came back from her funeral to Toronto, having left my brother behind heartbroken and my own heartbreaking. And of course, you know, the night I stayed with him, the last night I was in Ireland, I stayed in their guest room. And what's in the guest room, Hale? All of the medical supplies. And what's in all of the medical supplies? Like a bucket of OxyContin, my opioid stewardship stuff. And I came back, and I was like, we need to address palliative care, because they're a very, very grieving people left with an armament of drugs and who knows how at risk they might be? But I came back, and then I started a new treatment. And I'm not somebody who had been ignoring my mental health. I had health professionals. I've always sought therapists. I've always been very open with people at work and my bosses at work that it's like I'm struggling at the moment. I don't think I should be doing these kind of assignments, but I think I'm okay doing this if you're okay with me doing this for, you know, a few days. And they're incredibly understanding. And as I have leveled out this year, like you first met me, when I was just starting to level, our first conversation was one of the first conversations I had after I came back from Dublin. And over the course of the year, I have leveled to a place where, because I was worried is part of my craft, as part of my writing, because either I'm a bit off or a bit odd or because I'm taking medications or because I drink too much at times. And I was like, actually, it's all still in there. The poison and the toxicities, they're all gone. And the craft is still in there because the humanity is still in there. And the way I read and receive the world is still in there. And then going back through old drafts of this book or going back and looking through old poems that might have gone into this book that I might put into something in the future, I was just there. Like I said, days I was in tears. Evenings, I was in tears going, you were so, so sick when you wrote this, and you had no idea. And most other people didn't have any idea. As well, and you know, that's not an excuse and it's not a crutch, but it's just when you go into survival mode, you're very much like, how do I continue to pay the mortgage? And how do I do that in a way that doesn't get me in trouble where I could get fired from my job? And when you're in survival mode, you're in fight or flight mode. You're not really functioning all that well if you're pouring everything of yourself into doing one thing properly. And so, yeah, my work, my writing, my life is always a constant recalibration of where's the balance at the moment, what needs help at the moment, and what does the world need to see less of at the moment? But I'm very grateful to Paul Vermeersh and to Walzack and Win and Noelle Allen for actually never looking in this book and thinking it was too much. And I think some of the things you've said today, very, very insightful and very generous. And there are probably some of the things they saw as well. That said, this is a lot, but it's not too much. And maybe it's what people need to hear right now. You don't hear many physicians talking like this.
- [53:38]
B
Yeah. There's so many things about what you just said that are resonating with me. I think, you know, one of the first things is because, like, I. I never have to be balanced. I never have to produce the illusion of being a balanced. So, like, I work in the arts. I'm allowed to be eccentric. Nobody. I. With two different pairs of chucks on the other day, and it was just like, I didn't even bother changing. I saw it when I still could have turned around and gone, oh, I was like, whatever, I don't care. It's quirky, it's endearing. Right. I just don't care. But, like, I don't. I don't have to present this part of myself that's. I don't want to say a front, because I. I don't believe with you it's a front. I think we contain multitudes, and there. There's you as a physician and there's you as another person. I don't believe they're friends, but I don't even have. I don't have to try to conjure that out of myself for the most part. So I was thinking about that, and I was thinking about how perhaps it's because that's where I'm coming from. Not a single part of your book made me feel like I was entering a mind state that I wasn't already familiar with. Now there's probably going to be other readers who don't have. Have a long illustrious history of mental illness like I do, but I do. And so I felt very at home. And even the parts that were had that kind of Gord downy level of non separator logic to them. Even then I, I got it. I was completely on board. Number two is that I believe that motherhood as and as, as a force, motherhood as an institution is incredibly oppressive and I don't like the idea of it. Hear me out. I understand I have children, but I am a firm believer in the act of mothering and I do not believe that mothering is confined to one sex or gender. I believe anyone can mother and mothering is an act. It's something you do. And I, I felt that throughout your collection a level of care for the would be reading this and I found that incredibly powerful as well that you were constantly aware that it felt like that you were constantly looking outward at the world, even if we didn't like what we're seeing and you're looking inward too. But there was always a level of care there. So, you know, you're saying you don't, you know, you don't have children, we take care of children. I'm like, yes, because you're mothering. It's in. Mothering's fine. I mean, you change it to fathering, I don't care. But it's just there's like that caregiving constant. And I, you know, some of the people in my life shout out to Bonnie Sanderson who don't have biological children of their own, were my greatest mothers, the greatest sources of. So even, even my AMU Habib, that's my uncle on my dad's side, like he was a mothering figure to me, someone who took care of me. So I mean, I felt that in your book. So my last question for you, which isn't about this book entirely, but and I also don't want to put pressure on you because it's not like you don't have enough going on. And I asked this question to someone recently. They're like, really, Holly? You're asking this like the people want to know. And that is what working on now, people are like, I've already done enough. Leave me alone.
- [56:57]
A
Okay, so let me take that, let me address that from two different points of view because actually, I think it actually points towards a certain learning that's actively going on at the moment. Holly, first off, the reception for this book has been very positive. It's been very warm, very. But also the reviewing and the criticism of this book has been very insightful. And for the first time, I've actually felt like. I don't like the phrase I felt seen. I feel like instead, what I want to say is I put something out there and people started talking about it, and people are still talking about it. There are reviews that are still coming out. And each time I publish a book, my wife Audrey, says to me, can you please just sit down and enjoy this? Can you just let this play out? And Paul Vermeer had said to me, I don't want you to bring a manuscript to me for a good two years. He said, I want you to just let this be. And each time another review or something comes out, and it's not because it's good or not because it's rewarding, but it's more that I'm like, there's a conversation happening in people's heads with this book, and I don't feel the need to shove something else out there at the moment to clutter that conversation or to end the conversation that this book is having. So for the first time in my life, I am not actively scratching, like someone waiting under the bridge to buy drugs. I'm not, like, scratching my chin going, so when we're going to get the next one out, we're going to get the next one out. That being said, there are two books written. So I've actually. And one of the reasons that I reached out to you that I absolutely enjoyed your book, the Unraveling of OO so much. And it was one of the reasons I also reached out to Jade, Jade Wallace, about Anomia. I was very, very happy to be reading a book by somebody that I knew. And I was always reading it. I was going, God, this is freaking brilliant. This is so good. And I know this person. And, oh, my God. And there was no moment where I was jealous. And I was like, kind of going, opening the book, well, let's see what this can do. And I was like. I was just like, oh, my God, they wrote a novel. That's just great. And I'm enjoying it and I'm recommending it to friends, and I'm happy to do so. And that was another part of the whole thing of, like, you know, not feeling that I had to get into some sort of mass marathon, rejoin it, and kind of let people know that, like, something is coming. You know, within three months, things are written. And I have written for the first time, fiction. It's like a short novel and it's very idiosyncratic and it probably will never be picked up by anyone. But it was just something that occurred to me and a kind of an idea that I wanted to investigate. And I no way. I just. There was no way to address it except to try and address it through fiction and prose. So I did that. And then the way that I addressed it was to, is it possible to write a book without writing a book? So a lot of it is actually assembled from different public access texts, from things that are gone out of copyright from manuals and things like that to give it a very, very different tone in very, very different places. So currently it's with some friends who are just. I have some. A lot of people I know are just like physicians are just reading all the time. But I'm always blown away by the taste of some people. And so I have some really good friends who just love speculative fiction and transgressions, transgressive fiction, et cetera. Can you please read this for me and just tell me if it's a story and I can worry about all the other stuff after. But if you're still reading this halfway through and kind of wondering, oh, how's this going to go? Then I'll be happy with that. That may never see the light of day, but if it does, that's why I'm not giving away what the actual story is about, because it's bit of an original idea. The other is a poetry manuscript that maybe a month ago I would have said, oh, I think I finished it. I don't think I finished it. And the reason I don't think I finished it is I don't think at the moment it deserves to be the book that follows up the book that we've been talking about. And I think the book that we've been talking about deserves to be followed up by something that people will be interested in and people will want to read. And I think my books always have a central narrative, central theme. There's a story that's developing despite the fact that it's either a long poem or a collection of poems. And the book, the manuscript that I'm currently preparing, deals with transitions, Holly. It deals with what happens when two things come together and different energy is created. And at the same time that's run through the filter of the Book of Revelations and also the imaginings of a person who has just purposefully overdosed trigger warning.
- [62:37]
B
That's fascinating. I mean, I, I. All that sounds amazing. I'm all for, I mean, I, I asked that question and, you know, I've had that question asked to me and I always feel like writers need time to support the work they've already published and just gather wool. Like just sit and live life and experience things. You have something to write about. It's so, it's, it's a question. And some people have tons of stuff they're working on, but every time I'm asked that question, I slightly resent it, but I ask other people anyway. So I love that you mentioned Jade Wallace's Anomia because I have talked about their book so much and it didn't inspire the unraveling of Umay novel, but it did help me feel secure in certain artistic decisions I was making. So for our listeners, Anomia is a book that is, has, has no, has no gendered pronouns in the entire book. And even when the word yeah, even when they is used, it's only used to refer to like, more than one.
- [63:41]
A
The third person plural. Yeah. And. And the, you know, like, the skill of the book is like, after about 20, 30, 40 pages, you stop trying to guess because for a while you're like, oh, is this a dude? Or. And then after. And you kind of go, is there a clue in the clothing? And then after a while you're just like, it's not important in that, isn't it? Stop guessing and just go with the book. You know? And I was like, that was such a skillful thing that they did. It was just, I was so, so, so admiring of not just the book and not just, thank God you made a really big book, but also just the expertise with which it was executed.
- [64:22]
B
Exactly. And it's a really thrilling mystery too.
- [64:26]
A
Yeah, absolutely.
- [64:28]
B
And like, actually I'm. I didn't realize there were no gendered pronouns and probably until about 20 and 30 pages of the book. And then I started to try to figure it out, like my own detective work in this detective novel. And then I started having a conversation about myself, about why does this happen so much. Um, and so, like, the book served as a very fascinating and exposing mirror about, about my own beliefs and my own, I want to say, prejudices, but, like, what I value and why. Why is that important? So I definitely left the book a different person than I entered it, which also say for your book. So, Connor, thank you so much for joining me today on the New Books Network to talk about your fascinating long poem, what we know so far listeners, this is available wherever books are bought or borrowed. So pick it up. And Connor, with whatever you write next I hope to have you back on the show.
- [65:19]
A
I will be back on the show absolutely. And I hope that you are part of next book as well as the huge supportive part you've been of this one.
- [65:28]
B
Oh I. I'd be happy to. I'm such a fan.
- [65:43]
A
This episode is brought to you by Athletic Brewing company. No matter how you do game day on the couch, in the crowd or manning the snack table, Athletic Brewing fits right in with a full lineup of non alcoholic beer styles you can enjoy bold flavors all game long. No hangovers, no buzz, no subbing out for water in the second half. Stock the fridge for tip off with a variety of non alcoholic craft styles. Available at your local grocery store or online at athleticbrewing.com near Beer Fit for all times.