Writer’s Block: Nick Thran

All Lit Up: Tell us about your new book, Existing Music. What can readers expect?

Nick Thran: If you’re enthusiastic or curious about songwriting, basketball, motherhood, fatherhood, speculating on reasons your favourite artist has gone silent, bookselling, or practicing quasi-spiritual devotion to obscure objects and phrases, Existing Music may have something for you.   

ALU: What was your most rewarding moment as a writer?

NT: I was once a first responder during a genuine poetry emergency. A friend worked as an editor for a popular kid’s magazine. Their first anthology of poems drawn from the magazine’s archives was illustrated, laid out, ready for the printers. Then late news came through the wire that they couldn’t get permission to reprint a poem by A.A. Milne. My friend said he had a buddy who was a poet…maybe we try him? A day later I received the illustration. Two weeks later I delivered my lines. They invited me to the office Christmas party that year. One editor approached me during the evening and said, I liked your poem better than the A.A. Milne poem. I think there’d been a few rounds from the punch bowl by then.  

ALU: Why do you write?

NT: The capacity of writing to present the most experiential textures via the simplest technology and form.

ALU: What books have you read lately that you can’t stop thinking about?

NT: A book called Uneasy Listening, which is set up as a conversation between a psychoanalyst, Anouchka Grose, and a violin maker/ philosopher, Robert B. Young, about what makes a good listener, has stuck with me. It had one section that felt like a real conversation, which took place in a graveyard, where the violinist was saying something about there being no objectively good or proper sound for a particular instrument, that every note is contingent on the hall, the carpeting on the floor, the leaves at the outdoor show. I’ve been thinking about this a lot in relation to self-will and human consciousness. A book I’ve recently reread that gives me the most comfort from start to finish is Walking Backwards: Poems 1966-2016, by John Koethe. The book I’ve recently read that I’ve found the most present to our horrific moment is Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.

ALU: How has your perspective on writing changed over time?

NT: I have started to understand time as a being friend, not a bully, to the blank page. And I try to remain alert to the fact that the writing I’ve been proudest of is not the product of being immersed in a fantasy-world. It comes from being present and alert to my actual environment. So, a lot of my writing work these days is me working against my instincts to isolate myself from the experiences I want to write about.

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Nick Thran’s books include the mixed-genre collection If It Gets Quiet Later On, I Will Make a Display (2023) and three previous collections of poems. Earworm (2011) won the 2012 Trillium Book Award for Poetry. His poems have been anthologized in Best Canadian Poetry and The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry. Thran lives on unceded Wolastoqey territory (Fredericton, NB), where he works as an editor and bookseller.