Written by Danny Jacobs

Aquaria: Fictions sprang from the desire to engage with a hyper-focused lyricism, where fragmentation and fabulism is favoured over linearity and reason, to create sites where genre breaks down. The flash fictions (or postcard stories, or microfictions, or prose poems) that make up Aquaria are under 1000 words, sometimes much shorter—but the challenge was to contain a lot within a small space, while trying to eschew propositional logic in service of a more poetic/ dream logic. The fictions in Aquaria aren’t stories, then, but they aren’t poems, either. I found it freeing to hang out in this in-between space.

My (somewhat chaotic) desk/workspace. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, I’m drawn to writing from these formally liminal borders, work that doesn’t necessarily settle into traditional categories. Writers like Luis Sagasti or W. G. Sebald ostensibly wrote novels, but their books read like something outside or above these genre designations. What we have, rather, is the record of a unique consciousness, a juggling of obsessions connected not through the obvious channels of narrative and conflict, but through a coherent style and sensibility. This is the genius of their work. We can read, say, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets as a break-up memoir, as a long essay on colour theory, or as a series of philosophical fragments about literature, care, and solitude. Of course, it’s all of these things and none of them; Nelson’s sui generis project of radical self-examination transcends these thematics. So Bluets, a small book, is actually gigantic. And I dig how Nelson called her approach ‘nomadic.’ I’m spending time talking about this book because—while my project differs drastically in approach and content, and I could never match the nuance and beauty of Nelson—I aspire to this kind of literary nomadism.

Before starting the project, I found my artistic practice torn between the poetic line and the prose line, the dense and the airy, the abbreviate and the sustained. My last few published works reflect this formal dialectic. Sulci (The Hardscrabble Press, 2023) is a chapbook of very small, minimalist poems, Haiku-like in their imagistic focus. On the other side of the coin, there’s The Ignis Psalter (The Porcupine’s Quill, 2025), my debut novel that evinces some lyric density, but is positively maximal compared to the poems in Sulci.  The pieces in Aquaria are my attempt at a way out from those two poles, or a way through. Take the second section of the project—a series of 111-word pieces that explore the concept of spiritual beings, particularly angels (111 being an important angel number in occult and numerological contexts). I wanted lyricism and constraint with a formal through-line; I wanted to explore what spirit might mean within the bounds of a skewed and strange narrative logic. Call them poems, stories, essays, digressions— a both/and as opposed to an either/or.

A couple of the source texts consulted while drafting of the angel pieces. Photo: courtesy of the artist.

My creative process, when I’m working, oscillates between monkish routine and chaotic jotting. While drafting my novel, I woke at 5:30 every morning and wrote before work, and I keep telling myself I will do that again someday. The process for Aquaria wasn’t quite so structured—it was carrying around a notebook and writing down images and lines wherever I happened to be, then mining those notebooks for the charged bits. I tell all burgeoning writers to keep a notebook— develop a love of stationery and keep multiple notebooks in multiples places. And, of course, your notes app does in a pinch— we always have our phones.

Some of the notebooks used during the writing of the project. Photo: courtesy of the artist.

Being a writer is important for me because art focuses our vision. I mean vision in both the reductive, physiological sense, and vision in the Blakeian sense. In other words, to engage in writing and art-making is to hone one’s ability to see, to notice. To clock not just the visible but the invisible, too; the hidden. Training our vision through art is especially crucial now, as our attention is being hijacked and sold back to us by the little rectangles of glass we all voluntarily carry in our pockets. I’m saying nothing new here (artistic attention vs. the shallows of social media, etc., etc.) but it bears repeating. One way to fight the worst of the Anthropocene is to develop our visionary capacity by making art. This is why organizations like artsnb are vital—they provide the means and the space to create and expand our capacity to see, which is also a capacity to be better humans.

A broadside featuring a quote by Simone Weil. It was printed by Keagan Hawthorne, who runs The Hardscrabble Press in Sackville, NB, and it lives on my desk. Also included in this picture is a piece of Carnelian — a stone associated with warmth and creativity. Photo: courtesy of the artist.

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Read Danny Jacobs

A few of the pieces from Aquaria: Fictions were published in issue 25 of The Temz Review (Fall-Winter 2023): https://www.thetemzreview.com/jacobs-25.html