{"id":20946,"date":"2025-06-11T19:04:38","date_gmt":"2025-06-11T19:04:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artsnb.ca\/web\/?p=20946"},"modified":"2025-06-13T12:18:05","modified_gmt":"2025-06-13T12:18:05","slug":"wandering-in-literary-nomadism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artsnb.ca\/web\/2025\/06\/wandering-in-literary-nomadism\/","title":{"rendered":"Wandering in literary nomadism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Written by Danny Jacobs<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Aquaria: Fictions <\/em>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<\/em> are under 1000 words, sometimes much shorter\u2014but 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 <\/em>aren\u2019t stories, then, but they aren\u2019t poems, either. I found it freeing to hang out in this in-between space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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My (somewhat chaotic) desk\/workspace<\/em>. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Unsurprisingly perhaps, I\u2019m drawn to writing from these formally liminal borders, work that doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s Bluets<\/em> 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\u2019s all of these things and none of them; Nelson\u2019s sui generis project of radical self-examination transcends these thematics. So Bluets<\/em>, a small book, is actually gigantic. And I dig how Nelson called her approach \u2018nomadic.\u2019 I\u2019m spending time talking about this book because\u2014while my project differs drastically in approach and content, and I could never match the nuance and beauty of Nelson\u2014I aspire to this kind of literary nomadism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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<\/em> (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\u2019s The Ignis Psalter<\/em> (The Porcupine\u2019s Quill, 2025), my debut novel that evinces some lyric density, but is positively maximal compared to the poems in Sulci<\/em>. The pieces in Aquaria<\/em> are my attempt at a way out from those two poles, or a way through. Take the second section of the project\u2014a 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\u2014 a both\/and<\/em> as opposed to an either\/or<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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A couple of the source texts consulted while drafting of the angel pieces<\/em>. Photo: courtesy of the artist.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
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My creative process, when I\u2019m 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<\/em> wasn\u2019t quite so structured\u2014it 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\u2014 develop a love of stationery and keep multiple notebooks in multiples places. And, of course, your notes app does in a pinch\u2014 we always have our phones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Some of the notebooks used during the writing of the project<\/em>. Photo: courtesy of the artist.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
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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\u2019s ability to see<\/em>, to notice<\/em>. 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\u2019m 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\u2014they provide the means and the space to create and expand our capacity to see, which is also a capacity to be better humans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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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 \u2014 a stone associated with warmth and creativity. Photo: courtesy of the artist.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Danny Jacobs<\/strong>\u2019s poems, fiction, reviews, and essays have been published in a variety of journals across Canada. His book of nonfiction, Sourcebooks for Our Drawings: Essays and Remnants <\/em>(Gordon Hill Press, 2019), won the Writers\u2019 Federation of New Brunswick Book Award for Nonfiction. His debut novel, The Ignis Psalter<\/em> (The Porcupine\u2019s Quill), came out in April 2025.Danny lives in Riverview, New Brunswick.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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