Coffee Chat with Nick Perry
Pour yourself a nice steaming cup and settle in to get to know Nick Perry a little better.
Tell us a bit about yourself.
My name is Nick Perry and I'm a schoolteacher from Port Moody, B.C. I've been in education for the past few years, having dabbled in everything from kindergarten to grade 12, with some special education experience as well. Right now, you can find as the teacher-librarian at an elementary school in Coquitlam. My previous attempt at a career was with the RCMP. Before that, I worked in craft breweries both on the floor and in the back; before that I was a mover; before that I worked private security at my university; before that I was a labourer; before that I was a Taekwondo instructor; before that I worked in a bakery; and before that I was the first dancing inflatable cup mascot outside of local Booster Juice. A Booster Juice I now live across the street from and am reminded of every time I leave the house.
Outside of work, I write with my debut novel coming out early in 2025 (it's called Broken Water, it's being published by Chicken House Press, and it's about an atheist that tries to become a priest), I'm a hyperreader usually gluttonizing over a hundred books per year, I'm recently married (or as recent as a year and a bit can be), and Sir John A. MacDonald is in my family tree. Not directly but he was a first cousin to a direct relative.
“Stories, ideas, concepts, these things are constantly swimming in my head.”
How do you take your coffee? Crisp.
What Blank Spaces issue were you first published in? March 2024 - Volume 9, Issue 3.
What are you reading right now? What is it about and what keeps you coming back to the pages? I am just about to start the third part of The Mad Patagonian which is a difficult novel to summarize because it's so vast, so all-encompassing that I'll simply say it's probably the best novel of this century and no one knows about it.
What role has Blank Spaces played in your creative journey? I wouldn't be a pro without it. About a year ago, I had a manuscript and was submitting with all fervour of someone searching for a job. As it so happens, that very act is the action of the opening chapter of this novel (a novel I knew would be a tough sell based on its material and my anonymity). That opening chapter, I felt, was strong and singular enough to be its own piece and so I began submitting it separately as an excerpt to help bolster potential applications to publishers. Blank Spaces picked it up. Not only did they pick it up, but Alanna, our angelic publisher, emailed me after the magazine's release to request the rest of the book. Never before had I been queried for anything and so I put together another application with manic fervour and then I waited. Months passed. When they did, I had an email for a meeting. Alanna had read the book, loved it, and wanted it. I said yes without hesitation. As I write this interview, we are going through our final line edits with an anticipated release date of February 2 next year. Joyceans will know why I picked that date.
Describe how you see the landscape of Canadian publishing: Full of tiny presses that are overstuffed with manuscripts. Look, I want people to dream, but I want them also to be informed. There appear to be more writers than readers in the world and, in my experience, works get turned down not because they're bad, but because the publishers are bursting. If you wish to go Canadian, and I hope you do, know that the process will take years of submitting. Is it indicative of your talent? Who knows. But there's a lot of slush out there that makes professional readers tired.
Why is Canadian content important? I'm working on an opinion right now. It goes like this: writers only ever write about their countries.
When looking out at the literature of the world, this is unstoppably true. Sometimes, countries or cities are polyphonic. How many versions of London or New York or Tokyo exist because they have been written into existence? Or there are the cities like Dublin or Buenos Aires who have been so painstakingly realized that travellers must be disappointed whenever they go because there is no way they could have been so maintained in the last hundred years as they presented in their best fiction. When thinking of Canada, who has done that for us?
Munro didn't. Her Canadianness is an afterthought. Yes, her works feature prominently the cities of British Columbia and Southern Ontario, but not with the verve of her fellow Nobel Laureates. I've never left one of her stories feeling the place was as realized as the people and, what makes those stories so everlasting, is that the people could be from anywhere. If we removed the names and instead made her a neighbour of Updike, I don't think the content of the stories would change much.
The first guard of Canadian fiction, the Hugh McLennans and Roberston Davieses of the world, while they wrote about Canadian issues, did so in a firmly European style. While less separable from their nation as Munro's work, they are only so in the sense that Canadian news is about Canadians, nothing else. They're reporting on us because they have to, but the Canada they've spoken about is one that is hard to reach currently that it appears as if reported on and not lived.
Gabrielle Roy and Mordecai Richler might be our best examples but they're both limited to being French-Canadian. Their nation, even they would reject such a thing, is one of its own insulation and therefore has a much clearer focus on its culture and its literature. Richler knew this especially by being hyper-focused on the particular neighbourhoods of Montréal that he could bring about most vividly and, in doing so, carved them out from the rest of the city into the kinds of places that live in both life and fiction.
I could go on citing greats and contemporaries, the kinds of writers who have been adored by the nation (Ann-Marie Macdonald, Stuart McLean, Richard Wagamese, Joshua Whitehead, Esi Edugyan, Jessica Johns, Mavis Gallant, Margaret Atwood, Farley Mowatt, Stephen Leacock, Anne Carson) who, many of whom have written great books, still haven't given something definitive to Canadian literature. Although, I will say Stuart McLean's Welcome Home is one every Canadian should read. These authors more often write about their experience in whatever region of Canada they know rather than the region being of particular influence first.
Where does this leave us? For Canadian writers, a certain nationalism must be cultivated. One that begins in knowing the country, in prioritizing its places and people, and then being adamant about putting them at the forefront of literature. I was recently in America and there's an old rotten chestnut that says to be Canadian is to be not American, but there's ripe truth in it! Theirs is a country of excess, of largess, that the Canadian spirit does not match. Our work should be such that there is no way a Canadian book should be mistaken for an American any more than an English story or an Indian one.
For the next generation, know that your country has not yet been written and you may be the one to do so.
Where has your creative journey taken you since being published in Blank Spaces? Since then, the piece I had published was nominated for a Pushcart prize, I've had a few other pieces nominated for awards, and I got my first paid gig for an article about living my life under the inspirational wings of Anthony Bourdain in a magazine called the Mantelpiece.
What does your writing process look like? You're not going to like this answer: I just sit down and do it. Stories, ideas, concepts, these things are constantly swimming in my head. Just this morning, I was on the train and passed by an immaculate sunrise. It spurred a question based on an observation: sunrises are stunning, and when I see them, I feel like they should be photographed and preserved in some way. But what sunrises do I actually remember? If they are so beautiful, so stunning, so worthy of attention, why is their impression so fleeting? From that, I imagined a scene on a park bench in which a stranger speaks to a first-person narrator with just that opinion which would then cause an improvised defence and a moment of longing at the end when the parties parted, like a sunrise from a morning horizon. Will that ever become a story? I don't think so because I see it too much as a screenplay and fiction should be noticeably different from screenwriting. But it was a nice way to think for a morning.
If you could tell your young creative self anything, what would it be? Write longer. Read more. Narrow your focus. They don't all have to be the greatest story ever written.
Who are your writing influences and how do they motivate you? I'm easily influenced by great speakers. Primary amongst them was the Irish author/broadcaster/journalist Frank Delaney. He wrote the most whimsical novels about Ireland and ran a podcast right up until this death in which he went line-by-line through Ulysses explaining every word where necessary. Even though he was unbelievably erudite and articulate, he never stopped himself from laughing. Through all of the seriousness of literature, when I listen to Frank Delaney talk about books and authors, I know I'm listening to a man in love. When I approach books, it's with his enthusiasm and refusal to be, or to find, anything boring.
“When I listen to Frank Delaney talk about books and authors, I know I’m listening to a man in love.”
Who is your hero of fiction? I don't know that he inspires me but I do feel I know Leopold Bloom better than some family members.
What is the first book that made you cry? I haven't, but I have been overwhelmed in nice ways. Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote that great art gives a feeling of being surrounded and that is the chief metaphor I live by when it comes to whether or not a story, or anything else artistic, works for me. I've had that feeling often.
What advice do you have for writers struggling to break into the industry? Life is struggle, writing is life.
What are your creative goals? Where do you see yourself in five years? I want to be paid way more often than I'm not in this industry. I want to participate in conferences. I want to walk up to a theatre to see in the largest letters "An Evening with Nick Perry."
What are you currently working on? My next novel, which is a tribute to all the Latin American literature that has made me. It takes place in an odd hotel in which only married couples are permitted and when a single traveller sneaks in, one of the staff must pose as his wife during his stay. Throughout their trip, they do what couples do on vacation, they eat, they drink, they mingle, and they talk extensively about where they are. But at the end of the vacation, after believes he is truly in love, he asks her to leave her country behind and go with him back to Canada. What will she do?
What should we be watching for from you? Broken Water, coming out in early 2025 through Chicken House Press.
Growing up during the New Atheist movement, Declan Murphy never quite believed in the existence of a higher power. But when life throws him a series of challenges, his lack of an axis mundi has him latching one the one vision that feels right: becoming a Catholic priest.
This emotional and thought-provoking story follows Declan as he navigates the conflicts between his personal beliefs and his family’s expectations..
Will he be able to reconcile this contradiction? And at what cost?
As Declan delves deeper into his journey, he will discover truths that will test his faith and his relationships. Will his quest to become a priest ultimately bring him closer to or farther from the truth?
And what of the biggest question of all?
Why would an atheist ever want to become a priest?
If you’re a past Blank Spaces contributor and would like to be featured in a virtual coffee chat, please complete our online interview form.
Learn more about Nick’s work that has been featured in Blank Spaces here.
