Getting to the Heart of the Thing

A Conversation with Canisia Lubrin

Canisia Lubrin

is the author of five books: the poetry collections Voodoo Hypothesis (Buckrider Books, 2017), The Dyzgraphxst (M&S, 2020), The Wail (M&S, 2025) and The World After Rain (M&S, 2026) and a work of fiction, Code Noir (Knopf Canada, 2024/ Soft Skull 2025). 

TALI VORON: In your short story “How the River Swells” from your new book Code Noir, the narrator says, “It was grief that would make me a writer.” Can you share what has made you a writer?

CANISIA LUBRIN: I don’t think that there is a single sound bite for the very many things that go into a writing life. The writer as a persona comes with many fables, many myths, as you know. My whole life goes into everything I write, but without autobiographical interest. It’s true that one brings everything one has to the page to give a record of one’s imagination. I think a great engine for me is similar to that character in “How the River Swells”: grief, but also, and more prosaically, disappointment. Disappointment about the state of things, the state of the world, about the condition of the human alongside, and in almost equal measure, the curiosity and awe that also supports living. There’s a double valence in all things, and the writer worth your time and imagination will seek to listen to that.

TV: You’re a distinguished and celebrated poet, and your first two books were poetry collections. Can you share a little bit about your practice as a poet?

CL: My practice as a poet is to be attentive to the force of language and how it reveals the real world. The object of a poem is made primarily of language. And of course you have many other forms of poetry now. Concrete poems, visual poems, and the like. But I work with lexical communication and my practice with poetry is to go as close as possible to the heart of the thing that I want to express. My books of poems are interested in attending to the world and to our being and living in it, and to the many life forms that make an amalgamated experience on this planet.

TV: That’s really beautiful. So, for you, it’s poetry that gets the closest to the core of what you’re expressing.

CL: Yeah. I would say that. It’s at a different, more difficult, more complicated distance to what is being observed. You can even say it is from the inside of observation. A kind of internal art of the human heart.

TV: In reading Code Noir, the poetic voice and quality of your fiction is clear. How and when did you decide to venture into writing fiction? Was Code Noir always going to be a collection of short stories?

CL: I don’t think of this in such a programmatic way. I’m always working with language, and am primarily animated as a poet. In whatever it is that I’m writing, in any form, there are poetics at play—meaning a mode of thought, a structure of feeling, and style of speech. I could probably come up with one hundred different things to suggest, one hundred different origin stories, but the fact of it is that I have long felt both completely at home and almost alien in language, at one and the same time. I have lived with stories for nearly all my life, but I did not know for sure that I would become a writer of them because I happen to be good at many things. Fiction has been a long companion. And what we call form is simply the shape of the thing that is responsible for communicating the standardized behaviour of what is in front of you. What makes the thing a song? What makes a thing a movie? What makes a thing a short story? What makes a thing a novel, etc.? These considerations for me are secondary to the materials of the imagination that I’m putting forward, but I recognize that they are important to how the thing functions.

I found story, or narrative, first. I just happened to publish poetry first. There’s a long story about that and we’re not going to get into it, but I met Paul Vermeersch at a book launch and that led to my first publication being poetry. Code Noir presented itself in the form of fiction. I came upon King Louis XIV’s Code Noir while doing research for my second book of poetry. I used very little of what I found, but I knew that I wanted to return to the king’s Code Noir and to enter its supposed narrative authority with an equal measure of fiction, because those legal codes are fundamentally based on fictions. They are fictions that relegate Black people into abstractions, using ideologies that continue to wreak immense suffering and catastrophe in the real world. And it is not just fiction: it is fundamentally dishonest. I wanted to have the broad and long ecosystem that fiction offers, which is different in terms of that distance in poetry that I was talking about earlier. If poetry is really close, fiction allows you to pull back and see and build an entire world, build an entire galaxy. That is what I wanted to do with Code Noir because that is how it presented itself. So, a lot of my creative response has to do with what the thing is and what form will allow me to express what it is.

TV: And I think with Code Noir being fiction, it offered a lot more flexibility to respond to the original text.

CL: You know, my intention was not to respond to the archival text, at least, not to reinscribe it in the expected way. My intention was simply to have juxtaposition, to have contrast, and a matrix of experience to riff on the actual challenges and mysteries of narrative scripting in the same world as the codes. I did not wish to respond to the codes in a way that would produce a reconstruction of their ideas in the stories. Because our lives and the lives of Black people are way more expansive than whatever narrow, dishonest fictions are in that king’s codes. So, there is no desire to respond to it. It’s 2024. We know exactly what the results of those things have been, but what has been rendered invisible are the ways they continue to influence how the world is today.

TV: You’re so right. “Respond” doesn’t seem like the most accurate word to use. Thank you.

Shifting gears a little bit, Torkwase Dyson’s art is powerful, and incorporates the original decrees in Code Noir. What was your collaborative process like with Dyson?

CL: Torkwase and I had a pre-existing orbit. Our collaboration came out of a conversation. As one does in these contexts when talking about one’s work, one talks about what’s happening, and of course, I was talking about Code Noir. Code Noir was at the very end of the production process. The challenge for the publisher’s team was about how to disturb the presence of King Louis’s articles to foreground the relationship between the articles and the stories; it is one of disturbance. It has to be. Torkwase made those fantastic drawings without any need for a long conversation. The drawings are perfectly right.

TV: Code Noir includes a number of previously published works alongside brand-new pieces. What was the writing process to create Code Noir?

CL: Some of the stories were written more than a decade ago. The writer is always at work. Sometimes things do happen programmatically. You might have projects that present themselves as very distinct and process-driven things, where the form appears immediately. King Louis’s Code Noir crossed my desk while I was writing The Dyzgraphxst, my second book of poems, in 2018, but some of these stories were written as early as 2008. And then came the decision to write a piece of fiction in relation to, or in juxtaposition to, each of the articles of the Code Noir. This book accrued over a long stretch before I knew it would be Code Noir, even though the bulk of the work was written in a brief, compressed period.

TV: I have a couple of questions about the structure of this collection, because that really fascinated me while reading it and I’m sure that every reader who comes to this text, like with any work, will have a different experience. I would love for you to share how you might envision your readers coming to this text. What I mean by that is, for the ultimate experience of this work, how should we be reading it?

CL: I did not include such a note in the book, and I would not dare to give instruction about how to read it now, either. I believe completely in the power of the reader’s imagination and for the reader to be the person who finds their way into the book however they please. Because the book, now that it has left me, is yours. You decide to go with it however you wish. I don’t ever think of the reader as a dial I turn or a button I push. I feel completely confident that the reader will enter the work in the way that the reader needs.

TV: Undoubtedly, a lot of thought has gone into the structure and format of this text. The collection is broken up into three parts. “Part One: Now” feels a bit more experimental, “Part Two: And Then” seems to have more stories that follow the more traditional structure for short fiction, and “Part Three: Elsewhere” is a blend of the two, bringing the reader into the future. How did you structure this collection and decide what goes where?

CL: However you read the book, you get a sense that time is disrupted. There’s no linear time. What I have done instead is focus on how time itself is disrupted by the machinations of our social orders; the way that these laws have influenced the world, and how it is shaped in our imaginations and our stories. So, the book’s movement across time is to disrupt that idea that the past is only in the past and that for some, the sequestering of the past means that somehow we have a future that is completely divorced from the consequences of history. And then to imagine into the future how a different set of relations can occur in fiction. But what I want is to write something that’s interesting and engaging and rewarding for the reader. Readers come to books in many ways, which is why I don’t think it is important to have a singular door into this book. You have multiple doors because I think readers are multiple, but I also think that people have a much higher tolerance for using their imagination than the prevailing systems of the market would tell you. So, the moving through the past, present, and future, is in relation to the effects of those historical decrees. The seeds of these codes are very much alive and well in the over-incarceration of Black people, in the ways that certain urban centres where Black living occurs are starved of resources, in the ways that certain measures of social and economic viability are decided, the logics of borders that say there’s an inside and then there’s an outside—that some people are in and some people are out—and then all the “special” programs to include certain people to give an appearance that things have changed. These ideas are still central to the current world, and if they are impacting the present, which they cannot help but do, then there’s also a future to be imagined beyond this one way of forming what story is and can do.

TV: Building on that, you combine so many different genres and narrative styles in this collection, from contemporary realism to dystopia, futuristic fantasy to historical fiction, poignant microfictions to pieces that read like prose poetry and more. More than that, the effect of reading one after the other is truly remarkable, as it stays with the reader and propels them forward. “How the River Swells” in Part Two reads to me like a work of autofiction, and is followed by “Thing Without a Name,” which is a more absurdist piece. Each story is effective separately and striking when read together. Can you talk about your experience playing with genre and style in this collection, and your intention behind it?

CL: There are many ways that we tell stories and it’s really the mode of the story, and the language that the mode offers, that I find interesting. I wanted to have the characters and their distinct voices and mannerisms and characteristics to be what makes the book come alive. So, if you have twelve different voices, there are twelve different people involved in telling us these stories, and therefore they have their own ways of telling stories. Conventionally, we call this polyphony. Now, not everybody has an MFA to learn the traditional or the standard, or the accepted form or structure of a story—beginning, middle, and end, hero’s journey—and that’s that. Not everyone has that, and certainly, in many regards, those accepted structures and forms don’t ring true for a lot of people. What everyone has, without a doubt, is story and the capacity for beauty and poetry and song and movement and narrative. That is the kind of texture and atmosphere that I wanted in the book. Sometimes there’s a thing about absurdity that can reveal what’s true better than sincere realism. We experience the world in different ways. What might appear to certain people as unreal or even futurist, or surreal—say someone tells you they’ve seen a ghost—are all of what is mixed up in our experience of this planet, of this lifetime, of this time and space. All of these forms of story exist, and I do not put them on hierarchies. I think they are all valid forms of approaching the human condition and human experience. If there is a way to look at that historical document, which makes Black people abstract and homogenizes Blackness into non-humanness, it’s just a singular narrative, which is the master narrative. I wanted, instead, a more vast cornucopia of voices and styles of story. And to have that feel like encountering people out here in real life, as opposed to the archive in the way it is incomplete.

TV: Absolutely. I love that you said you wanted to bring the text to life because that’s exactly what it feels like. The book feels alive, and the fact that you never know what’s going to come next, who you’re going to hear from, and in what voice they will appear is remarkable. I didn’t want to put it down, but I also wanted to stay within each story for a little bit longer.

CL: And those are the kind of reading experiences that I enjoy. I think what we do is project our view or our sense of who might be reading the book, who is the primary addressee. I like to linger with books. I also like to appreciate the architecture of a writer’s work and thinking.

TV: I love the kinds of books that when you’ve finished reading the last page, you think, “Well, I have to read this again,” because you know there’s so much more you can get out of it. And that is the experience of reading Code Noir, at least it has been for me.

The eighth story in the collection, “Via Overnight Mail” is essentially written in a footnote, and the thirty-seventh, “The Boy, the Girls, the Dog, and I Was There” is loosely structured like a play. Can you speak to the role that form and experimentation plays in this collection?

CL: I try to find the best vessel for the expression. I don’t sit there and think I would like to be experimental. That seems weird and like an absurd thing. I simply come to the page with what I have and what is in me. I’m doing what I can do, and I think in a certain rubric it appears experimental. But I don’t have any spectacular ideas about experimentation. For me, it’s about the best expression for the thing that I’m thinking and what it invites me to feel. Form is the shape that allows it to communicate, and story can happen in any form. Genre is a different consideration. Genre is the broad category that has many different modes inside of it, say X number of characteristics then make a particular thing.

So, it’s really about how the teller of the tale encounters the tale and decides to bring it forward. And again, it is about listening deeply and listening to the particularities that people bring to story. If I go to the market to buy some fruit, and I encounter the market woman selling her mangoes and her oranges, sometimes in that exchange the market woman tells me a story.

And then it sounds like something from a sci-fi flick, even though I have no way of actually understanding how this person came upon this form of story. Then you encounter someone else, and they might tell you something that sounds like a ghost story; and you encounter somebody else, and they might tell you something that has the shape and sound of a footnote. What ends up being on the page is made up of what I can make sense of in terms of form

In terms of story, what arrives as experiment could just be the kind of encounter that we have with the materials of each other’s lives. That thing creates these little riffs and pressures on what we hear and what we end up feeling. It’s intuitive for me. And then there’s the question of bringing skill to shaping the materials of intuition.

TV: Code Noir also seems to be deeply influenced by music, especially jazz. Writers, artists, and musicians fill the text, like John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Aimé Césaire to name a few. What is the connection between this collection and music? How have other artists influenced this collection and your work more broadly?

CL: I have a profound appreciation for music. Music features prominently in my life, in my process, and the way that I live. I love music and music is a permanence around me. Too, language is also a kind of musical score. When I hear language, I hear music. These writers and artists that you’ve already mentioned are in there because they are Black artists who have had a profound effect on the intellectual and artistic life of Black people, and they have made profound contributions more broadly to the artistic and intellectual life of the world. They are there because they are in conversation in the fictionalized imagination that I bring forward. I put them in conversation deliberately, but it also means that I, as the writer am someone who, just like John Coltrane and Miles Davis and Billie Holiday and Gwendolyn Brooks and Aimé Césaire and Dionne Brand and Christina Sharpe and all of those people who show up in the book, descends from the people who were directly the subject of these codes. And that’s the obvious thing. But there is something to the sort of effect or the emotional scope of any good work of literature that is about the musicality of language itself.

TV: The following line from “A History of Noise” really stood out to me: “She thought about the ways that stories are carried across a perfect horizon by the ones that came before.” What stories are you carrying? Is this the role of a writer?

CL: I carry many, many stories in many, many different forms as I have laid out. Certainly, my grandmother’s stories are always with me. They’re my primary text if you will. My grandmother’s folk tales and folk songs are the kind of exciting, compact, playful improvisational stories that I inherited from living in Saint Lucia and participating in all of these different forms of cultural ritual, and community theatre. The different kinds of stories that have passed through the Caribbean are the rich cultural identity of that place, which is very similar to the way Aesop’s fables, for example, are adapted outside of Europe; this is how African folk tales make the voyage into the so-called “New World.” This is the connection between these two registers of a similar kind of story.

These stories form the foundation of what I appreciate in literature. I’m sure a lot of them are some kind of subconscious bedrock. But there are certainly stories that I appreciate in relation to the work that I did in Code Noir, which includes Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here, Toni Morrison’s Jazz, Amos Tutuola’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and The Palm-Wine Drinkard, Simone Schwarz-Bart’s The Bridge of Beyond, Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco, Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones and Breath, Eyes, Memory, and many other poetry books, films, songs, etc. So, yes, I think you’ve touched on something quite profound with your question about whether this might be the role of the writer—this carrying forth of story. It’s a record of our imaginations, which extends to the ways that we live in the world. The ways that we can read books, for instance, from the nineteenth century and get a sense of what that world was like even though we were not there. That world was for those people living in it. I think there is a carrying forward that happens and you’re perhaps very right, yes.

TV: In “Metamorphosis: 1” there’s a line that reads, “And to undertake witnessing is to double presence.” The artwork corresponding to “Code Noir: Swing” has the words “witnesses” and “memory” boxed in. So much of this collection is preoccupied with actively bearing witness to the past, and bringing awareness to the implications in the present and future. Can you speak to our collective responsibility to bear witness?

CL: If there is a collective responsibility to bear witness, certainly the writer plays a significant role in that. It is the kind of work that being in a social context allows us to do because literature is not somebody’s vanity. Literature, when it really does its work, is angled toward the world, toward each other. And because there is this extended social context in which literature happens, there is this function of witnessing that it allows us. Now, what responsibility is drawn from that is not something that writers can dictate. But I think that is to say your relationship to literature is whatever you decide it is. Writers make books to the broader collective memory, and this gives us a chance to contest certain narratives, especially the ones that are really corrosive: the narratives of tyrants, the narratives of autocrats, the narratives of “winners of conquest” and “us vs. them.” Narrative can have that function; story, and poetry, and all of that literature can have that function. But it’s always, I think, an invitation, not a demand.

TV: In Part Three, there are several stories that are set in the future, including the final story in the collection. What does the future (of writing, publishing, and beyond) look like for you? Or at the very least, what do you hope we’re moving toward?

CL: I don’t know exactly what that is and I would not want to hazard a guess. I’m always writing, so I’m going to keep writing. I think that literature, because it is about our being, is about the dynamism of our lives and the materials of our existence. To me, it just makes sense that it keeps evolving, and that we have new forms of telling stories. It is important that it not be reduced to ideology and propaganda and posturing. When those new forms arrive, they are not necessarily the things that we’re prepared for, but they may be the result of that dynamism and the aliveness opening into new things. For me, the great hope is for that to keep happening and that there’s no stagnation. Even though we’re in the era of homogenized fast food, so to speak. I think above all literature is nutritive. It’s enriching even when it arrives in ways that are mostly very entertaining.

TV: The closing remarks in Code Noir warn to “prepare for consequences from friends, loves, and enemies” after reading the collection. This was a thoughtful reminder of the vulnerability not only of writing, but of making your words readily available for the public to consume. It also reminded me of the questions I receive time and time again from students and new writers, so I’ll ask you—how do you know your work is ready to share or publish? What is your advice for writers who are scared to make their private words, and worlds, public?

CL: I feel compelled to stress again that I don’t think of the reader as a consumer. As a reader, I don’t think what we do is consume literature, in this base sense. I think what we do is participate in a really complex and complicated extended engagement with our imagination and the materials of our lives. Yet we have this structure that reduces that thing into consumption. I suppose it’s part of the consequences of industry, and what industrialization and large-scale production has brought into the life of literature. Because I don’t think of the reader as a consumer, I also do not have this fear of sharing and publishing things. I have confidence that perhaps when the thing leaves me, it will find its completion in the reader. The reader will be the final piece of the structure. The reader will make of the thing what they need at that moment. Like my experience of reading teen books at age eighteen should vastly differ from if I were to read them at age twenty-eight or thirty-eight. And then there are certain books that we read when we’re younger and we gain something from reading, although not entirely. And then much later, if we go back to it, it’s like the book has become a new thing.

I don’t think that books are static things because we are constantly changing. There’s a dynamism to the life of books. So, I would say to novice students to try not to be so taken by this fear of publishing and of sharing your work. You will change as you grow as both a reader and as a writer. Understand that the thing you put out today is what it could be right now, and it is okay to not grasp everything. You must be daring. Dare to express what is true because that is the thing that compels us to take a pen to a paper. We cannot control how people will interact with the work, which is also why I resist answering questions about telling the reader what to do. We can only control the things that allow us to gather all of the bright imagination that we need to make a true sound on the page, and therefore, in the world.

TV: That is the best answer I’ve ever received to this question, thank you. Over the last couple of months, I’ve heard of this idea of picking one word to be your guidepost for the year, which I found quite powerful. I’m curious if this is something you’ve thought about. What would your word be?

CL:I don’t like these kinds of things at all, personally! I’d rather not be so programmatic, and I don’t need these kinds of signposts. I like to be available to what is. I don’t appreciate predetermination. Give me the improvisational, the unexpected.

TV: Can you share what you’re working on now?

CL: Actually, I do have a book of poems coming out next year.

TV: Congratulations!

CL: Thank you. The World After Rain will be published in 2025. And another book in 2026. I am also working on a novel that will hopefully enter the world not too long from now. I have a non-fiction project that is taking shape slowly and I’m enjoying the slowness with which it is coming together.

TV: That’s incredible. So there’s lots to look forward to.

CL: It seems that way.

TV: Lastly, a question I ask at the end of each interview: What is the best piece of advice that you’ve received that you would like to share with our readers?

CL: A couple of things I find true and profound have stuck. And I like to share them with my students. The late Priscila Uppal, a great poet and writer and wonderful teacher, said to me once, “Trust your intelligence.” Just that. And that was exactly the thing I needed to hear. And then in grad school, when someone was talking about writer’s block and complaining about being stuck, Dionne Brand said, “Do not say you are stuck. You are waiting for understanding.” Those are great things that I would like to pass on.