First up, we’re in conversation with Jordan Abel. Jordan’s novel Empty Spaces (McClelland & Stewart) is the winner of the 2024 Governor General’s Award for Fiction.

“With a combination and manipulation of found materials, and eschewing a traditional human main character, the land in Empty Spaces becomes the centre. Abel’s compelling and hypnotic prose, with its reverse beginnings, repetition, rewriting and revision, feels like settling into a hot spring that grounds the reader in the present moment. Beautiful, poetic and revelatory.”

Jordan Abel was the winner of the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize and the VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres award, and was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the Wilfrid Eggleston Award for Nonfiction, and the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize. Abel’s work has been published in numerous journals and magazines—including Canadian Literature, The Capilano Review, and The Fiddlehead—and his work has been anthologized widely, including The Broadview Introduction to Literature. Abel completed a PhD at Simon Fraser University in 2019, and is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta where he teaches Indigenous Literatures, Research-Creation, and Creative Writing.

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Imagine you could spend a day with any person, living or dead. Who would you choose and what would you do?

I would love to spend the day with David Lynch. Not only would we be able to talk about the weather and drink coffee together, but I’d finally get to tell him all my theories about what I think Lost Highway is about. I imagine he’d refuse to tell me what he thinks it’s about, but I think we would have a great conversation.

What advice would you give your ten-year-old self about 2024?

When I was ten, the year was 1995. I’d definitely suggest to myself that I invest in Apple and also that I try to convince my family to bet our mortgage on the underdog New Jersey Devils and not the heavily favoured Detroit Red Wings for the Stanley Cup that year.

I think that would set me up for pretty good financial success for at least a little while. I’d also probably tell myself not to sell my Super Nintendo and also to treasure these years with the Notorious B.I.G.

Who has been the biggest influence in your journey as a writer?

I’m tempted to name a handful of writers that I’ve never met or interacted with, and I think their books have been really helpful for me.

But I think the most honest answer would be to name a few folks who have been there for me at different moments in my writing journey: Bert Almon, Melissa Jacques, Ray Hsu, Steve Collis, Elise Partridge, Chelsea Novak, and Sophie McCall. All of these people have been instrumental in some way in helping me get where I am, and I am forever grateful for their mentorship and for all of our conversations.

What did you learn about yourself as you worked on Empty Spaces?

I learned that I can write a 70,000-word allegorical novel with no characters or dialogue and that people will be willing to give it a shot. Honestly, I learned that I had to trust myself. To believe in the vision I had for this book even when it seemed untenable at times. Empty Spaces was a difficult book to write and I’m glad that I stuck with it.

What was the last book by a Canadian author who changed you in some way?

I just re-read Tenille Campbell’s nedi nezu (Good Medicine) for a graduate class that I’m teaching on Indigenous joy, and I always in awe of the way that Campbell writes and how easy she makes it look. This is such a complicated, beautiful, joyful book, and I think more people should read it.

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Excerpt from Empty Spaces

A deep, narrow chasm. Black rocks. The river lies still on those black rocks. A mile above, there is a tumbling; there is a moment. At this very moment, there is a tumbling in the air a mile above us that runs straight through the open heavens and into some other place. A deep hollow. No shape. No consistency. No breaking some hundred feet in the air. Some places are softer than others. Some hundred feet up in the air. Some right angles enter into narrow passageways and some right angles break off a mile in the air above us. These rocks are full of cracks. Water has worked through some deep hollows. Breaking here. Wearing there. Breaking and wearing until the chasm separates into two caverns. Some hundred feet in the air there is no danger. There is scattered driftwood and the scent of roses. There are glimpses of roses and rocks and shrubs in the spring rain. There is a steep, rugged ascent. A path that winds among the black rocks and trees. Somewhere in the air there is the scent of roses. Somewhere out there is the wilderness. A reasonable distance through scenes of greenery and nature and glimpses of mountain ranges that disappear just as suddenly as they appear. Among the rocks and trees, there are mounds of earth and other rocks and other driftwood. Somewhere there is an islet and another islet and a clear sheet of water and bald rocks just beneath the surface. There are forests and straits and islets and rocks and somewhere in the air is the scent of roses. There are crevices and fissures and rocks. The rocks surround themselves with other rocks. Although there are sometimes mounds of earth in between. On the shore, there are fragments of rocks. In the deeper parts of the river, there is more tumbling. At this very moment, the river pours into a wide fissure where it just becomes more water between rocks. Between the broken rocks and the deep, roaring cavern, there is the scent of roses and driftwood and trees. There is light. There are straight, naked rocks and immovable trees. There are woods and rivers. And the bed of this particular river is ragged with rocks and intersecting ravines that cut silently across the water above. Somewhere in the air is the scent of roses. The woods are full of sounds and rocks and trees. The woods are full. The upper air, where it drifts over the tops of trees, is full of sounds. Just where it breaks over the tops of trees, there are slow, intermingling drifts of sounds and scents that brush over the clearing some hundred feet up in the air. Rocks and logs and mounds of earth and narrow fissures and bottomland and little ponds and pouring rain and a brook that shoots through the narrow fissures, spreading through moment after moment of stretched light. There is a bellowing in the passageways between the rocks. There are moments of admonished madness. There are moments spreading over the acres of bottomland. There are precipices and adjacent lakes and headwaters. There is a fierceness here that floats through the waters. These rivers are full to the brim. These waters stream down to our feet. In six hours, these waters will rush in. And in another six hours, these waters will rush out. Salt grows in this water. The water in the woods and on the lakes and in the higher
parts of the sea. Stretching out horizontally until the current flows upward
like blood at the throat.

Copyright © 2024 by Jordan Abel