Nic Brewer’s debut novel, Suture, was published by Book*hug Press in fall, 2021. It has since been shortlisted for the 2022 ReLit Award in the novel category and for a 2021 Foreword INDIE in the LGBTQ fiction category.

In your book, the characters must rip open themselves or a part of themselves, hurt themselves—literally—in service of their art. For instance, pulling out their eyes in order to make films, ripping out their heart in order to paint, ripping out their arm bone in order to play drums. How did the idea for this come to you?

You know it’s funny, I haven’t actually spent much time thinking of how this idea came to me! I have mentioned before that the book started as an assignment for an English class I was taking on satire, but it’s been so long that I hardly remember the inspiration. Body horror feels like such a close cousin to satire--particularly in those course materials, with “A Modest Proposal” and Gulliver’s Travels and Peter Carey’s short stories--that when I was tasked with writing a satire of my own, it felt natural to house it in the body. And the idea of ripping your heart out to make art, well, it is certainly not my idea alone: I just made it literal.

When you introduce us to Grace, the writer who uses her blood to power her word processor, you say “Lying, she discovered, was easier than she had ever imagined” and that she “change[d] the facts of the stories so they better matched the feelings she wanted.” Is this how you approach writing? 

This is almost the opposite of how I approach writing! I am annoyingly honest, I think. I use Grace’s character to embody a lot of the things I dislike most about artists, and a trend towards dishonesty in fiction writers has embarrassed me many a time. When someone tells me something, I believe them (always!), and it is always startling when I later find out they were not entirely truthful -- a habit I found particularly prevalent among artists.

Once Finn, the visual artist who must use her skin, lungs, heart to paint, wins an art award, her art starts being mass produced in a gruesome factory and she has a realtor-like agent. After achieving success with her first novel, Grace’s ego inflated and she wrote a “predictable, stale, and boring” second novel. Do you think there is a happy medium we can reach where we can live off our art but not be overrun by the business side of it?

I don’t think it’s possible to live off art without being overrun by the business side of it, but I don’t think the business of art is anything to scoff at. Personally, I value the creative freedom to write weird things that don’t fit easily into a genre, that don’t sell easily, that are not likely to go viral or be bestsellers, and I’m perfectly happy to keep working my job, writing in my spare time, and risk not being published in order to maintain that freedom. I think as soon as a person is trying to reach a particular financial goal with writing, they will have to shape their work to meet that goal; that could mean writing a certain type of book, producing on a particular schedule, or any number of other things. And that is absolutely a great thing for people who choose that! I am too soft to make a whole career out of the thing I love, but I think it’s incredible when people do.

At one point, the relationship between Eva, the film maker, and her wife, Dev, is described like this: “Eva, always digging valleys; Dev, always building bridges.” There were several less successful relationships in the book between the artists and their significant others. I wonder what you think of the sort of relationships an artist must build or destroy in order to serve both themselves and their art? 

The building and destruction of relationships is such a painfully human activity, but in artists it seems to get loaded up with all of this existential importance - maybe because we’re more ready with the words for hurt and love and hope and trauma. We study it, we talk about it, we make art about it. Even in the phrasing of your question, we see it: the sort of relationships an artist must build or destroy in order to serve themselves and their art. You see those self-serving motivations in Grace, and she destroys her personal life because of it, whereas Eva and Dev’s relationship is meant to show what those relationships can be when they aren’t being designed to serve anyone or anything. All three main characters in Suture have unkind brains, and their stories are designed to show the consequences and possibilities of mental health: when people are prioritized, relationships are built; when art is prioritized, relationships are destroyed.

In a recent Instagram post, you wrote that “Having a book out in the world is so very strange and wonderful and tiring. … It is oddly hard every time me and Suture are not a part of something, but I hold on dearly to every time we are.” First, I completely relate to this! And one of the reasons I started doing this newsletter focussed on indie-published writers was because I realized how much harder it was to get the book media’s and the public’s attention when your book is out with an independent press. Can you tell me a bit more about your journey as a debut author?

I first met Jay and Hazel of Book*Hug almost ten years ago, when I approached Jay at a book fair and asked if they hired interns - a charming moment that has become a core memory for me, and which continues to change my life to this day. Through my internship, I learned about their catalogue of incredible poetry and experimental fiction, but also about publishing—I learned about grants and sales and returns and publicity in a way that many writers don’t always get the chance to. During that internship, they once said to me that there’s a point in the publishing process where they have to ask their authors to pause being a writer, and start being an author: sharing news of your book on social media, accepting media invitations, doing events, and so on.

Obviously, this is a bit of a necessary nightmare for many writers, but Jay and Hazel are the kindest and most supportive people a writer could ask for to be on this journey with. I never expected Suture to find a home, and then it found the best home I could ever imagine, with two of my favourite people in the world, in a catalogue that is home to so many writers I admire! Suture was published at a wild time—a year and a half into the pandemic, in the same season as I got engaged, a few years into a personal hiatus from literary goings-on, and a year after I moved away from Toronto. It’s been hard to gauge its success, from my standpoint as the author, particularly when other debut indie books appear to be thriving in the same timeline—which is where the feeling of it being oddly difficult to not be part of things comes from. But I have received so many kind messages, reviews on Goodreads, beautiful Instagram posts, and other recognition and engagement, and it all means so much to me. It is easy to worry I haven’t done enough, but I also trust that Suture is also out there living a life I can’t see, and I am always just remembering to be grateful and stay engaged!

Finally, can you tell me a bit about Frond, the online journal you co-founded for writers who identify as part of the LGBTQI2SA community? 

Frond is a passion project that I was excited to launch with my friend and colleague Madison Stoner. We both love prose, and we were bemoaning the general lack of bite-sized prose venues out in the world one day - so we started one! I had recently realized I was gay, and we decided to go ahead and make this space for the weird kids; for us, for the queers, for the people who write in-between and have a hard time placing their work. Madison took on 99.9% of the work to bring our second season into the world, and although we’re both always a little too busy to run a literary journal on the side, I’m confident we’ll be back with a third season sometime soon. Whenever our next call for submissions does open up, we’ll share it on the Frond social media of course, and I’ll also be spreading the word through my own accounts!

Thank you, Nic! Here is the Suture soundtrack that Nic Brewer has prepared for us:

“Walking Far From Home,” by Iron and Wine

“Unsteady,” by X Ambassadors

“Armored Scarves,” by 13 & God

“Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl,” by Broken Social Scene

“29 #Strafford APTS,” by Bon Iver

“Painting Greys,” by Emmit Fenn

“Wrecking Ball,” by Mother Mother

“Light Leaves, Dark Sees, Pt. II,” by Los Campesinos!

“Hallelujah,” by Pentatonix

“Laura,” by Bat For Lashes

“Dark Parts,” by Perfume Genius

“Appointments,” by Julien Baker

“Fourth of July,” by Sufjan Stevens

If you’d like a longer version of the Suture soundtrack, head over to the Book*hug site!

Nic Brewer is a queer, autistic writer and editor from Toronto. She writes fiction, mostly; her first novel, Suture, was published by Book*Hug in Fall 2021. She is the co-founder of Frond, an online literary journal for prose by LGBTQI2SA writers, and formerly co-managed the micropress words(on)pages. She doesn’t look like her author photo, doesn’t have an MFA, and really wants to hear about what you love most in the world. She lives in Kitchener with her wife and their dog.