This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Heidi: You recently took A Horse at the Window on a hyper-local book tour; how did you contextualize/frame the book to your audience? It’s definitely not your typical easy summer read. 

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Spencer: I think people who find themselves in bars, cafes, bookstores, libraries, or community spaces for literary events (whether they’re launches or collective performances) have some understanding of where they’ve found themselves. To use your contrasting example, they’re not necessarily there to be sold a nice, easy “summer read.” So a lot of that work is already done by expectations—a lot of the events I was organizing over the summer were part of an ongoing reading series that hosted poets, fiction writers, and other people into more literary endeavours. There wasn’t a burden to say, “Hey, I’m going to give you a very long preamble and orientation to what this afternoon is going to be.” 
 

That being said, it is kind of a funny book. I conceived A Horse at the Window as a collection of prose poems—that’s how I wrote up the preliminary, preparatory material to publishers when I was looking for a home for it. I then went into the details of what I was trying to do and who I was drawing inspiration from. I got into discussions with the poetry editor at House of Anansi Press, Kevin Connolly, who is a writer of several collections and previously worked at Coach House Books. He was happy with the manuscript and excited about potentially publishing it but noted that their poetry list was full for several years, through 2024 and into 2025. Our discussion about this was back in June 2022. At the time, Leigh Nash, who was the publisher at Anansi then, stepped in. Rather than passing over the manuscript or slating it for what felt like a million years, they asked if we could publish it as fiction. I said, “Of course.” I didn’t care what they were going to call it or what other people called it because the content itself wasn’t changing. 
 

So that’s how we eventually got to a book described as a collection of “prose poems, faux memoirs, online diatribes, and philosophical investigations.” Then we provided more of a definition: we said these were 25 dramatic monologues, which came from some of my earlier writing about the book. I was like, “they’re prose poems but adhere less to the lyric side of poetry and more to the dramatic monologue, where there are distinct speakers for each one and not a unified lyric ‘I’ running through with the same litany of concerns.” 

Heidi: Prose poetry is already a genre with vague borders between it, flash fiction, and lyric poetry, so do you think the marketing side could influence what readers get from the content in a way you wouldn’t have expected?

Spencer: I see what you mean—even when editors try to define prose poetry in popular anthologies, there’s not a clear definition. It’s funny, y'know; we typically think something’s poetry when there’s a line that’s broken somewhere on the page, which is not a great definition. Just like in the world of fiction, you can have something that is extraordinarily radical in its execution/telling, or you can get the most basic storytelling; so even beneath these umbrellas, there’s so much variation. 
 

I was realistic about what this book was ever going to achieve audience-wise. We’re already in a super narrow chasm; poetry is a little wider, but A Horse at the Window is just some super niche thing calling from the bottom of a deep well. But you never know. Sometimes these books can slip through in weird ways to find wider audiences. I have to throw my hands up at some point about how it’s defined and who it’s going to reach. 

Heidi: For sure. And when you’re writing it, I can understand not necessarily needing to define it because it’s this little curiosity you’re developing for yourself, which sort of leads into my next question, which is what the creative process looked like for this collection. I know you have a couple of others—one poetry [Cruise Missile Liberals] and one short story [Cosmo]. In terms of length, vision, and conceptualization, how do they differ? A collection is really different from writing a novel in terms of “completeness,” to know how far to go before you can say, “Aha, yes, this is a completed product full of everything I want it to say.”

Spencer: Some of that comes with having published a book before; you get a feel for it. If it’s finished, if it feels finished—these things are intuitive. Cosmo was a collection of short stories, and you know how long these books are and what one chalks up to. For that book, it was ten stories, 220 pages, and ready to go! It was the same kind of thing with my poetry collection. You’re like, “Okay, this is going to amount to about 100 pages of material.” 
 

For me, form usually determines my “way in” to writing. Even with a genre like short fiction or poetry, the thing that usually excites me is whether a piece is formally going to be doing X or Y, and then I ease into the execution. 
 

So, creative process-wise, the book emerged in 2019/2020. I had finished touring for Cruise Missile Liberals and was writing a novel and other longer pieces of fiction, and I was still writing a lot of non-fiction—book reviews, interviews, etc.—but what excited me was this new thing where I was writing these long blocks of text. They weren’t stories, but they weren’t quite poems, either. I hadn’t written a lot of prose poetry before, and it was new for me—so, exciting, formally. Eventually, after a few of them, I realized, “This is my new project.” 
 

Back then, I was still sending work out to magazines now and then, or friends would publish my stuff here and there. And that’s why a couple of the pieces that were first written for the book got published in magazines. So, originally they were totally isolated bursts of creativity that could have just sat and maybe got published and then maybe been sorted into a book of poetry later, but eventually the form was too addicting to ignore; I couldn’t get enough of those chunky blocks of text. The later pieces in the book have more variety in terms of appearance. Some of them have multiple small paragraphs, more breaks—there’s one piece that’s composed of two columns… but that stuff came a bit later. The original first, say, five to ten pieces were made of those strangely appealing rectangles. 

Heidi: That’s great, because I was going to ask about the previously published pieces and whether the idea for the collection preceded their publication. But in terms of the sections, were/are they divided chronologically or did you write something for the middle and then realize, “Oh, this needs to be at the beginning”?

Spencer: Gosh, yes. The entire book-writing process took two-ish years. By the time it was completed and with Anansi, the arrangement started. My manuscript submission was in a totally different order. There were different pieces in there, and some that made it to the final book weren’t in any way, shape, or form looking like they do now—it was an utterly different collection. For a book of 25 pieces, arrangement was super important; I wanted readers to walk readers through from the beginning so they could move through it as I’d arranged it and end where they end without jumping around. So I stood in my office and arranged the pages on the floor and moved the bundles around and thought about it at length.

The editing process was very slow and allowed us to think through a lot of themes. But editing is something Anansi does quite well. My editor’s partner, Gil Adamson (she’s a great novelist as well), does excellent copyediting there, and she caught a lot of wonderful things to discuss. Then it went through others at Anansi, like Jenny McWha and Shivaun Hearne, who both combed through it. So all of that was a collaborative effort to put the pieces in order and shape them up.

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I think I submitted it in winter 2022, and then we got around to talking about it in June. Then it came out late June 2024. So that gives you a sense of how long a time it is for a book to just sit. 

Heidi: And did you get kind of sick of it by the end? 

Spencer: Oh yeah. It’s not fresh anymore. You lose the fun, unbounded creative spark that was poured into the original creation, especially pieces that have more of a personal connection—those become completely alien to you after years of looking at them, or not looking at them, or having other people looking at them and rearranging them. After long periods of not looking at it, you have to put on a helmet that zaps you into the book again. You might be working on completely different things and suddenly you’re back in that headspace. It’s especially difficult if you’re asked to write to fill a gap, which there was in this book. A couple pieces had to be rewritten last-minute due to litigation concerns. Anansi had slightly cold feet about the amount of real people and real names that were in the book—and the potential for lawsuits. So I had to cut back on several pieces and redo them. One piece in particular had to be completely rewritten for those reasons. So that was tough. It was like, “I have to get back into here. What is this? Who am I?” You do get sick of it!

Heidi: Did that mesh well with your regular writing process? I guess it must be different to be a professional writer vs a student writer because there’s more of a need to “force” inspiration because it’s the job. Do you still get those waves where things flow really well? Where it might even be detrimental to pop back in and add things later?

Spencer: Absolutely. There’s this kind of folksy wisdom around having to buckle down and work all the time and make it a job—and some people absolutely have to do that—but I think it’s a different equation for everybody. For me, it’s not something I’m keen to do. I’ve tried. Back in the 2015, 16, 17-era, I used to go into my office super early and work every morning and be like, “This is my discipline!” And I didn’t produce good stuff there at all… So I feel in this phase of my life, there’s enough work—work is work, there are enough obligations out there. Writing is a blessed freedom and distraction from that, and I would never want to turn it into a rigid discipline. I want to make it one of the only places where I’m free and can do things that are upsetting and dangerous and make me feel a little uncomfortable.

So yeah, I ride more of an energetic ebb and flow rather than a daily march at 5 AM to get to 400 words or whatever your goal is every day. I’m sure that would be more productive, but productivity in this world for me is a long-gone dream. I have many peers with far more books, and I’ll never keep up with that, so I just go with my own slow flow. 

Heidi: Thank you—I think everything you said makes a ton of sense. Earlier you talked a little bit about the form of the pieces in this book. Did you find the experimental styles freeing, or did you find them constraining in some ways? We’ve already talked about the publishing process and what that looked like, but before we talked about that, I was thinking to myself that selling a publisher on a more experimental form would be a lot harder than something proven to do quite well.

Spencer: Selling a publisher on anything sucks. Selling your work sucks. Like, having to describe it without just saying, “Go read it, and if you like it, then let’s talk.” But yeah, it is much harder when it’s not a novel about people falling in and out of love, or having a domestic row, or a workplace problem, or a crime—when it’s not a generic box. For a lot of these pieces in A Horse, I wasn’t experimenting consciously. They’re not “experiments,” like I’m in a lab going, “Hm, I wonder what would happen if I…” It’s more like a natural flow out of me—this is what I want to be saying and how I want to say it and not a conscious, “I’m going to take a risk here to say it like this.”

It was just a dance with form. That’s what I meant when I said that when I find the form, the writing flows. And form in this case was boxes of text with these diverse, propulsive speakers. So as I was getting deeper into the manuscript, my concerns were more like, “Am I repeating myself too much? What have I not said yet that I want to say? Or is there a tone, a cadence, a style, I haven’t incorporated?” I did not want to have samesy pieces over and over again—the same feeling and the same style. So that was part of finding some variety. But luckily that wasn’t a huge issue. It’s a small book. It’s, as I still imagine, a poetry-length manuscript.

Heidi: That makes sense, but I was surprised when you said you weren’t consciously experimenting. I guess that’s just on inspiration, but I find that when I’m doing something fun with a piece it’s usually because I’m like, “Oh, I’ve never done this before with perspective or dialogue or whatever device,” so the differences are interesting. 

Spencer: There are some new approaches to writing in this manuscript. Maybe “experiment” just isn’t the right term for me. Better: I was trying to find the voice and the form because my intellectual and spiritual inspirations had changed. So I was in dialogue with different speakers. This book is very intentionally intertextual, which touches on a couple of your questions. Whether you’re talking about drawing from different places, or allusion, the notes in the last section of the book are quite scant. In fact, thinking back, there’s so much I didn’t mention that was fundamentally part of the skeleton. So that was a revelation for me: to be able to talk to some of those voices. A couple of the pieces I framed as reverential (and referential) excavations of other texts, so they live inside them or in the rafters or the bones of those texts.

This book has slipped nicely into the void—almost no reviews or mentions—but there was one smart skim in Zoomer Magazine by Michael Bryson, and I was like, “Phew, at least there are some reviewers going, ‘This is just a book of texts. A book of speakers—talking to texts and in and out of texts.’”

Heidi: We were talking about devices, and you touched a little bit on my question about how you use allusion throughout the collection. I was wondering if you have any thoughts about whether it’s becoming less popular as a device in contemporary literature because you have both these extremely grounded pieces within the collection like “The Horrible Inclemency of Life” and then others that float in a more pastoral setting like “Aperture I” and “Aperture II.” 

Spencer: We can divide between settings that are more universal and less circumscribed by specific reference to signposts (like the sky, something can exist in any place). Then there are more temporal references, like Twitch, which comes with a lot more baggage. Both, to me, are basic realism. As you navigate the world, you navigate trees and wind and sky and air in your chest and feelings. And those are just the bare facts of being alive. But also, as part of that influx, part of your attention is dedicated to brands and corporations and digital media and signs that are extremely specific. But none of those things have a clear hierarchy. It’s not like one is good and one is bad, or one should take dominance over your attention. So, most people’s attentions are totally blown to pieces by the world. Most people’s attentions are scattered, or shattered.

Part of what the book is doing is looking at attention, what we pay attention to and how there is indeed some kind of personal responsibility for that. On the one hand, we are responsible—but there’s no get out of jail free card for our torched attentions and our ability to look at things truly, deeply, with reverence and pleasure: to shore up the fragments of our psyche. But to ignore those things and say, set a story in a small isolated farming community in the Northern prairies, untouched by time and untouched by culture, is total fantasy. So for me, even though I’m working with prose poetry, I am simply writing little realist stories; some of them are walking in a park or in a forest; and some of them are scrolling along online. 
 

I thought the question of whether allusion is becoming less popular in contemporary literature is interesting, but I don’t know. I like allusion; I like the idea that there’s a haunting of the text by sometimes multiple things at once, which is fun—like a text that is haunted both, say, by a song (like pop lyrics or pop culture or movies) and also some older, stranger collisions as well. But these are very basic literary concepts that have always been around.

Heidi: I agree and, in a way, the specific way intertextuality works in the collection is something very specific to its conception. You touched on it, but are there things you said in this collection that simply weren’t of interest to you in your previous collections, or that you couldn’t articulate before?

Spencer: I think what was new for me in this book was a big point of sensitivity around the incorporation of and dialogue with Eastern texts—across the spectrum of Buddhist texts, both from Theravada and Mahayana, and most frequently and specifically from Zen lineages. For me, that has been a recent shift in my practice: in my day-to-day life and in my readerly interests. For the past six years, they’ve been the primary works I’ve read and been consumed by. I also have a daily practice, and teachers; by now, these are core parts of my daily life, what I’m doing, and what I hope to achieve. So if you have a life change in a major way, this will naturally bubble over into your work. I wanted to talk more deeply and honestly about my mind and my imagination, and the processes of thought—a far more epistemological focus and far more inward-looking thing. With any shift toward a spiritual practice, you move inward. The pieces in this book reflect that shift. 
 

Many also focus on simple questions: where thoughts come from, whether I have any say or control of them, and what that means for my well-being. What is our absolute orientation in the world as human beings? And what are we supposed to be doing? That was also part of the way the book was packaged—there is one brief mention of the Buddhist affiliations in the catalogue copy. While I’m not some kind of evangelical representative of Zen and am by no means advanced in any of this (I cannot speak for it in any way), I was approaching much of the source material in a deeply reverential way that honours ancestors in a lineage. So if you’ve ever read, practiced, or been involved in Buddhist communities, you can probably see those elements shooting through the book, but A Horse at the Window is still an open text. 

Heidi: It’s been great hearing so much about your experience, processes, and works as an author, but I know you also have experience behind the scenes. Can you talk to me a bit about your experience with The Ex-Puritan?

Spencer: The Puritan [changed to The Ex-Puritan late 2022] came out of the University of Ottawa. Ottawa is a fiercely productive city in the micro-press and small press world. Back then, we were young and didn’t really know what we were doing but said, “Let’s just make a magazine; let’s do this and see what the process is. We’ll get work, we’ll print it, and we’ll distribute it somehow.” And what spiralled out of that was an epic journey: work, commitment, learning, stakes, embarrassment, and scraping things together. At the peak of its run, it was available across the city—something like 15 stores sold it on commission; we sold ads to local businesses in Ottawa, and we got money through the UESA and through the clubs’ fund at U of O. But we still went into debt, which we shouldered and paid off because we printed too many copies. It was very foolish—we had to mulch tons of those precious copies. And then it eventually became an online magazine once we relocated to Toronto. 

But once we went online, that’s when we started working towards grants (the Canada Council Grant, OAC funding, etc.). I would have happily continued to edit it because we really had some momentum with The Puritan once it had gone online in its last, like, three years. We had introduced the blog and the Morton prize (now called the Austin Clarke prize), and we had guest editors and supplements. The money was going up every year, so we got to start paying staff. There was so much happening—but you can only do something like this for so long, make no money yourself, work tirelessly, and then realize you’re burnt out. You reach a certain stage where you think, “I’ve done everything I can.”

I’m proud we got it to that point and were able to publish and pay hundreds of incredible authors. Some of the most enjoyable parts of my last couple years at the University of Ottawa were getting to do that: launching the magazine and imagining where it would end up. It really helped me define my path out of the city and into new vistas as well. Publishing a magazine is fun—and let’s be honest, why else would you do it?

Spencer Gordon is the author of three books: a collection of dramatic monologues (or prose poems), A Horse at the Window (House of Anansi Press, 2024); the poetry collection, Cruise Missile Liberals (Nightwood Editions, 2017); and the short story collection, Cosmo (Coach House Books, 2012). He co-founded and edited the magazine The Puritan (now Ex-Puritan) for a decade, which was begun on campus at the University of Ottawa while he was an undergraduate English student. He has taught writing at Humber College, OCAD University, George Brown College, and the University of Toronto. Currently residing in Bowmanville, Ontario, he now works as a Principal Associate for Blueprint, a non-profit, mission-driven research organization that helps decision-makers make better policies, programs, and services to improve outcomes for people in Canada. More info can be found at www.spencer-gordon.com.

Heidi Elder is a third-year English and Creative Writing student at the University of Ottawa. Her work has been featured in publications by Polar Expressions, The Artifice, VISTAS, and more. She previously worked at Understorey Magazine as an Editorial Assistant and currently works at Common House Magazine as Editor-in-Chief.