On Landscapes, Writing, and Malleable Narratives: An Interview with Trynne Delaney
Trynne Delaney is a writer currently based in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal). They are the author of the half-drowned (winner of the QWF First Book Prize) and A House Unsettled. In their spare time they like to garden. Trynne holds a Master of Arts in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Calgary.
In this interview, Canthius editorial board member Rachel Shabalin talks to Trynne (left) about their book, the half-drowned.
The compass is smashed—“This is not a history lesson.”
What can we unlearn from stories that resist easy definition, structure, and shape? Trynne Delaney’s the half-drowned (Metatron Press, 2022) exists in an unknowable, undefinable landscape—an alien terrain of formless slime and mud. Taking place in a future, where everyone who could afford to leave, fled up to the sky, the half-drowned follows a community of Black survivors living and healing on a devastated land. We follow the characters Harbour, Kaya, and LaVon, who are all navigating their own forms of grief and queerness, while also discovering uncharted ways to live and love.
In Delaney’s Afrofuturistic world, the narrative is malleable like slime. The text embodies an orality that speaks through a polyphony of voice, dreams, and memory. The genre-bending narrative compassionately draws us a fresh map for reading and questioning. As I read the half-drowned, I kept returning to the question of what makes a narrative slime-like? What is the power of narratives that thrive in this state?
Slime brings up the illegible. Illegible knowledge and histories and dreams. Slime is connected to the earth in a way that is beyond human imprinting or comprehension, but slime is also a substance that can change and morph and absorb. It can absorb violence, toxins, and carry what has been lost. Slime allows us to consider the unanswerable and intergenerational: “What’s worse? To remember your loss or not know what you’ve lost?
The half-drowned makes it possible to witness how layers of story can shatter clean plot structures and formulas. As we surrender to the rhythm of the text, we are pulled through a somatic ceremony, a ritual that is a kind of drowning. By the end, although we may be left gasping and shivering, we are also held. We are left held while viewing our wounds, our world, our communities through a shard of sea glass. We are left with desires and possibilities that resist shape. What do we desire? How do we want to live, connect, and heal in a broken world?
Trynne and I connected virtually across landscapes to discuss writing and the half-drowned. The conversation was tender and left me hearing and feeling the tumble of rocks on a low tide.
The half-drowned is published by Metatron Press, a publisher that is dedicated to speaking out against violence and injustice by standing with the people of Palestine. If you are a Canadian literary institution, we encourage you to use your platform similarly to advocate for not only an end to the genocide of Palestinians, but ultimately, freedom.
Trynne Delaney, the half-drowned.
Metatron Press, 2022. $18 CAD.
Order a copy from Metatron Press.
Rachel: Can you share a bit about yourself and what influences, visions, and landscapes drive your work?
Trynne: I just came back from a trip to Norway to visit some friends who moved there last year. We drove around the fjords, which are a bunch on these tiny twisty roads bordered by cliffs on one side and rock face on another. In the city I’m a very anxious driver, but out there I felt comfortable! It made me think of how much driving and walking around the east coast when I was a teenager imprinted the maritime landscapes on my brain.
Another influence is my grandfather, who is a geologist. He has a lot of knowledge about flora, fauna, and geological formations. He’s lived in New Brunswick his whole life and he loves to go on a walk and tell you about everything he sees. I’ve absorbed a small fraction of his knowledge about landscapes.
In general, the world tends to confuse me. I don’t really know what to make of being born into this era.
My visions are peace, comfort, and the resistance that must happen to lead to peace and comfort.
Rachel: In your EVENT interview you mention how you were thinking about “dreams to be a doorway into a history connected to trauma, to be connected to some future.” This definition also feels connected to queerness? How do dreams and queerness connect us to unwritten and unspoken histories, knowledge, and futures?
Trynne: When writing the half-drowned it was a conscious decision for me to tap into intuition as much as possible. I’d just had my first queer (and first ever) relationship and I had a lot of questions about how to proceed into a future where relationships (romantic or not) were something I considered more seriously. It took me a long time to get to understanding my own desires, so I began to rely more on what my dreams were telling me. It turned out that sometimes the stories they brought to me were stories that I only found out later had happened in my family history in parallel form. My brain was working to piece together some past that made sense with the fragments I’d been given. I wanted to create a life that was meaningful outside of expectations—I think that is quintessentially queer.
Rachel: This entire book is somatic and connects to a primordial, slime-like body knowing. I understood the Rites ceremony as a way to return to the body and tap into this untranslatable knowledge that is stored in the bones, blood, and ancestral memory. (I felt like I went through a somatic ceremony while reading). What is the difference between history and knowledge? Both? How are they in dissonance?
Trynne: I think you’re right to suggest that history and knowledge overlap. It’s kind of like that rectangle and square thing. Maybe knowledge can be history but history can’t be knowledge? We can never know For Sure what happened in the past. We have our narratives and we have facts and evidence but there is always a certain degree of imagination that must go into a history. Knowledge is not necessarily factual and belief is a type of knowledge. Sometimes I know things that I know aren’t true. Writing is a process of knowing things that we know aren’t true truly enough to make other people know them. You feel?
Rachel: I wonder how you connect, disconnect, or relate to the body while writing? Does it shift depending on the project? How do you integrate rest and care in your process/work?
Trynne: Writing is one of the few things that makes me feel at home in my body. I deeply believe in writing as a physical practice. The tools we use and the ways we sit and what we write on and what we hear while we write are all part of the process of moving a pen across the page (or pencil, or fingers across a keyboard.) It’s important for me to be well fed and hydrated while I write. I like to keep snacks readily available. (While writing this I was eating some chips I’d left for my future self by my desk.) My fingers have pen dents! Writing has changed my fingers irrevocably!
In our current sociopolitical context it’s difficult to work at the pace that works for me. I’ve become much more strict with rest in the past year and a half out of necessity. I nap most days and try to get as much sleep at night as possible. I see my friends occasionally, which can be a type of rest too. Rest takes up a lot of time. In general, I’m a pretty patient person and don’t mind being patient with my body but saying “no” is very hard when exciting opportunities come your way. And realistically, sometimes I can’t say “no” when I need to because I need the money!
Rachel: I recently read Joshua Whitehead’s “Indiqueerness” interview with Angie Abdou and he mentions how “to be undefinable is to be unknowable to colonial powers.” In your interview with EVENT Magazine, you also mention the hopes that the story/book is “malleable, slime-like.” Can you speak to the unknowable, formlessness, and slime in your work?
Trynne: Like many artists I struggle with a fear of being pigeonholed. I don’t know if I’m only a writer but it feels like that is what I’m supposed to be when I talk to other people and they ask me what I do.
As soon as I became a published author I immediately lost my taste for writing. I began to understand that this was rooted in a discomfort with being perceived as a particular person who does a particular thing. The options seemed to narrow. What was the point of being a writer if that was all I could be? I don’t think my body likes being legible. It feels unsafe to be legible. I admire Joshua Whitehead’s writing and his readings of his work for their malleability and unknowability. Whatever we know we must consider what we don’t know within that knowing.
Rachel: Where and how did the half drowned begin? With the vignettes, and shifts in perspective and character, I’m wondering what your process was like? Did you write/speak the character sections of Kaya, Harbour, and LaVon separately, or did the voices arrive together?
Trynne: The short answer is that I don’t remember! I think I just started writing and eventually something felt good. I talked with my editor, Shazia Hafiz Ramji, whose work I really admire, about how I wanted the voices to rise like rocks at low tide—all part of the same landscape but with different outlines. Once we came to that realization it helped me a ton in focusing each voice while making the half-drowned host to a larger community and history behind the scenes.
Lavon is the heart. His voice connects the rest together and he arrived first.
Rachel: Your note on Black Loyalists arriving on the colonially-occupied coasts of Mi’kma’ki in 1783 is included at the end of the book, and completely re-frames the reading of the text. The note seems to be asking the reader to question the patterning of time, history, and place. We are given a new map and way of connecting and seeing at the beginning, and then this note at the end. The work would feel completely different without these “markers.” Did you know this was something you wanted to do from the beginning?
Trynne: I think my body knew this from the beginning. Part of the reason I began to write this story was that I felt that Black history on the East Coast was not something I’d had the opportunity to learn about in a literary or academic way while I was in middle and high school or university in the Maritimes. It was an intentional choice for me to pursue a Master’s at the University of Calgary so that I could have the funding, support, time, and space to connect with this history. I’m humbled by how much I don’t know and often sad that I no longer live in the Maritimes to connect with more knowledgeable people in my day to day life! Visits are too short!
There’s also a lot that goes unsaid within my family, we are a collection of pretty quiet people who are geographically spread out, and so a lot of my childhood and adolescence was spent imagining the connecting points between the conversations I’d eavesdropped on. As I got older, I contextualized my understanding through googling and reading. What I understood from all of this reading and puzzle piecing is that although a lot has changed, a lot has stayed the same!
Rachel: the half-drowned places the terms “dystopia” and “utopia” into question. What these terms mean and who they are for. The work questions what “dystopian” means to a community that has gone through many endings, or has lived through many apocalypses already. But it also questions what “utopia” means when a community can live in “peace and friendship” on a “purgatorial plane.” I’m curious to hear more on what you think of these terms and how you were considering them while writing? Do you consider the half drowned a dystopian/utopian text?
Trynne: When I attempt to describe my book to people I usually lean toward the word utopian. I think a better word might be “everyday” though? Like our own world there’s a lot wrong surrounding the community in the half-drowned and each character might relate to the words utopia/dystopia differently if they were asked their opinions. The biggest difference in the world of the half-drowned is that social support is readily available and care is prioritized. For me, one of the greatest horrors of our world is the banality of the denial of support and care—I wanted to see what a future looked like where support and care are available, but that this was only achieved after an act of horrific abandonment during the climate crisis.
Rachel: In 2022, you also released a YA novel, A House Unsettled, from Annick Press. How do you transition between audiences in your work? YA feels like such an unknown territory for me, and I’m wondering what it was like to write a novel for this audience?
Trynne: Transitioning between audiences feels natural to me—each project I work on is directed towards a specific purpose/need and I write towards that purpose/need. I kind of half-believe in genre. I think genre has more to do with marketing than the contents of a book, I tried to write towards youth and I tried to be honest! It’s such a privilege to write a book for youth because they tend to be more curious and less beholden to the everyday demands of capitalism so they have time to really enjoy reading.
Rachel: Tell us what you’re working on or considering right now?
Trynne: I’m considering what it means to chronically desire a way out—from what? To where?
These considerations are happening in poetry.
Rachel Shabalin (she/her) is a writer, editor, and library facilitator living on Treaty 7 territory (Calgary, Alberta). She was the 2nd-Runner-Up for PRISM's Jacob Zilber Prize (2022), and has been shortlisted for Room's CNF contest (2020). She likes to go for gentle walks and bird watch.