I crossed paths with Tim Blackett when I began reading Grandview Drive, his debut collection of short stories, with an intention to review the book. Little did I know that I was about to discover short stories that represented loneliness, disconnection, loss, and grief in some of the most profound ways I had come across. The stories are a testament to the intimate and core yearning human beings have to connect with one another, to be loved, to be seen and heard. Grandview Drive foregrounds the dangerous state of disconnection people inhabit in a time of hyper-individualism, and how they strive despite all odds, sometimes desperately, to create spaces of belonging and connection. 

Tim Blackett is a Canadian writer whose work has appeared in Briarpatch, [spaces], Grain Magazine, and a small Saskatchewan journal called Swift, Flowing. He holds a Bachelor of Theology and a BA in English from the University of Regina, as well as a certificate in Creative Writing from Humber College. His short story collection, Grandview Drive, placed second in the John V. Hicks Long Manuscript Award (2019), and the titular story was longlisted for the Carter v. Cooper Short Fiction Award (2012). 

In our interview, Tim and I discuss the books that influenced him as a child, creative process as a writer, reception and thematics of Grandview Drive, genre and form, relationship to religion, message on mental health, and future projects.


Tamanna Basu: Let’s begin at the beginning. I know you were an avid reader as a child. In your blog What We Talk Bout When We Talk About Loving Books you write, “I needed books as a child. As much as I pretended to hate reading, I came to rely on books to escape.” The Chronicles of Narnia surely top the list. About them you write on your Instagram (August 29, 2018), “There are very few books I can say changed my life, but this series is definitely one of them.” What was it about The Chronicles that was so impactful? And, which other books and writers influenced your childhood and shaped your own journey as a writer? 

Tim Blackett: I found Narnia when I was around twelve years old. It was the first book—at least the first I remember—I picked out on my own. We had a library at the church school I attended, but I hadn’t paid much attention to it. We were forced to read twenty books throughout the school year, but those books were chosen by my teacher, or my parents, and even if I enjoyed some of the books, I pretended not to. I had some kind of idea that reading—or enjoying to read—was not cool, so when we had our designated library time each week, I’d busy myself trying to disrupt the other kids and spent very little time actually reading.

I noticed The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe out of all the books, because I had just watched a made-for-TV series based on the books at my aunt’s place the summer before, and I hadn’t realized it was based on a book. So I sat and read and at the end of the hour, when I’d usually toss my book on the table and try to be first in line at the door, I stood in line with the other nerds to borrow the book instead.

It was the first time I’d felt lost in a book. Even if I ended up enjoying some of the books I was forced to read, I had never felt totally immersed in a story this way. Maybe it’s because I “discovered” it myself, but I finished all seven books in a month and when it was finished, I felt lost and lonely. I needed to “get back to Narnia,” to the feeling that I really was somewhere else and anything could happen. I started talking to animals when I saw them, opening random cupboards to see if there was a magical world behind it, that sort of thing. And I started reading. Still kept it a secret, but I was reading. The Hobbit comes to mind, but the Lord of the Rings books were too dense for me. There was a series of books called, “My Life as . . .” Maybe twenty-five books, but each one was called My life as crocodile food, or something outrageous. There was a series of westerns about a kid named Nathan T. Riggins I remember. All of these were still Christian books. I had no idea about books “out there.” It was a very strict environment, and any media I consumed was very heavily censored. But I did find some books.

Eventually, I snuck off and read Harry Potter and His Dark Materials and whatever else. All books that were deemed un-holy, but which were even more fun to read because of the taboo—there was a real sense of danger around these books. But I could never tell why they were supposedly so horrible.

It wasn’t until way later, in my twenties, when I thought of writing, of creating these worlds or stories, as something I could actually do.

Let’s dive into Grandview Drive. The collection accomplishes a unique balance: All the stories are interconnected and yet they stand alone, they are interdependent and independent at the same time. How did you ensure that the stories maintained this balance through the course of your writing process? 

I wanted to write short fiction. I love short fiction as a form more than any other. I think it’s able to speak to the kinds of concerns I want to think about when reading—loneliness, grief, regret, the human condition—better than anything. The heroes of short stories almost always feel alone or on the outskirts of some community they wish they could be a part of, whether that’s “the wealthy elite” or some club, or just in their own marriage or relationship. For whatever reason, they have come to believe they have been ostracized in some way, and they’re acting in surprising ways because of this feeling. I love that the heroes of short fiction are almost never the heroes of other stories—novels, memoirs, movies—we tell. No one makes heroes out of short-story protagonists.

But they do find themselves in short-story protagonists. Even the most dreadful protagonists are somehow—mysteriously, to me—able to show us just a little bit of what it means to be a human being. I think short fiction does this better than any medium.

Which is a long way of saying: The book was always going to be short fiction. Every story was, in my mind, about that one character and nothing more. I had written at least three of the stories before I realized they were connected in some way, but when I did notice this, then I started doing it more purposefully. I loved the idea of writing about loneliness, or “aloneness,” the feeling that we are unloved or unnoticed, within a world that suggests the characters are all connected.

The point of each individual story seems to suggest we are all alone, while the book as a whole suggests we are all connected in many different ways, some of which we will never know or understand.

The entire writing process of Grandview Drive, from the first story to publication, took ten to fifteen years. Looking back, what was this period of time like from the perspective of creating Grandview Drive? What were some of the challenges and roadblocks to writing that you faced through the course of those years, and what were the motivations, habits, practices, that helped you sustain the rigor to work on your stories? 

It’s a very common thing to say, “I spent ten years writing this book,” and it’s true I wrote the first story in 2009, the last in 2018, but I wasn’t working consistently on the book. I think I wrote an entire novel between the first story and the second story (a terrible novel that has since been destroyed), and I was working on my undergrad, and my son was born in 2008, my daughter in 2011, and I was working full-time for much of that period. Writing was still very much a dream in my mind, and more of a hobby than anything else.

I used the creative writing classes I was taking to add to the collection. Whatever prompt they’d give, I’d find a way to make it fit with a new story for the collection. But it was really after I finished uni in 2014 that I tried to make a regular practice out of writing. I was still working, still raising small kids, still a partner in my home, but it was then when I really started setting dedicated time aside for writing. I’d wake up at 5 AM, when the house was sleeping, and I’d just write until the kids woke up. Or I’d schedule a day in the calendar for writing. I was working shift-work at this time, so I’d have a string of four to five days off at a time, and I’d schedule one of those days for writing, drop the kids with their grandparents, shut off my phone, and just write.

The fact that no one was waiting for the work to be finished meant there was never any pressure, and I could procrastinate or take my time, or I could take six months on a single story. Now that people are expecting another book down the line, there feels like more pressure to get working.

The nature of the book—taking a minor character from one story and making a full story from their life—meant the book could go on forever. So there was a moment in 2018, after I wrote “Tina Slinn” that I just told myself I had to be done or I’d never finish.

Then I wrote “Before a Lost Soul.”

I have come to understand that you write a book entirely with pen and paper first before you type it out. That is quite unique in this digitized, high-speed age. Why do you choose pen and paper over a laptop or a computer?

I have chosen this method because I can’t help it. That’s basically it. Sometimes I wish I could write my first drafts on the computer, but I find when I’m typing things out, especially new work, it gets messy. It goes all over the place, and it’s never as succinct as I want it to be, or that it is when I’m writing with pen and paper.

I’ve always had this romanticized view of a writer, right? Like I bought a pipe at one point, just because people like C.S. Lewis and Tolkien smoked pipes, and I thought I was going to be one of those writers who smokes a pipe while genius spills from my pen. Same goes for Scotch. I tried to be a Scotch guy for a while, tasting and testing five or six bottles, because I thought lonely writers drank Scotch.

But I hate Scotch, and smoking a pipe is tedious.

Pen and ink, though. That’s the one thing I’ve kept from that fictional writer persona I had concocted. I even have a fountain pen that I have to dip in the ink and all that. I like that it gives me an extra second to think before putting the next word down. There’s a story in the collection, “Scratch and Drag,” where the narrator is a writer, and she talks about the split second the scratch and drag of the pen gives her to think helps her as a writer, and that is probably the most autobiographical bit of the book.

It’s also beneficial in that I do have to type it up eventually. And it’s in that process that I’m revising and editing quite a bit, so by the time I have the thing typed up, it’s already at least a second draft.

I’m working on a novel right now, and I thought maybe it’d be different for novels compared to short stories, but it’s not. There’s just something about the pen to paper that gets my creative mind going.

Lastly, I almost always write at a coffee shop. Probably 90 percent of all my work was written at one coffee shop or another.

At the McNally Robinson Saskatoon event you clearly state of Grandview Drive, “These stories are not autobiographical except for these characters are all lonely and trying really hard to connect with other humans.” Undeniably, disconnection, loneliness, and a yearning to connect are at the heart of the collection. Yet, at the same event you say, “I do feel by the end it is filled with hope.” And I agree! Not only do I feel that the stories offer hope but that they put out a call to action to foster and deepen connections. In this vein, I am keen to unpack “hope” in Grandview Drive from your perspective. Where do you find hope to be located in the stories? What about the stories or the collection as a whole do you feel foregrounds hope? 

I think the hope is in the whole. Maybe if you’d ask some of the characters if their stories were hopeful or happy, they’d likely say no, but when the characters feel so alone or helpless, and the reader from the outside can see that how they perceived things was obviously wrong, and they were in fact connected to many people in many different ways, there’s hope there.

I mean some of the stories are hopeful in themselves. A second chance marriage, a writing career after an attempted suicide, winning the lottery after getting hit by lightning, even a (somewhat) successful career as an artist after murdering someone, or reconnecting with your childhood sweetheart after fifty-odd years. There’s hope in these stories.

But I really love how you say, “The stories offer hope but they [also] put out a call to action,” because that’s what I felt as I was writing. Watching this community of people come to life, all of whom feel alone and lonely, but seeing that if they just did one thing differently, or were willing to be vulnerable with those around them, they’d see that there’s almost definitely a community of people around you that deeply cares for you.

So while few of the stories have happy endings in themselves, I think (or hope!) that the collection as a whole might be illuminating to a reader who is feeling some of these same things, and might cause them to be more deliberate about making connections in their own lives.

Grandview Drive is published and out in the world! In your blog My New Life you describe a difficult process: “I worked on Grandview Drive for ten years, and I have more than fifty rejection letters, whether for individual stories or the manuscript as a whole, filed away in various folders. I can’t tell you how many times I told myself the work wasn’t good enough; I’m a fraud; I need to start over; I need to quit.” Today, you have been widely read, reviewed, interviewed, and have won multiple awards for Grandview Drive. Congratulations! How has it all felt for you?

It feels amazing. There’s no other word for it. A literal dream come true. I’ve been so honored and humbled with its reception, the awards and everything. I still can’t believe it some days.

But, you know, it’s a strange thing to be an artist. Because even though it’s selling well, and most who’ve read it appreciate it, there’s a large part of me that thinks it should be selling better, or that more people should be reading it, etc, etc.

And this is quickly followed by those same feelings of fraudulence, where I think it’s because it’s no good that people aren’t reading, that sort of thing.

I’m so very happy to have been published, and just imagining strangers reading my work gives me a pretty big kick. But you realize pretty quickly that there’s a very small window in which your book can make its mark. And it’s just made me want to write more. Instead of the peak of the mountain top that it’s been in my mind for so many years, it’s become a sort of basecamp. I’ve come this far, and now it’s time for the hard work of getting to the top.

I want to pivot to aspects of your life tangential to your work as an artist. You are prolific on social media. Whether its TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Substack, YouTube, or your podcast, Tim Blackett & Friends, you are actively producing content and engaging with your audience. On your social media you have created a community of literature lovers with whom you discuss books and their interconnections with your life, and your podcast features interesting conversations with writers about their work and processes. What motivates and drives your social media activity? What is your hope from it and what do you most enjoy about it? 

I love this aspect of my life right now. To be honest, it was all a big accident. Grandview Drive was accepted at a publisher in 2019, and they mentioned that they’d like me to “build an online presence” as part of the marketing or what-have-you. Back then, this meant starting an author page on Facebook. That’s basically all I did.

That publisher filed for bankruptcy before they published my book, so I was back to the drawing board, as they say, and I sort of just left the “online presence” thing alone.

It wasn’t until 2022, middle of Covid, when my son was getting obsessed with TikTok, and I decided I’d start my own account (at his behest) so I could at least see who’s he’s following and all that. But of course the algorithm there is very smart, and it started showing me all kinds of “BookTok” accounts, and after a few months of that, I thought: I could do that.

There were a lot of people talking about books, but very few, as far as I could see, that were talking about the books I wanted to talk about (e.g., short fiction). So I started my own, and started talking about the books I was interested in. They were very bad videos to start. I had no idea what I was doing. But six months in, I had two videos go “viral” (750k+ views) in one month, and that started a pretty steady gain in followers.

That led to the podcast and the bookclub and basically everything else. I keep doing it because it’s opened a lot of doors for me. I’ve met some of my literary heroes through the podcast, at least virtually, and I’ve been sent free books, which is awesome. I’ve even been invited to speak about how to build a social media following and everything. It’s weird because I still don’t know what I’m doing, and I am still baffled that people like to listen to and watch my stuff.

This all happened before my book was published. It was kind of right as I heard from Nightwood Editions, who eventually published the book, that it blew up. But I started the whole thing before I was a published author. I was just submitting to wherever had open submissions. So in some way, I think people see me as a “content creator” more than an author with a social media presence. It’s been hard for me to pitch my book to people because they’re not coming to my page because I’m a writer, but because I talk about other people’s books.

So it’s strange, but I keep doing it because it’s a lot of fun, and I’ve been able to have some very meaningful conversations with authors I admire, authors I almost definitely would never have met if not for my TikTok page. And these are all creative projects that are fulfilling in ways other hobbies may not be.

On your social media, your podcast, and in your interviews, you have often shared your complex and difficult journey with religion. I find your journey (and the fact that you speak of it publicly) to be very inspiring because, on one level, it demonstrates the potential of humans to embrace radical change when fueled by knowledge and critical thought, and on another level, because it gives permission to others to do the same. Could you describe your navigation of religion, where it began, how it evolved, and what may be the questions that you engage with today?

Well. This is a very big question for me. It began before I was born. My grandmother was part of the group of thirty or forty people who started our church in the ‘60s, and now the church has more than a thousand people with ministries all over the world. I grew up going there three to four times a week, sometimes seven days a week. They had a church-run school for K-12, so I attended the school there, youth group, Sunday school, the works.

It wasn’t until I was nearly done with my theology degree before I allowed myself to question the whole thing even a little bit. I was fully convinced by the time I was four that this was the only true worldview, and I never thought to question it until the final year of Bible college, where they made me read something outside of that Christian bubble. I had to read “secular” philosophers in order to defend some tenet or another, and when I found Hume, say, or whoever it was, I was kind of like, Wait. This guy makes some sense.

Then it was another eight to ten years of reading and studying and thinking and letting go of some things before I finally got to a place where I found I couldn’t reasonably stay without feeling like I was lying, and I definitely couldn’t share the “good news” any longer, because I didn’t believe it was real anymore.

It’s a much longer story than that (I wrote a whole novel about it), but that’s the very basic gist.

I don’t practice any longer, and I barely think about it outside of the fact that most of my family is still very religious. I have never felt the “peace of the Lord”—I longed for this my whole life—as clearly as when I said, out loud to myself on a gravel road, “I don’t believe.”

I can’t explain the tremendous peace that flooded my mind and body in that moment.

Speaking of impactful public expression, you are also very open about your struggles with depression. When writers speak of their own mental health, it contributes to raising awareness in the public domain and to normalizing the conversation globally. For a careful reader, it is evident that Grandview Drive too foregrounds the conversation on mental health. What more do you think we (individuals, communities, institutions) can do to better support people navigating difficult mental health journeys? 

Wow. Another big question. For me, it’s just a part of my life. Ya know? I was officially diagnosed with clinical depression in 2014. I made an appointment to talk about it after Robin Williams died. I thought if someone who was seemingly so happy and enthusiastic about life could do this, I better get some help. At that first appointment, the doc asked me when the last time I could remember feeling happy was, and I couldn’t answer the question. I said, “Maybe high school.”

She made me fill out a questionnaire, then tallied that up and said, “Yeah, we would call you clinically depressed.” We tried half-a-dozen meds. Most of them made it worse, one of them seemed to slow my mind down enough that I could say to myself, “Yeah, you don’t actually believe that,” when I was thinking about wanting to die or hurt myself. But none have been the “magic pill” that just makes me feel happy, or even content.

It’s been a constant struggle. Things like meditation, walking, some really good friends, and a very understanding partner have helped. But the thing about being depressed is it’s very hard to motivate yourself to do the things you need to do to feel a bit better. I know meditating helps. I know regular exercise helps. But some days I can’t even make myself brush my teeth, let alone go for a walk.

The thing that’s helped me the most is talking about it. Saying it out loud, preferably to someone you trust. Talking about it but also recognizing that it’s impossible to explain depression to anyone who has never been depressed. Sometimes I’ve had to say, “Look, I’m not looking for help, or suggestions. I just want to vent a little bit,” and I’m lucky that I have friends (and some family members) who are willing to let me do that.

Tack on a generalized anxiety disorder diagnosis, and life is a mess up there in my noggin sometimes. Hard work, being a human.

So as far as my writing goes, and even my social media presence, I’d feel wildly disingenuous if these ideas didn’t pop up. Maybe feeling alone when you are, in fact, not alone is unique to depressed people, though I suspect not. But it’s certainly been the way I’ve felt through my life, whether it’s been not quite believing the way I was supposed to in our church life, or on the flip-side of that, feeling awkward and out of place in the “real world” because I grew up so very sheltered.

It took me a very long time to realize the depression I felt through most of my life wasn’t healthy, and that many people don’t feel this way. And even that brings a certain loneliness—knowing that your brain is functioning differently than most.

The point is, I can’t help talking about it. It’s who I am, and whether it’s healthy to identify with it in this way, I’m not sure. I just know it’s hard for me to even imagine what I’d be like without this thing in the background of everything.

Corporate initiatives won’t do much, though I do think it’s beneficial for them to be thinking and talking about mental health. Real people talking about it, and real people listening without always having to “fix” things immediately. I think that’s the best thing we can do.

And now to the future! I know that two novels are in the works, one of them autofiction. Could you tell us about these novels, what are they about, and when may your readers expect them?

I was also curious about the process of writing autofiction, in particular. How has memory, with its infinite potential for recreation, editing, and slippage, influenced the process of writing the autofiction novel?

Yes, I’ve finished one novel, the autofiction. It’s about a boy named Tim Plumber who grew up in a very strict, fundamentalist religious home and community. He tried his best and did everything he was supposed to—preached on the streets, remained a virgin til marriage, got married, had kids, studied to be a minister—but eventually left religion and everything behind. After his dad passes, Tim hopes to explain his life—something his mother and other family members can’t understand—to his mother before she passes away. The ultimate goal is some sort of reconciliation before it’s too late.

I’m in the long revision process right now, but I hope to get it out next year or early 2026.

I’m also working on a more traditional novel, about a group of millennials about to turn forty. They’re having a bit of an accidental reunion when one of the group returns to their small town when his ma gets sick. It’s exploring love and loneliness again, but also friendship, parenthood, and anxieties around growing older and not becoming the “grownup” you imagined you would. It’s called We Were Meant to Be Grownups. It’s just in the drafting stage, about 60K words into it.

And I’ve continued writing short stories, all of them set in McCloud, some of them continuations from characters in Grandview Drive. It’s set mostly in and around the McCloud Public Library. So where Grandview Drive was the setting that tied the characters together, the library ties these characters together. I’m having a lot of fun with this one.

These last two are “in the works.” I have no idea when (or even if) they’ll be published, but I’m hopeful!

Tamanna Basu is a feminist activist. She works as the Core Lead at Shakti Shalini, an organization working for gender equality, and as a Fundraiser at Civis, an organization working on law-making. She has worked as a Research and Communications Consultant at HAQ: Centre for Child Rights. She has taught Literature at Ashoka University, Haryana, and Nirma University, Gujarat. She has served as a member of the Governing Bodies of Shaheed Bhagat Singh College and Satyawati College. She has an M.Phil. in Literature from Delhi University and her research was on autobiographies of domestic violence survivors in South Asia. She has various written works such as a chapter, articles, life narratives, research reports, media content, and book reviews that have been published in books, journals, and websites of civil society organizations. She has also presented her work at academic centers and conferences. She lives in New Delhi, India.


 
 
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