Editorial Assistant Michael Yvon Robichaud's Interview with Danica Klewchuk whose story "Important Intersection Ahead" was published in Issue 304 (Summer Creative Nonfiction 2025)
Michael Yvon Robichaud: One of the most arresting features of your piece "Important Intersection Ahead" is its structure: scenes from childhood and adolescence offered in discrete, vivid fragments. Could you talk a bit about how you arrived at that approach?
Danica Klewchuk: I circled around what I really wanted to say with this essay, but those fragments were the things I kept coming back to. I can still see them, like short movies that play in my head, and they put me right back there in that time. Focusing on them seemed like the best way to bring the reader there with me. Admittedly, this wasn’t a conscious action, at least not at first. But I think a piece—especially one that’s about your origin story or something so personal like that—will tell you what it needs. How many drafts you end up writing just depends on how well you’re listening.
MR: One of the most memorable sequences is the description of finding a Penthouse magazine in a derelict Chevy—and the childlike, almost anthropological response to it. There’s a tenderness and precision in how you write about girlhood, particularly in relation to sexuality and danger. Did writing this essay shift how you think about that younger version of yourself?
DK: I do feel a real tenderness toward that younger version of myself, and writing this piece certainly amped that up. When I was doing the edits The Fiddlehead requested, I found myself wanting to go back there and snatch her out of that place. I can still picture the way she’d fold in on herself when the men got too close, and it just tears the heart right out of me.
MR: The environment you describe—rural Alberta, oilfield towns, highways, graveyards, rivers—feels both expansive and claustrophobic, like it can offer freedom one moment and peril the next. How do you think the physical landscape shaped the emotional or psychological terrain of the essay?
DK: I wanted the reader to feel trapped with me, to experience that juxtaposition between all that wide-open space around a town I wasn’t grown enough to leave for good. I could take off into the wild for a little while, but eventually I was going to have to turn around and go back to all the things that could and would happen there. It was important for that restriction to be felt within the essay, and mirroring the beauty alongside the uncertainty helped me to convey this emotion of hope alongside all of the crushing possibilities.
MR: The essay ends on a moment of departure—a new car, a new direction—but it doesn’t feel entirely triumphant or clean. There’s still tension, still a charge. How did you think about tone and emotional texture when shaping the ending?
DK: You’re right about it not feeling clean. Even driving in a new car to a new city, I still had to take all my experiences with me. Even now, an image or a familiar phrase can put me right back there. I needed this to exist in the ending too; the way something fluttering out from my car’s sun visor could make me feel like I was nine again. And I wanted it to be a little bit shocking, because I was often shocked by the things I was exposed to all those years ago.
MR: Your forthcoming book Standing in the Footprints of Beasts is billed as a memoir in essays. Is Important Intersection Ahead representative of the book’s larger shape and style? Can you tell us a bit more about the collection and what readers can expect?
DK: I would say that "Important Intersection Ahead" is representative of the book as a whole, especially in that it’s full of these vivid fragments you pointed out. In fact, there was one essay that wasn’t working until my editor pointed out that it had none of these in it. After she did so, it came together really quickly.
Largely, I’d say that the essays are about what it’s like to be a woman and have a body. In them, I grow up within the evangelical church and learn that no one but me is going to protect my body. I travel to Ukraine and am asked by a Lithuanian mobster if I’d like to be his third wife. I move to Australia and go out to get the laundry in knee-high platform boots in hopes of avoiding a snakebite in the long grass. I hole up in a communist block apartment in Bratislava and think about how nice it would be not to have a body, because so much trouble stems from carrying it around.
Effectively, it’s a book about a girl who keeps driving places in hopes of getting away from all the things that have happened to her—only to glance up into the rearview mirror and see them right there behind her in the distance.
— Danica Klewchuk is a writer from Edmonton, Alberta. Her work has appeared in Swamp Pink, Event, Room Magazine, and On Spec. Her first book, Standing in the Footprints of Beasts, a memoir in essays, will be published by NeWest Press in the fall of 2025.
You can read Danica Klewchuk's story "Important Intersection Ahead" in Issue 304 (Summer Creative Nonfiction 2025). Order the issue now:
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