Editorial Assistant Kath Gerobin's Interview with Mike Barnes whose story "Animals" was published in Issue 302 (Winter 2025)
Kath Gerobin: A jackrabbit creeping out of a forest, a hummingbird perching on Dad’s shoulders, a squirrel gliding from trees, a tiny bug finding its way to the sidewalk. These are just some of the animals featured in your essay. Small, lonesome wildlife commonly find themselves lost in or close to civilization. How does this inform your relationship with non-human lives?
Mike Barnes: I almost never feel other animals are lost. Wherever they are, they are always themselves, always found. Even in terribly adverse circumstances, such as cages. (Pets can be an exception to this; sometimes they seem quite confused, or even disturbed.) Being always found and always here, they can help us when we are not-found and not-here. I also don’t see a sharp cut-off between “civilization” and “nature”. It is all nature. Toronto is the habitat that a certain kind of animal makes for itself. And many other animals find it a good habitat, too.
KG: Your essay is fragmented in many ways. It features a sectional form and even the sentences are sometimes incomplete. What is the rationale behind your choice of form?
MB: This essay came about when I gave myself the prompt “Animals” and took down the memories of animals that came, in the order they came. Since it was a memory piece, I wanted to keep the immediacy of memory, and some of the rawness, the fragmentariness. The sense impressions that return strongly when you let your mind drift back. Sometimes I would try to join up bits into a sentence that was more complex, but it usually seemed too composed that way, too detached and controlled, and so I broke it back down into what seemed to me more natural and accurate bits. I wanted it to stay lively. It felt joyful to create this gallery of animals I’d known.
KG: The epigraph mentions that “animals can give you back your life.” In the essay, you mention how a bug brought you back from a time of psychosis and how a group of sparrows reminded you of your dad. Can you elaborate on this point? How can being in the presence of animals be enlivening?
MB: I often feel called back by animals. Called back to here, called back to now. To the earth and the body. Called back from wherever the mind has been roaming. Called back home. Animals are grounding in that absolute sense. At the same time, there is something uncanny about animals. There is a wonder and a mystery about any of them. They tend to replace rumination of the self with contemplation of the other—always a good trade.
KG: There are two poems included in your essay: “Alive” and “Fox and Turtle.” How does the insertion of poetry figure into your work?
MB: I’ve written in many different genres—poems, short stories, novels, essays—and I’ve always felt the genre designations were a little artificial and too strictly insisted upon. That they blur and swap around across their supposed borders—or they should, perhaps. At the same time, it’s true that the genre you’re working in changes what you think and what you perceive. If you walk down a street looking to write a poem or looking to write a short story or looking to write a novel—it won’t be the same street. You’ll see it through a different lens, a different focus, that will show you different things. So I’ve often wanted to combine different forms of writing in the same piece, make a hybrid of sorts. I have a lot of experiments like that in my boxes of unpublished writing. And I did that here in a small way, with these two little poems.
KG: Writing in sections allows great flexibility in terms of temporal arrangement and idea organization. What considerations did you have when deciding the sequence of your sections?
MB: When writing anything, I always pay close attention to the order in which the material first comes to me, since there is often a power and a meaning in the unconscious pattern it already has, which a conscious re-ordering might improve and might make even stronger, but might also lose, especially if the re-ordering is done before the initial pattern is understood. For this reason I often number the sections as they come to me, so I can put them back in their first order as I’m monkeying around with other arrangements. With this one, I kept a lot of that first order, although I shifted some things around slightly, if I felt two did not quite work next to each other, or I needed a good one to go right at the end. It might sound like mumbo-jumbo, this idea that there is an initial order that has its own meaning and vitality before you change it, but something in support of it is the fact that the sequence of animals that came to my prompt was quite small—between 25 and 30, I think. Out of all the animals I’ve encountered in my life, this was the small group that arrived. And then the memories cut out and felt done. Which tells me that this particular sequence of animals tells a kind of story, or maybe a couple of stories. And as I read over the sequence, I began to feel I knew what that story or stories might be. I’ve tried a couple of other “prompt” essays. “Plants” brought only two entries—not much story there, or not yet. “Writing” brought four connected sequences, each about the length of “Animals”. And it wasn’t what I might have expected about writing, something I’ve done all my life. It was from a different angle, a different story.
Mike Barnes has published twelve books of fiction, poetry, and memoir. His work has won awards (Danuta Gleed, National Magazine, Edna Staebler) and been shortlisted for awards (Journey Prize, Gerald Lampert Memorial, City of Toronto). His latest book is Sleep Is Now a Foreign Country: Encounters with the Uncanny.
