Book is artwork intended to be read: Nixon

Duncan McDonald —

Downtown resident Edward Nixon writes to understand life: “One writes, speaks, and listens from where one finds oneself.” For Nixon, poetry was a natural form of expression, one he was fascinated with when he was “old enough to break the spine of a book.”

As a young man he found refuge in the works of Al Purdy, Earle Birney, Dylan Thomas and many others. As he grew older and his experiences broader, so did his reading list, which now included authors like Michael Ondaatje, T.S. Eliot and Phyllis Webb.

But Nixon’s influences are not limited to writers. He is also a great appreciator of contemporary visual art. When in his favourite independent record store in Victoria, B.C., he came across an issue of FILE magazine, a publication produced by the influential Toronto art collective General Idea. The issue contained a two-page spread about the Queen West scene. This made him realize, “I can stay in Canada. I don’t have to go to New York.”

Nixon experiences writing as a kind of need, “a way to try and make sense of this thing we call living.” But it is not a laundry list of emotions: “My work is not my diary. It is constructive. It is artwork and it is intended to be read.”

He hopes his writing can “give [the reader] a window into how they can view their own experiences and make sense of them. I also hope the reader will take some pleasure in the way the words are organized and the sounds of the words.”
Nixon is conscious of his audience, “but I am not conducting a marketing exercise. I don’t have a target audience.” He hopes they will engage his writing and find something within themselves: “I have no wish to control how someone experiences the book.”

His new book  “is about trying to figure out how you tell stories of memory and personal history in a larger context of politics and culture. There is a lot of memory, history and geography tangled up in personal experience and experiential explorations of feeling in the book.