Chaotic Excellence with Nina Dunic
The award-winning author of The Clarion discusses her unorthodox path to success and emphasizes the importance of experiencing life in addition to pursuing writing.
Interview by Louie Simonin
Nina Dunic
The Clarion (Invisible Publishing, 2023)
Nina Dunic is a two-time winner of the Toronto Star Short Story Contest, has been longlisted by the CBC Short Story Prize four times, and was nominated for The Journey Prize. CBC Books named Dunic in its 2023 Writers to Watch list. Her debut novel The Clarion (Invisible Publishing) won the 2024 Trillium Book Award, was longlisted for the 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize, was selected as Best Canadian Debut by Apple Books, and was included in the Globe and Mail's 100 Best Books of 2023. Nina lives in Scarborough, Ont. ninadunic.com.
SIMONIN: I know I told you in the email that I was Team Peter, but as I went through the book again, I realized I love both characters. I think it’s the way you frame them.
DUNIC: Well, you remember how Stasi came about—you were at that event, right? I was trying to create archetypes, and Peter felt like the soul or philosophy of the book. Creating Stasi was just fun. You hear authors and even actors say that playing the villain is more freeing, and that’s how it felt. Because she’s flawed, arrogant, and ambitious, Stasi felt more textured and interesting to write. Some of her passages have a stronger sense of urgency—she’s much more dramatic. That makes her more fun to write and read. But I totally understand when people don’t like her. It’s easy to dislike her.
SIMONIN: It is easy, but when I was reading, I noticed you don’t judge her in the narrative. It would be easy to judge her actions—she’s cheating and making bad decisions. But you could also do the same with Peter by calling him a loser.
I also noticed this in your short stories. You seem to work with opposites, and as the narrative progresses, they find a kinship or common ground. Is that intentional? How does that process work for you while approaching a story?
DUNIC: Okay, a couple of questions there. Wanna know process? My process is absolute chaos and instinct. I have no idea what I’m doing. When I write one sentence, I don’t know what the next will be, let alone the next page. I’m definitely not a structured, planned writer.
In terms of starting with opposites and finding a kinship, I think that mirrors my own experience in real life. When I meet someone new—like if I met you today and we talked for half an hour—my mind would first notice our differences. He’s like this, I’m like this. I think I mentally process the lines between us first. But as time passes, my perspective shifts, and I start finding the kinship, the common ground. But I love opposites—I find them interesting. A whole book of grays? I think I’d prefer something with sharper contrasts, more defined relief between things. You know what I mean?
SIMONIN: Is that a matter of personal philosophy? Because there’s no clear separation between the way you structure your stories and the way you engage with people. You don’t just throw archetypes together for a dramatic clash—you create something emotionally resonant. I’m thinking about undergraduate writers—beginners—there’s this idea that we have to make grand observations about the world. When you’re this deep into writing, do you feel that impulse to say something grandiose? Is the scope of your stories just a result of your chaos?
DUNIC: I think it’s a result of my age, to be totally honest. I’m 42 now. I published my first book at 40. I wrote it at 38, 39—right at the start of the pandemic. If I had been writing at 22, I guarantee you my stories would have been theatrical, dramatic, full of injustice and tragedy. I would’ve thrown everything I thought I knew about the world at the page and made it as intense as possible. Back then, I was job-hopping, broke, and working multiple jobs just to pay rent. I never thought I could be a writer because, in my mind, writers had some money to fall back on. There was no way I could work the hours I was working and also write a book—it was a joke.
Then, later in life, I finally started writing, and that dramatic, idealistic youth passed. Now, I’m more interested in quieter things. Even when it comes to trauma, backstory, sad childhoods—I get tired of that, too. I definitely like characters at my age and phase of life where there’s more agency.
SIMONIN: Let’s expand on that. Was writing The Clarion always a dream for you? Or did you just stumble into it?
DUNIC: Oh, I stumbled—definitely stumbled. Or maybe unconsciously, I had always been dreaming about it, and when the opportunity came, I just knew, this is the only thing I want to write about. Before I was asked to write a book, I was writing short stories. I never thought I’d write a novel. I figured I’d just keep publishing short stories, maybe win some more contests. That was enough. Then my agent said, write a novel. Within a day, I thought, Okay, it’s going to be about Clarion Call. But I had no plot, no real interest in creating one. Instead, I made this lonely character, and the book’s philosophy became his philosophy. That was it. Peter was my vehicle.
SIMONIN: That’s so interesting because writing is one of those things—especially for young writers—where you don’t always see a clear path. You have a journalism background, right? Did that just start as your first professional gig, or was it something you pursued intentionally? Because I was looking at your journalistic pieces, and a lot of them focus on economics, real estate, and finance—topics that, frankly, a lot of writers detest. Do those experiences inform your fiction at all? How do the two intersect, if they do?
DUNIC: Well, they’re just jobs, right? I did start in journalism, but before that, I dropped out of university, worked in a little pita place, a small restaurant—I have a strong background in restaurants and hospitality; as you can see, it shows up in the book. Then I got into journalism. Later on, I left it, job-hopped a lot, and ended up with a résumé so chaotic I usually have to cut more out than I leave in. When I got back into freelance writing, I just took the jobs where I could find them. I was never fussy about the topics.
To me, the topic itself didn’t matter—it’s more about the people I’m talking to. I could be writing about markets, the economy, or real estate, but I’d be talking to the most brilliant people. Even if the subject felt a little cold, the person at the center of the story made it compelling. I’ve always been more of a people person, so the character behind the work was more interesting to me than the work itself.
SIMONIN: That makes a lot of sense. Do you think that focus on people informs the fairness with which you provide your characters? Because your characters feel so human. Like I said, you don’t judge them.
DUNIC: Okay, fairness. Let’s put it this way. I’m not interested in judgment. I’m exhausted by it. If you’ve been online in the past 10 years, that’s all there is. At some point, it just becomes white noise. And eventually, morality itself starts to feel less interesting. That sounds weird to say, but honestly, if I wrote a book about good people doing good things all the time, it would be boring and unrealistic. That’s not a true story. People would get to page 40 and think, What’s going on? These characters don’t feel real. So morality? Less interesting. Judgment? Completely uninteresting to me. Judgment is a terrible cloud on your perception.
It’s reached the point where I have a physical revulsion to it. I struggle to be online. The second I log on and see people tearing each other apart, I close the screen. I just can’t—it’s not a world I can operate in. So when it comes to books, I’m simply writing the world as I experience it. I know other people experience it differently, and I respect that. But the readers who connect with my book? Those are my people. They see the same kind of reality that I do.
I wrote a book about a guy who works in a kitchen and plays the trumpet. That’s it. The only thing he wants—literally, the only thing he wants—is a moment, a granule of truth that says maybe we could be connected and belong to something greater than ourselves.
SIMONIN: That’s a gorgeous sentiment. Expanding on that, a lot of young writers feel pressure to make a statement. To say something profound. This book does make a statement, right? It has a perspective. And that’s what I love about—
DUNIC: Wait—when you say "statement," I hear concrete. I hear something unmoving and inanimate. That word feels like death to me. It scares me. You say your book is a statement, and I immediately want to run.
SIMONIN: Okay, okay—
DUNIC: Seriously, that word scares me. When you reach 42, if you have a healthy sense of humility, you should be afraid of the word "statement." What happens after you make a statement? You stop learning. You think, This is my statement. I’m done. Case closed. But the book is never closed. The book is never over.
SIMONIN: Young writers don’t want to be pinned down. For the people who believe in this craft, they want their big break, but the fantasy isn’t always the reality. I was looking at your website—your interviews, your background. And Cardinal—that’s where it started, right? You’ve said, quite legendarily, that you wrote it in four hours off a bet. Your husband told you, Go ahead, do it, and you did. You submitted it, won first place, and that’s how everything started.
But obviously, that’s not the whole story. It doesn’t just happen. At least, not in my mind. Maybe I’m wrong—maybe you’re just that awesome, and it did just happen. But take me into your life at that point—personally, professionally. What allowed you to write such a fantastic story so quickly?
DUNIC: Okay, I’m going to paraphrase another writer, but I forget who—it was Kevin [Andrew Heslop], I think? He quoted this to me once, and now I’m going to butcher it. So, yes, Cardinal was written in four hours. I spent one hour on it each morning from Monday to Thursday. Then, on Friday, I spent an hour editing and sent it off. That part is true—it was a dare. And I hadn’t been writing at all before that. The last time I had written anything was in high school, for a class.
So Kevin said to me: “I’m thinking of John Patrick Shanley here. He was asked, How long did it take you to write the play Doubt? And he said, in essence, There are two ways to respond to that question. One is, It took six weeks. Another is, It took 43 years.”
(Exact quote provided after interview)
Because I hadn’t been thinking about writing—I had been thinking about bills. Paying down my student debt. Saving for a down payment. For the first 35 years of my life, my priority was getting a roof over my head. That was it.
SIMONIN: That’s so fascinating.
DUNIC: Yeah, it was weird. Even after winning $5,000 and a free course at Humber, I didn’t jump in right away. Six months, eight months passed, and I hadn’t done anything. Someone in my life finally asked, Didn’t you get a free writing course? And I was like, oh yeah… I should probably take that. So I did. And I wrote more stories during the course. Then, that led to an agent. Then that led to the next thing. But I had very little internal motivation—it was like I needed external forces nudging me into action. I could go months, even years, without doing much writing. I don’t know. It was kind of weird.
SIMONIN: Yeah, you’re completely dismantling all the typical ideas of what a writer should be.
DUNIC: There are so many different types of writers with so many different backgrounds and experiences.
SIMONIN: Of course.
DUNIC: I’m happy to represent what I call an unconventional path.
SIMONIN: Absolutely. So what would you say to someone who’s on that unconventional path? Actually, no—because I feel like you’ve already answered it. You’ve completely dispelled all these rigid ideas of what a writer or artist has to be. You just did the thing. It reminds me of that quote when Jay Z was talking about his debut album, saying It took me 26 years to write, because it’s not about sitting down to write, it’s about living.
DUNIC: Right! Those 26 years weren’t spent writing. They weren’t even spent thinking about writing. Sorry, I’m quoting Jay-Z now, but for me, it wasn’t like, Oh, this is great content, let me take notes. I was just living. Just slugging it out like everyone else. Then one day, you catch a break. The clouds part, a little bit of sun breaks through, and suddenly you have the time, and it happens. For some people, it happens like that. Others are different. Some people, like Kern—who interviewed me at the event you attended—he knew since he was eight. Every interview he’s ever given, he says, I’ve wanted this since I was eight years old. That guy wakes up at 5 a.m., does the work, and shows up every day. That’s his path. But there are many types of writers. If someone is in their mid-30s, hasn’t tried anything yet, and thinks they can’t—why the hell not?
SIMONIN: Exactly. And I think there’s something to be said about the fact that you weren’t doing nothing that whole time. You were still living. That ties back to the book, too. Peter gets exactly what he wants in the end, but it’s because he takes action. He finds courage.
DUNIC: And who gave him that courage? Do you remember that weird little scene?
SIMONIN: The jar?
DUNIC: Yes! So, what’s with that jar? I think I called it a radical act of intimacy between strangers. It’s like, sometimes it feels daunting to ask someone for the time, right? Well, these days, we don’t need to ask anyone for the time because it’s all on our phones, but asking for directions or asking a stranger for something—there’s this impenetrable wall, and then you do it, it breaks open, and suddenly everything changes. It had to be something that could so easily have been missed. It had to be that small.
When we talk about Peter’s courage, he took it from that moment—from her courage. It was an ordinary exchange between two people, and it kind of symbolizes what he’s feeling throughout the book, which is that there’s something connecting all of us, even though we live our lives blind to it and occasionally despairing of it. It can be as simple as this random, radical act between two strangers. It was like when he lost his trumpet, and the old man found it and was playing it in the park. Peter wanted to give him the trumpet. He already had his other one, but he didn’t give this one to the old man. He was too embarrassed to offer it to a stranger, afraid to see how he’d react to such a big gift. That kind of intimacy between strangers—he was afraid of it.
And then, years later, a woman just needs help opening a jar. She’s in the street in her slippers—it seems ridiculous, right? From the outside, it’s just a silly request. But somehow, that gave him the courage to show up at the restaurant. I think that’s going to change his life. It’s perfect for him. A real full-circle moment.
SIMONIN: So, you have a collection of short stories coming out this year. Is there any anxiety coming off the success of The Clarion, or do you feel liberated because you’ve done it before? How does that feel?
DUNIC: There’s always anxiety, yeah. Well, it’s hard to say always because I’ve only done one, and my second one’s coming up. But yeah, there’s definitely anxiety. I’d say, of all the pieces, the reception of the book is actually the smaller concern. Obviously, you want people to like it, and if a lot of people say it’s terrible, you’ll feel bad—that’s the smaller concern. But the bigger concerns are the work—the events, the social media, the public speaking, reaching out to people, asking them to buy the book, showing up and introducing yourself. That’s 80 to 90 per cent of my anxiety. If we were in a different era—like, back in the 1900s, when you’d just send the book off, everyone else did the work, and you just sat there working on something else—my anxiety would be much lower. But still, if people don’t like it, yeah, of course, I’d be disappointed. There’s a bit of heartbreak there.
SIMONIN: What specifically about the promo and press makes you anxious?
DUNIC: I’m just scared of it. Some people are, and that’s just who I am. I’m not going to blame it on my childhood or anything—that’s just my DNA. But one-on-one, I’m comfortable. I love chatting with you, even if we’re in a public place like getting coffee or something. But if it’s like, five people looking at me, if I’m the center of attention, it’s excruciating. If it’s 30, 40, 50 people in a room, it gets even worse. There’s just normal fear there—fear of public speaking, stage fright, all that stuff. It’s very normal.
SIMONIN: That’s going to happen. I’ll say, as someone who was in the room watching you on stage, it looked natural. You didn’t—
DUNIC: I focused on Kern, and luckily, he was really engaged, so I could just respond to him. Yeah, Kern saved me because he really pulled his weight.
SIMONIN: Is there anything you’ve been waiting to say this whole time? Anything that no one’s acknowledged yet that you’ve been waiting to talk about?
DUNIC: Oh, first of all, there’s a lot. I’ve hidden a lot of Easter eggs throughout the book—small secret details that come up. And you sit there waiting for someone to pick up on them. That hasn’t happened as much as I would have liked it to, but when it does happen, it floors you. I had one woman, just a few weeks ago, someone I volunteer with, who loved the book. She’s one of those kindred spirits, right? She came into a shift and said, You know that one part where…—and she named something really small that no one else had ever noticed. Then, she mentioned two other things that no one had ever said, including something I never talk about in interviews. I’m not going to mention it here, I’m keeping it a big secret. But within 10 minutes, she said three things about the book that I’ve been waiting a year and a half for someone to notice. I was so overwhelmed and shy; I was like, Yeah, that’s really great, and then I made an excuse to scamper off and do something else because I was overwhelmed. I went home, had a glass of wine and a cigarette, just sitting there thinking, What just happened? And I thought that would happen a lot more often. I thought I’d be feeling that way every week or month, but instead, people just mention the book's theme of loneliness, and that’s it. And it just moves on from there.
SIMONIN: That’s so fantastic. Hopefully, you get to the point where people are making video essays about it, dissecting all that stuff. That would be amazing.
DUNIC: My husband is a gamer, so he watches a lot of gaming YouTube channels, and he just started making his own. In that community, they'll talk for hours, picking out nuances and details. I thought, Okay, someone finally gave that attention to this book. I had put all these little secrets in there, and someone noticed them. That was apparently what I wanted the whole time.
SIMONIN: Of course, that's the magic. That's like the imaginary interview you do before the actual one, right? Preparing your answer.
DUNIC: Yeah, exactly.
SIMONIN: Okay, so to end off, I have to hit you with the cliche last question: What is one piece of advice you'd like to give to the readers of Arrival Magazine, to the young writers out there in Canada?
DUNIC: Yeah, I would say... I think you've already touched on it in some of your questions, even when you quoted Jay-Z and you were just like, Just live. I will always say something along those lines. That being a writer—the identity—I say dispose of it. The writing, the technical craft, the practice, the workshopping—all that stuff—I would say, put that in second, third, or fourth place. If you have the opportunity to leave the laptop, to leave the room, always take it. Always be outside, always be with people. If you have the chance to shut down your intellect and experience things on an emotional and intellectual level, always do that.
However, this is advice for my type of writing. There are many different types of writing, but you'll notice I wrote a very emotional, intimate book. So obviously, get your advice from that type of author; this is for me.
Don't rush. I get nervous sometimes with young people—the goals they have and the reality of the world as it is. I’m nervous that they’ll get discouraged early on, abandon their dreams, and just disappear. That bothers me. Be willing to take a year-long break, a five-year break, a 10-year break—is that a big deal? No, I’m 42, and you’re chatting with me today. It’s cool. I just want everyone to relax, live first, and let the writing follow.
One last thing to add. Drop out of school, get your heart broken, get divorced, have your dog die in your arms. Just literally do everything first, and then write later. Don’t rush. And if you have early successes, I absolutely love it, because you’ll probably get further in the long run. But if you don’t, oh my God, just forget about it. You know what I mean?
SIMONIN: Absolutely.
“Drop out of school, get your heart broken, get divorced, have your dog die in your arms. Just literally do everything first, and then write later. Don’t rush.”