Author spotlight: Peter Counter

Dea Toivonen, Outreach & Social Coordinator: Your nonfiction integrates a lot of personal anecdote and detail from your own experience, and you weave this together with a lot of cultural artifacts—descriptions of various media and textual or digital encounters. The connections often feel very organic and sometimes feel surprising. Do you tend to know where you are going when you are writing? Or is your process more emergent and spontaneous?

Peter Counter: I start with outlines, and I stay open to discovery, surprise, and play when researching and writing. Both of my books started with detailed outlines of every chapter and essay (plus a few essays that were cut from each book). These included working titles, summaries, and three-to-five supporting ideas from personal experience, pop culture, or science and philosophy. Then, during the drafting process, I allowed myself to deviate from those outlines. After a draft, I would re-outline the essay and then re-draft it based on that new outline. And over and over. It’s a very iterative process of outlining, writing, re-outlining, rewriting, and on and on until I’m confident that I have communicated the idea or emotion that I intended to.

I’m very obsessed with two aspects of writing: I want to communicate complicated emotional ideas to readers, and I want everyone involved to be entertained. The complexity of the ideas require that I frequently look at the big picture and how sections and chapters speak to each other. The entertainment part demands that I have fun when I’m writing. I’m a strong believer that writing can contain the essence of the moment it was written, so if I allow myself to make discoveries and play around while composing, readers will hopefully feel that when they read my words.

What do you think is the role of the critic, and what of the expectation that role often carries to be objective? Do you think of your writing as cultural criticism or as some adjacent genre?

I think of my writing as cultural criticism, which is a tradition that I’m proud to be a part of. My gateway to nonfiction writing when I was a teen was music criticism, and since my twenties, I’ve identified as a culture critic first when it comes to writing.

My definition of criticism—the shared application of critical thinking, context, and analysis to art and culture—might seem counterintuitive. The popular conception of the critic has been corrupted by consumer review culture, which collapses everything into binary “buy” or “don’t buy” categories. But that kind of objective pronouncement always makes me catty. Cultural objects provide anchor points for us to gather around and share subjective viewpoints. After all, art is activated by the personal experience an audience member brings to their viewing. Done well, criticism deepens the experience for the reader, spurring their own self-refection and engagement with culture. And I think that’s essential for a healthy arts ecosystem.

Although you’re writing nonfiction, what you do sometimes seems to bend genres within the form—weaving criticism, personal essay, and memoir. What do you think about these distinctions and classifications, and how do you see yourself fitting into them (or not)?

I’m very flattered when people call my work genre-bending. So: thank you! In the moment of writing, I don’t think much about genre. My focus is on trying to communicate an idea or emotion, and the genre switching comes out naturally. If a point I’m trying to make is best illustrated through a memory, then I write memoir. If an idea I’m trying to communicate is best illustrated through criticism, I write criticism. And if that idea is best explored through speculation, I use fiction—which, in my nonfiction, is accessed through the hypothetical, like the karate tournament with time-travelling Jeb Bush I describe in the essay “Gotta Do It (Kill Baby Hitler)” in How to Restore a Timeline.

The effect I’m aiming for is a heightened conversation with the reader. The best conversations are deep and personal and flip between all sorts of communication modes without apology. When we talk, we don’t constrict ourselves to genre conventions. We just engage and communicate by the easiest means.

How to Restore a Timeline seems like it would have been both difficult and cathartic to write. The title suggests the healing power of writing and criticism to dive into the past and make sense of its happenings. Do you feel like writing this book was a healing process or that through writing it you were able to reckon with something you needed to?

Like many writers, I don’t really understand something until I’ve written about it. And while I’ve lived with PTSD for half of my life, there are some aspects I never gave myself the time to explore until this book. I feel like, with How to Restore a Timeline, I have finally been able to communicate how it feels to be sick with an event. In that way, I know myself better, which is cathartic.

I don’t really believe in healing from trauma, and I think that causes some folks discomfort. With this book, I try to propose a path through post-trauma that honours survivors’ experiences, in which community and family and humility can make our violent world more compassionate. The last thing I wanted to do was alienate a fellow traumatized person by placing an ethical imperative to return to pre-traumatic normalcy. There’s nothing wrong with honouring the negative experiences of the past and acknowledging their echoes. I actually think that’s beautiful. I’m still afflicted by my trauma in severe ways, but the love and understanding I have found in my community has made that less of a dangerous prospect.

While your work has often maintained a ‘memoirish’ tone, How to Restore a Timeline seems like it was particularly vulnerable to write. What was the most difficult part of the process of writing this book?

I have a rule about my own personal writing: if it’s not vulnerable, it’s probably not very authentic. The most difficult part of writing How to Restore a Timeline was coming to terms with the parts I couldn’t include—because, while they might have met my vulnerability requirements, I couldn’t quite find a way to express their core ideas in a compelling way. That level of editing is really painful. But I’ve been writing long enough to know that some ideas just need more time to develop or a different framework in which to thrive. This book is better without the cut chapters, and those ideas will find a way into the world eventually.

Your chapters in this book are often quite short, feeling like flashes of memory or fragments coming back to you. Was this an intentional choice or just the shape the writing took?

This was an intentional choice, but—and how convenient is this—I naturally seem to write essays between 1200 and 4000 words. The idea was always to have a non-linear memoir composed of flashes, and when it came to writing it, that was the easiest part. Which I suppose makes sense. Memoir is an invitation to see how an author thinks. I think in short essays about watching TV and listening to music.

What is your daily writing practice and process?

When I’m in the drafting phase of a book, I have a pretty routine daily writing practice. I wake up early and write, edit, or rewrite as much as I can before I start work. In order to facilitate this, I write in batches of four essays or chapters at a time. This way, if I wake up and don’t feel excited about one topic, I can just pick whatever seems the most fun that morning.

Outside of the drafting phase, things are a little more nebulous. My practice is still daily, but it’s not just typing or scribbling. Sometimes it’s reading, sometimes it’s research, sometimes it’s outlining or composing a pitch. This is all under the umbrella of writing for me, but because it rarely results in being able to look back at a word count, it can be fraught with self-doubt and anxiety. The most crucial moments for me as a writer are moments of self-forgiveness, when I’m feeling guilty about prioritizing these less tangible but crucial aspects of writing.

Having lived in bigger cities, do you find moving to Nova Scotia has shaped your writing practice? How do you find the writing community here?

Moving to Nova Scotia in 2016 was very positive. Earlier that year, I’d been rejected from a creative writing MFA program I was excited about, and I decided I was just going to write a manuscript anyway, out of spite. My partner was accepted to NSCAD that September, and when we moved, I had access to this city’s rich interdisciplinary artistic community. That—plus the time and space and affordability that Halifax offered at the time—was indispensable. I wrote that manuscript in like three months! I definitely credit moving here as a major catalyst for my maturing as an author.

Obviously, the Halifax of 2016 is long gone. The affordability crisis has squeezed out many important arts community members. It also means that the freedom from the hustle that I found in 2016 is no longer a reality for anyone who has to work for a living. It’s not easy to live here. And when it’s not easy to live, it’s not easy to create. That said, the community that remains here is excellent and welcoming and supportive. Nova Scotia is full of creative people—not just writers. And the culture they have fostered is one of collaboration and cooperation rather than competition.

Who are some writers that influence and inform your work? Who are you reading now?

My main influences as an author are Chuck Klosterman, Carmen Maria Machado, Alicia Elliott, and George Orwell. And because I am self-conscious about not having formal creative writing education, I am constantly reading and rereading books on craft. My favourite of these is Writing Tools by Roy Peter Clark, which I revisit probably once every two years.

Right now I’m reading Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland, Kaoru Takamura’s Lady Joker, and The Divine Comedy. For nonfiction, I’m reading Alexandra West’s horror essay collection Gore-Geous.

Are you working on anything at the moment?

Yes, right now I am finishing the outline phase on two books. One is a nonfiction book about Hell and technology. The other is a Catholic horror novel about rock music and nostalgia. Hopefully I’ll have more to share about these soon.