Build a Fortress: Irena Datcu-Romano interviews Shane Neilson

Shane Neilson

Creative Nonfiction Editorial Board intern Irena Datcu-Romano talks with Shane Neilson, cnf judge for our 2026 Open Season Awards (accepting entries now, with an Early Bird discount until September 30). They discuss pursuing parallel careers, reading as first love, and bending the prose line toward the poetic line.
[photo credit: Zee]

 

Shane Neilson is a poet and physician from New Brunswick who has a particular focus on literary representations of region, madness, and neurodiversity. His prose has appeared in The Walrus, Maisonneuve, The Malahat Review, swamp pink, and Best Canadian Essays. He won Arc's Critic's Desk Award, for which he has also served as judge. In 2025 he has published What to Feel, How to Feel (Palimpsest Press), a text about what Neilson neologizes as “neurofatherhood.”


Has working as a physician informed how you read and write?

Not how I read poetry or prose, no. Reading came first, of course, and any pretense of systematicity and rigour appeared long before medical school. I’m very glad for this. If medicine infected my first love (reading), then my writing would be doomed. As for writing: of course. My daily work is medicine. I bring forward my knowledge of medical history, the vocabulary and epistemology of biomedicine, and, through the field of mad studies, the voices of lived experience as well as my own medically-informed ill voice. I aspire to make a poetry of the body as factualized by medicine, a resistance and celebration of that fact-making enterprise.

Any advice for writers pursuing parallel careers?

Yes. This is one of the most common reasons I’m approached at readings and workshops. The full answer is too long, there’s too much practical advice to give, but ultimately I land on this serious joke: I tell the asker to build for themselves a fortress. A small fortress. A half-day in the middle of the week, not on Monday or Friday. From there, be absolutely merciless about your time. Let everyone in your life know that they cannot intrude. Be as merciless with yourself as you are with others. Don’t let anything intrude. Shut off the phone. I have a sick child, I say. I’m there for them almost all the time. I still have to shut off my phone. The world doesn’t want you or need you, really. But you need and want this time. With it, you are being true to yourself. You are being serious. You are respecting the words that may come. If anything threatens the fortress, then overreact. Behave like you’re five years old, with a wooden sword. Rush out of your fortress and brandish it at the interloper such that they’ll never bother you again. I actually tell them: wave your arm like you are brandishing that wooden sword. If you get good at this, the half-day will expand to a full day. Etc. Until you’re satisfied. But start here.

Much of your scholarly work emphasizes the aesthetic and political dimensions of medicine. In your experience, has medicine been open to poetic or humanities-based approaches? What advice would you give to others bringing the humanities into their fields?

Another big question. I’ll have to point people to Poetry in the Clinic (Routledge, 2022), Carelanding: Canadian Literature and Medicine (Routledge, 2023) and The Routledge Handbook of Poetry in Medicine (Routledge, 2024) for clues. The skinny, though, is: poetry is everywhere, in everything. But of course it is.

Which writers inspire or encourage you?

To begin with New Brunswick: Nowlan is my Whitman and Lane is my Dickinson. But also, Whitman and Dickinson. Lowell, because classical, wild, and Catholic. Plath because of the dangerous energy and incalculable beauty of her lines. Larkin, for the morbid attitude and beautiful pith. Williams because the good doctor knew you had to be particular, you had to really look and notice to see, and also because he’d argue in his verse. Rukeyser because of The Book of the Dead (“These roads will take you into your own country. . .”). George Elliott Clarke for the sheer verbal exuberance that never traipses into excess, and because he (in my opinion) wrote the first great book of poems that conjured a Maritime community on purpose. I’ve restricted myself to poets who write in English, mind.

What advice would you give your younger self, as a writer or student?

For younger myself: There, there, it will be okay.

For younger myself, the writer: Enjoy the reading more.

For younger myself, the student: The practice of medicine will be something you love, eventually. You just have to get through their hatred of difference, and when you’re on your own, you’ll be fine.

What do you look for in a winning entry?

I want the prose line to bend toward the poetic line until it almost breaks. Which is to say: be lyrical, but not lyric.

 

Irena Datcu-Romano

Irena Datcu-Romano