CURRENT ISSUE

Queerness & Masculinity:
L'Amour Lisik interviews Brett Nelson

The pressure to conform hangs like a fog in “Man Camp” as Noah tries to fit in with his presumably straight coworkers at his new job. While talking with them, he’s aware of “adjusting his voice slightly” and then later, on the phone with his ex, describing his room as “giving, like, millennial-grey, psych-ward realness.” A real uneasiness permeates every interaction. How did you balance this tension in the setting, dialogue, and characters?

I think the tension in the story comes from the discomfort that can exist in small interactions. Whether it’s between characters, or between characters and the setting, or just between a character’s expectations and their reality. I wanted everything to feel a little bit unsettling for the reader, the way I imagined Noah would feel arriving at the camp. While I was writing the story, I kept going back to how it feels, physically, to be queer in a space that feels unwelcoming. Whether that unwelcomeness is intentional or not.

Duality recurs throughout “Man Camp,” from Noah’s previous job at a gay bar in Vancouver to heavy machinery work in an unnamed remote area in Alberta. Meanwhile, it feels like he must choose between financial and romantic freedom, never able to have both. What drew you to this theme of juxtaposition? Can you talk more about the other themes of safety and assimilation, queerness and masculinity?

I come from a smaller industrial town and live in Vancouver, so I spend a lot of time thinking about the tensions that can exist within people and places. To me, the themes of safety and assimilation come from the gap between your perception of your identity and others’ perceptions of it, and in which direction that gap is closed.

I think queerness and masculinity both reflect the ways in which people feel pressured to conform and assimilate, as you noted earlier. I’m always kind of interested in exploring what kinds of queerness are “allowed” to exist in masculine spaces, and vice versa.

When I read your story, I was reminded of Kate Beaton’s graphic memoir Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands and the world of exhaustion, loneliness, and harassment that she portrayed. What first inspired you to set a story in a “man camp”?

Everyone recommends that book to me. I’ve been meaning to read it for a long time.

I think a lot about workplaces as sites for social interaction. The mill in my hometown closed when I was a kid, taking away not just one of the major job opportunities in the area but also the place where many people my parents’ age and older built their social lives. Because of that, a lot of guys I grew up with went to work in the oil sands instead, flying in and out to spend weeks at a time away from their community. I was interested in exploring how the isolation, loneliness, and distinct social culture of a “man camp” might feel to an outsider.

“Man Camp” layers stories within stories—Noah’s past relationship with Raine, how he got the job. Can you explain your writing process for short stories? Do you have any particular techniques you like to use?

With most of my writing, I usually begin with a moment—an image or thought or even a line of dialogue that I think is interesting. I’m usually either writing away from that moment or towards it. For this story, the opening image is the moment that preceded the story. The rest of it came out of exploring the question of who the character in that image was. From there, I started digging into the tensions and juxtapositions we’ve discussed.

As for specific techniques, I usually create a loose outline of what I think are the important parts of a story, either before I start writing or after I have a rough draft. This tends to be more detailed for longer pieces, and more open-ended for shorter ones.

What are you working on and/or reading right now?

I recently finished up an (ugly) first draft of a novel, and I’m letting that rest for a bit while I plug away at some short pieces again.

For reading, I recently finished Teenager by Bud Smith, and am just now reading his memoir, Work. I’m also looking forward to digging into John Vaillant’s Fire Weather, and I’m hoping to finish Hamnet before I go see the film. It also sounds like I need to move Ducks even further up my to-read list.

Thank you for the thoughtful questions!

 

 

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