Subscribe now

“And so, we see that, in Proust,” Martin said, concluding his lecture and checking his laptop for the time, dreading the rush-hour commute already—two stops following the descent down the concrete, then the Via Rail back to Guelph: “What we call desire is the mind and body’s reckoning with the fact of our inability to ever fully know another person. Swann’s suffering is brought on by the limitations imposed upon his perceptions: he conjures Odette only from fragments, and he suffers for this kind of love; it is the parts of her life that are absent that make it impossible to imagine a life and a future without her.”

Martin was thirty-four, which felt to him like being too young to feel completely settled in his course of life, but also too old to admit that he wasn’t, not in the slightest. He had been married to Helen for almost five years by then. Five years, he realized, as if for the first time. Half a decade. He mourned those lost, perfect days of their earliest years together. The conversation was good, the sex was still amazing, but though he knew she had loved him faithfully ever since, he had wondered about his love for Helen for some time. He’d doubted the marriage early—within the first year—as soon as he’d realized that hurting her would be far more painful than losing her, even if it meant being free of her burden; and so, he had learned to call his mistake “love.”

Reminding the students of the next week’s reading and essay topic, he wrote upon the board, in bold caps:

THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF POSSESSION SUSTAINS DESIRE.

When he turned back to the rows of students, he saw that Clara—his T.A. for the French Literature survey—was writing something on the printout of the passage his slides were currently projecting. She was twenty-six—a freshman PhD student—whom he’d had no doubts since meeting would undoubtedly go on to do great things, recently returned to university after several years of work in publishing. He remembered from their introductory conversation, too, that she’d completed her Master’s in Paris, at the Sorbonne, submitting her first graduate thesis on Flaubert.

He’d made a move on her, it was true, when he’d invited her out to Einstein’s for a drink, writing, in his email, that it could be “an opportunity to discuss the syllabus and general flow of the course, besides the general T.A. workload.” She had the nervous, girlish kind of attention that seemed to invite at least some light flirtation.

He found himself entirely wrapped round, by turns, that evening in details like the dark strand of hair that escaped hold of her ear, and slipped down her cheek until she gently returned it back into place; then the pale insides of her wrists where her sleeves slipped back. He was saying something—right in the middle of speaking—he could not remember what—even if he knew, even in the act of speaking it, that it was something he was likely to regret—when she’d first interrupted him, veering him off course, and eventually naming her boyfriend. To Clara’s credit, she never spoke of the incident again.

With the late-afternoon class finally drawn to a close and the students filing out, he looked back at Helen’s message and typed that he’d be leaving momentarily. No faculty meeting; no need to stay and plan, mark, or write reports to the department head from his office. He’d be home in time for dinner, he said, aware that the smile and heart emojis he’d punctuated the messages with meant nothing.

Of all the students, Clara stood least, and as she rose and turned, bending over to unplug her computer, his eyes fell once more on the dark ribbon of hair that fell to her cheek, the pale insides of her wrists, the easy smile and tender wave as she left.

Sighing, smoothing out the sheets, he put his notes back in his briefcase, then he looked toward the door.

—“And, so we see that, in Proust . . . ”

The words hurt when they arose in memory now.

And so, having understood nothing he had not already known, he went home, where he would continue to call what awaited him there “love.”

Leave a comment

Null Point

Fiction, poetry, author interviews, and personal essays by Brock Eldon

By Brock Eldon

The Commonplace Book

Essays on Books, Film, and Culture.

By Brock Eldon

Read more

Subscribe now

Gravity

You send a thought.
I receive its shadow.

I think your thought.

Two distant stars
discovering they were forged
in the same burst of creation.

When we meet,
gravity.

When we part,

you dream my dream
from very far away.

Null Point

Fiction, poetry, author interviews, and personal essays by Brock Eldon

By Brock Eldon

The Commonplace Book

Essays on Books, Film, and Culture.

By Brock Eldon

Read more

Read more

Read more

Share

Persona Non Propria

Pseudonymous contemporary fiction. Bildungsromans, romance, humor and local color. Essays on themes relating to the fiction.

By Clancy Steadwell

’s The Big T is now available for purchase here.

Introduction: Why Clancy Steadwell Matters

Clancy Steadwell writes determined to prove that sincerity isn’t dead. His debut novel, The Big T, appeared not through a major press but serially on Substack, under the deliberately impersonal pseudonym Persona Non Propria—“in one’s improper person.” For me, Steadwell’s pseudonumity is above all a refusal of the personality cults that govern literary marketing and an insistence that the work speak for itself first. One must first read Clancy Steadwell to gain access to his identity.

Across the interview that follows, Steadwell talks about anonymity not as a kind of self-protection—an attempt to preserve humility, and to keep the writing clear of ego. He also traces his novel’s shape—how friendship becomes a moral apprenticeship, how class functions, and how millennial culture still seeps through dead malls, coasters, and the present state of American Rust Belt towns.

What his intelligence ultimately leaves us is a quiet, consequential novel that shows us how friendship can be both a kind of burden, and a form of love.

An Interview with Clancy Steadwell

NULL POINT: You chose to publish The Big T on Substack rather than through a traditional press, and you’ve done it under the pseudonym Persona Non Propria. Why that route, and what did anonymity allow you to do—or protect you from—that publishing under your own name might not?

CLANCY STEADWELL: It’s kind of you to think I could get published in a traditional press. I don’t think it’d quite be possible for me, mostly because I won’t deviate from publishing under the Clancy Steadwell moniker. I won’t ever acquiesce to the traditional personal branding needed to be cogent in that realm. If a publisher would allow me to be my Clancy Steadwell self and maintain what I have going on Substack, then maybe I’d entertain it.

Because “Clancy Steadwell” isn’t really a shield for my writing—it’s a shield for me, to protect my privacy and to protect myself from an inflated ego (not always successful). There’s nothing in any of my writing—including this book—so egregiously similar to or plucked from real life that I would be worried about it. The closest The Big T comes to reality is I had a friend who passed away, along with some minor characteristics and details shared by me and Jude. That’s it.

Real life isn’t interesting, or at least mine isn’t. My writing is, at the presentational level, divorced from me the author, and I like to keep it that way.

NULL POINT: One of the novel’s defining choices is how little of Tommy’s inner life we ever see. We only get him filtered through Jude’s account. Was that opacity deliberate from the beginning, and how do you think it affects readers’ empathy for him?

CLANCY STEADWELL: The “opacity” was one of my main choices for the novel. I wanted it to read as a sort of recounting of the legend of this kid who was larger than life, who was this foolish romantic. I was inspired by the lenses we get vis-à-vis Sal Paradise / Dean Moriarty and Nick Carraway / Jay Gatsby—the “comet and the scribe” relationship, as you put it.

I think it makes Tommy more of a mirage and more of a myth than an actual person, which I don’t think is a bad thing—it’s what I was going for. I didn’t really imagine readers empathizing with Tommy; I was more interested in them working out the reasons for his demise through Jude’s reporting. He can either be empathized with or pitied, depending on what you read from Jude. Tommy’s story from his own perspective would be biased. I think Jude’s telling—while incomplete—gives us Tommy’s story in a more interesting, roundabout way than any directness Tommy’s own perspective would afford.

NULL POINT: The book reads in vivid, almost self-contained episodes—skiing disasters, county-fair games, fireworks on the lake. It can feel serial in the Dickensian sense, even though it wasn’t released that way. Was this a conscious structural decision, and do you think the Substack format encourages that short-story rhythm?

CLANCY STEADWELL: It was 100 percent a conscious structural decision—and also one of my biggest regrets. I was nervous about writing and releasing a novel myself and thought, well, people love my short stories, so if I just make this thing a string of short stories, it’ll work out.

So I tried to create through-lines from story to story, but did some heavy unintentional recapping that I think was mostly unnecessary. It also left some fat in sections that either needed to be cut or replaced with a more momentous scene.

Vanya was nice enough to point out that because the novel covers a vast swath of time, it more or less had to be structured episodically, and I agree. I just wish I had paid a bit more attention to it or worked with someone to assemble the pieces differently.

NULL POINT: Jude and Tommy’s relationship feels like a study in how boys teach each other ethics—through shame, dares, and forgiveness more than through lessons or speeches. Did you set out to write a friendship novel, or did that focus emerge naturally as you followed them?

CLANCY STEADWELL: I definitely set out to write a friendship novel, more than anything. The initial conception was to establish a view of an extraordinary character from the perspective of a more ordinary boy, and between the two, the lessons exchanged and how they influenced each other into manhood—how one burned out by living through a set of pie-in-the-sky ideas.

There are very few chapters where Tommy is not the focus, and the ones where he isn’t, Emma Lightfoote is—and it becomes sort of a romance between her and Jude. That aspect of the novel did emerge naturally, and even though I didn’t set out to have a romance at all, it felt good when it emerged.

One of the main themes of the book is the problem of platonic male friendship and how estranged Tommy and Jude can feel from each other sometimes, despite their closeness. There’s a lack of communication between them, especially regarding Tommy’s troubles, that leaves them frustratingly distant. Their relationship, I think, is typical of what affects young men from their generation. One defining feature of their friendship is engaging in solitary activities as a pair—playing video games, running, reading—rather than active collaboration. Competition between them, both outward and unspoken, is another definer of such male friendships, explored intentionally throughout the novel.

NULL POINT: Class quietly inflects everything—skiing and lake houses, “victimless” thefts, the grocery inheritance. What interested you in making class a background hum rather than the loudest theme?

CLANCY STEADWELL: Any book about America (and I rather grandiosely think this is a book about America, however myopic its lens) will have class as at least a “background hum.”

But I didn’t want it in the foreground. I didn’t want Jude to preach or to have his interiority convey too much of whatever my internal philosophies. It’s not a philosophical novel—it’s a simple story about a boy relayed from another boy. What you get regarding class will differ from reader to reader.

To me, what the story says about class is this: when you’re blessed with privilege, if you’re not grateful for it, if you don’t utilize it fully or appropriately in the pursuit of helping others or gaining self-knowledge, then you risk an all-consuming unhappiness and guilt which can’t be sated by the pursuit of more money or greater class.

Because the Goodspeeds don’t understand or utilize their position as they should, nor allow or encourage Tommy to in his own right, there’s this karmic retribution against them in the form of what they perceive as bad luck; which of course, some of it is simply bad luck—but you also make your own luck.

Class is in the background, but to me it comes to the fore in any sort of real analysis of the novel.

NULL POINT: Jude often insists he “really saw” what happened, even when others deny it—the thumb-sucking fiasco, the lightning strike. How much do you trust him as a narrator? Did you ever think about letting readers see outside his memory, or was the single perspective essential to the story?

CLANCY STEADWELL: I don’t trust Jude as a narrator in the story of their friendship—at all. Certainly not any more than I’d trust myself, which is 0 percent. His retelling their friendship is rose-tinted in a way that absolves him of as much blame as possible. He’s made out to be this great guy—but is he really? I don’t think so, though he’s not evil. He was a kid doing the best he could.

He feels guilty about liking Emma, about not helping Tommy more, about abandoning him, at times, to save himself. He was inattentive, absorbed in his own life when Tommy needed shepherding.

His perspective was crucial to the story, so I never planned to write it outside that—in third person or whatever. I guess I could have written it from Tommy’s perspective as well and alternated chapters…but maybe Tommy’s chapters would be short poems? I think that’s how Tommy would have conveyed his side of the story, or at least his interior perspective.

One thing I thought about was maybe having that be bonus content for the novel posted online. But I’m just not great at writing poetry. Hey, maybe Tommy isn’t either though.

NULL POINT: Blockbuster rentals, Age of Empires II, dead malls, Auntie Anne’s pretzels—the details are exact but lightly worn, never just nostalgia. How did you decide which cultural markers to include, and what do you think they reveal about growing up Millennial in a declining town?

CLANCY STEADWELL: I included the references from the context of my own life, and they probably reveal a lot about me as a person. On their own, though, these nostalgic details don’t reveal much about growing up—other than, of course, rampant American consumerism through any decade.

The setting they create along with Veddersburgh does reveal a lot, though, about how growing up has changed for young people in towns like it: new distractions, new ambitions, new locales. The setting is crucial to the novel’s existence. Without it, its tropes and clichés are baked a bit stale, but what made it worth writing (for me) was the backdrop of its time period and how the zeitgeist or the culture of the time affected the characters in both real and superficial ways—guided their decisions, and inverted those tropes within their particular temporality.

The time in which this novel takes place is inextricable from its content, for me. I think if you told the rough outline of this story about two boys in the 1970s, it’d be pretty trite. But this era is worth investigating because it has only just recently crossed the threshold of national temporal consciousness into the realm of, as you say, nostalgia.

NULL POINT: You’ve written The Big T under this pseudonym as a kind of first statement. Where do you want to take Persona Non Propria next? Do you see it as a single-project alias, or the start of a longer body of anonymous work?

CLANCY STEADWELL: Ideally, I will only ever publish under “Clancy Steadwell,” for the reasons I’ve mentioned. It’s going to be a big body of anonymous work. I’ve already got another “finished” novel I hope to rewrite early next year and a novella I’m working on now—not to mention the occasional short story. I’ve even decided to write essays lately.

The Persona Non Propria thing is probably not a phase. It’s me, and it’s going to keep going. If I’m not putting out writing as Clancy Steadwell, it means I’m not putting out writing at all.

Hope you stick around for the ride.

Get more from Brock Eldon in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Support Clancy Steadwell and his work by purchasing a copy of The Big T, now available here.

Null Point

Fiction, poetry, author interviews, and personal essays by Brock Eldon

By Brock Eldon

The Commonplace Book

Where I explore inspirations for my Fiction, sharing reflections on Books, Film, and Culture.

By Brock Eldon

Subscribe now

I. Frosted Foundations

“For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.” — Hosea 8:7

The frost was older than the morning.
It glazed the ditch-grass, stiffened the blacktop,
a film thin as glass over stone and bone.

Barns slouched into themselves,
timbers split by winters without forgiveness.
A tractor rusted red to black,
its gears stiff with silence,
a carcass beneath the snowdrift.

The first cracks came not in parliaments
but in the marrow of soil—
the seed that would not rise,
the field tilled for ghosts.

The land remembers.
It keeps the tally.

And when the wind moved through the farmhouse siding,
its hymn was not for us.
It was for the earth alone,
that old dominion already turning away.

II. Mudtown Hymns

“Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness.” — Judges 14:14

The mill windows are punched out,
glass teeth glittering in the mud below.

Graffiti climbs the brick like ivy,
but even the paint flakes,
peeling in sheets under rain.

Children once dragged sleds here,
their shouts echoing down smoke-stung streets.

Now liquor bottles shimmer in the gutter,
labels washed pale,
a hymn written in broken glass.

Oil stains the earth.
Beer stains the breath.
An old cough rattles in the rafters.

This is the gospel of rust and rain—
Mudtown’s psalms sung to an empty sky.

III. Capitals in Glass

“Woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees, and that write grievousness which they have prescribed.” — Isaiah 10:1

The seat of power is a mausoleum of paper.
Memos tower higher than spires,
reams pressed from dead forests,
ink drying into dust.

The city beside the inland sea
wears a crown of glass
too heavy for its neck.

Condominiums choke the shoreline,
mirrored cliffs with no curtains drawn.

Men in suits pray to the market,
eyes lit blue by screens.

The city of endless rain
polishes its towers each morning,
yet the alleys reek of fentanyl.
Bright tents bloom on asphalt—
flowers of the forsaken.

The northern capital
shivers beneath ceaseless snow,
its rulers mumbling in acronyms.

Every word another icicle:
sharp, hollow, already melting.

IV. The North Unmoored

“The earth mourneth and fadeth away, the world languisheth and fadeth away, the haughty people of the earth do languish.” — Isaiah 24:4

The ice has stopped speaking.
Once it cracked like thunder,
split with the weight of stars.

Now it melts without sound,
ashamed of its vanishing.

Caribou scatter as though chased by fire.
Polar bears wander into ghost towns,
their ribs like fences.

Sled dogs howl,
but no one answers.

Permafrost exhales bone,
ivory tusks and skulls
pushed back into daylight.

The dead rise
to show us what it means
to lose the ground beneath.

Still the ships come north,
steel hulls cleaving silence,
foreign flags proud in new bays.

They anchor where frost once ruled.
The compass spins.
Maps dissolve into white.

The sky’s green fire ascends,
not in beauty but in judgment.

The North withdraws its covenant.
We are left southward,
faithless, estranged.

V. The Children’s Exodus

“They wandered in the wilderness in a solitary way; they found no city to dwell in.” — Psalm 107:4

Airports glow at midnight,
faces lit by departure screens.

Students drag suitcases east,
west, anywhere but here.

They say they’ll return.
They will not.

Playgrounds sink in weeds.
Swings creak without riders.
Chalk fades from pavement.

Only echoes remain,
and houses forget their laughter.

In dormitories, whispers spread:
another attempt,
another body carried out.

Posters smile from walls,
but inside, silence blooms thicker
than any prayer.

This is the inheritance—
a homeland too heavy to carry.

Buses pull away,
taillights dissolving into rain.

The children are gone.
The silence grows.

VI. The Borderline Burning

“Nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.” — Matthew 24:7

Border posts glow like furnaces,
red lights smoldering on the horizon.

Convoys crawl the highways,
armoured backs of steel and dust.

Engines growl through the night,
smoke drifting north
like a second winter.

Farmhouses bar their windows.
Children lie awake in barns,
counting chains rattling on the road.

Every fence becomes a wound.
Every customs booth a pyre of flags.

What was handshake and open sky
bristles with razor wire.

Drones buzz over rivers
where fish once flashed silver.

Rumours travel quicker than fire:
a town evacuated,
a bridge blown out,
a neighbour shot on his porch.

And Ottawa still silent,
trapped in glass,
hands bound in paper.

The borderline burns.
And the land remembers
what invasion means.

VII. Dominion Ashes

“For the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat.” — 2 Peter 3:10

Flags tear loose,
strips of red and white
whipped into rags.

On Parliament Hill
the stones sweat fire,
arches crumbling,
bells warped silent in their towers.

Cities burn without sirens.
Glass towers rain down in shards,
streets awash in glittering ruin.

Subways flood black,
trains stalled mid-tunnel,
passengers stilled in airless dark.

Rivers carry wreckage—
timbers, tires, a child’s stuffed bear.

Smoke veils the horizon.
The northern lights rise above it,
not in beauty but in wrath,
green fire scrawling
the last testament of the land.

Voices shout, curse, pray—
then thin, then vanish.

No anthem survives.
No dominion holds.
Only ashes.

Ashes for barns and mills,
glass towers and borders aflame.

Ashes for children’s laughter,
for barren fields.

Ashes for the whole north country,
which keeps no record,
forgets our name,
turns away.

VIII. The Silence Beyond

“And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour.” — Revelation 8:1

Snow falls without witness.
No anthem, no oath,
only flakes settling
on stone and ash.

Lakes lie black and breathing.
Shorelines bare,
docks gone,
only driftwood and smoke.

A few fires glow in the hills—
faces bowed around them.

They do not name the country.
They do not call it home.

They speak only to the flame,
to the silence,
to each other.

The land waits.
It does not mourn.
It does not forgive.
It endures—
ancient, unbroken,
a silence beyond us,
beyond the ashes,
beyond the word 
dominion.

Share

Text and Reading by:

Artwork by:

Null Point

Fiction, poetry, author interviews, and personal essays by Brock Eldon

By Brock Eldon

The Commonplace Book

Where I explore inspirations for my Fiction, sharing reflections on Books, Film, and Culture.

By Brock Eldon

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

The stories in this volume compose FAB = -FBA, SUM FLUX V.2.3. See more stories, and check out the authors featured in this edition here.

Read more