Joshua Doležal: Welcome back to The Recovering Academic Podcast. I’m Joshua Doležal and my guest today is
.My interview series this year is called “The Things Not Named.” It takes its title from a passage in Willa Cather’s essay “The Novel Démueblé,” one of her craft manifestoes:
“Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there—that, it seems to me, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the over-tone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself.”
I don’t know of a better description of craft – that elusive effect we often call voice or characterization or defamiliarization even as we know that the real thing escapes words . We know it when we feel it, when our writing reaches that higher level or when a book unlocks a part of us that we didn’t know was lying dormant. The thing not named is the mark we all aim at even if we can’t define it. And that is just what this series is: an attempt to catch that fugitive gleam before it flits away.
Kern Carter is a Toronto-based novelist celebrated for his captivating storytelling in books such as And Then There Was Us and Boys and Girls Screaming. His stories explore themes of family, friendship, and the drama that can fracture those relationships. Kern is based in Toronto, where he also teaches writing, hosts workshops on craft and storytelling, and travels the speaking circuit.
I hope you enjoy our conversation — and please also consider subscribing to his Substack,
.Joshua Doležal: Before we jump in with my series of questions, with this craft series that I'm calling “The Things Not Named” after Willa Cather, can you just say a little about your background, how you became a writer, and sort of where you are now?
Kern Carter: Yeah, I always like to say that I'm extremely fortunate because I always knew I wanted to be an author. I was writing books since I was eight years old, and what I would give myself credit for is just sticking to that dream, sticking to that, you know, having that little boy inside of me saying, this is what you want to do and keep going.
So I studied it throughout high school, studied literature in university, graduated with an English degree. And it's in university where I really started taking being a novelist seriously, so I started writing my first novel while I was in university. Self-published my first two books, and then I felt like I wanted to move away from that and get published and see what that experience was like.
So that's kind of where we are now. I've been, again, grateful to be published by some amazing publishers, Penguin Random House, Scholastic and an independent publisher here in Canada named Cormorant, who's also excellent. So I feel like I've really explored so many parts of the publishing industry and I've been able to use that wealth of knowledge to help me in so many ways, including write better, which I think is, is extremely important.
Joshua Doležal: One of the reasons why I wanted to speak with you today is I sensed a little bit of dissatisfaction in one of your recent posts that…so you self-published your first two books, which I didn't know, and then you were agented, you were represented, and then had access to the Power 5, as folks call them, but you felt that you were sort of pushed into the YA space, and that wasn't really your passion. Is that true?
Kern Carter: Yeah, that, to a point – more so the middle grade space. So, what, and interesting that you actually brought that up. I never considered myself, when I self-published my first two novels, I never considered myself a YA author. I was just, the stories happened to be of younger people, so my first novel, I think the main character was 19.
My second novel, the main characters were somewhere between like 19 and 22, like they were young adults. But I never categorized myself like that because I just felt like I was writing stories and these stories felt very adult themed. So I never looked at it like that. It wasn't until I got published and my agent is like, you know, you are a really good young adult writer.
And I was just like, okay, cool. I never thought much of it, but I did understand the industry, and I understood why that label got kind of used on me and why the stories that I was telling would reflect that. So I understood that.
What I was not all the way okay with was writing to an even younger audience, so writing to a middle grade audience, exclusively, let me say, like that became problematic, and I just wanted to stop it right away, and because while I was writing these middle grade novels, I got my first novel published in 2020, and my publisher said it was a hybrid, so it was like young adult slash adult.
Whatever, cool. But then after that, Scholastic messaged me and they very definitively wanted me to write a middle grade novel. And I was just like, cool, Scholastic, I'm not going to turn down this opportunity. I was a little bit worried about me not having the understanding of how to write to that audience.
But they told me, hey, it's, you're still writing a novel. Just, think of the basic kind of things that you would have to leave out if you're writing to that age group. So I went through the process. It was fine. Again, it was Scholastic, so I was actually really excited about it, but then they liked it.
So they asked me to write another one. And then my other publisher, Penguin, was like, oh, what about writing for our Tundra imprint? You know, writing another one. So I agreed to those just in haste, I think, and without really thinking about what that meant for my career, when really, I just want to write, I want to write novels, like I want to write adult themed books and books for adults, you know, like that is where my passion lies.
Those are the conversations I want to be having. So I, once I kind of caught myself and actually took years, like this just happened in 2024, where I stopped myself and I'm like, wait, and I was under contract for some of these books. And I said, no, I don't want to write any of them. So I called my editor, called my agent.
And we put a pause to all of that. So it's a little bit tricky and, you know, without going into logistics, I do owe books that we have to figure out how to, how to manage, but to be honest, it was totally worth it because now I'm back to writing what exactly what I want to write and, and the themes and for the audience, I want to write for it.
Joshua Doležal: It seems like your struggle – it's so emblematic of writers at large because the market reality seems to be the tail wagging the dog for a lot of people feeling that they have to demonstrate a kind of strength on social media or they have to figure out a sales strategy before they've even created a work of art. Really the reason that we became writers was to tell the stories that matter to us.
So, it's really interesting that you had to kind of reclaim that, after finding your way to the inside of a commercial arrangement that a lot of writers would envy – but it wasn't what you were hoping for. So it sounds to me like you're trying to get back to craft. Is that fair to say?
Kern Carter: Absolutely. Absolutely. In the way that I love to do it.
Joshua Doležal: Well, let's talk about what that means for you then. So when you are writing these novels that that need to be told, what are some of those craft principles that guide you sort of when you're drafting or revising and you know it's good when you see it or you feel that you've done something that you're aesthetically proud of, what does that mean to you?
Kern Carter: For me, it is mostly about pace and rhythm. Those are the elements that I think about the most, how am I pacing my story. And when I say pace, how am I getting my story from here's the plot of the story, and I know my character needs to go from there to there, but then how am I pacing that throughout the novel with enough suspense, with enough tension, with enough conflict so that the writing and the story almost feels like a, so like, you know, a barbed wire, so it's kind of going around, like, here's this little tension here, then it's going higher and higher, like, that for me is everything.
I think pace is so important. And then rhythm for me, which is, to me, also connected to pace. Like, what, how is the story sounding? How am I formulating sentences so that they're diverse enough so that I create the rhythm that I need for the story. And how am I playing with rhythm throughout the story. How am I making it go faster? How am I slowing the story down? How am I making this part feel more exciting or how am I building the tension in this part using the rhythm of my prose? So for me, it's a lot of pace and rhythm – those are my primary focuses when I'm storytelling. And I think that kind of guides me more than anything.
Joshua Doležal: Are you talking about a kind of lyricism?
Kern Carter: Yes, absolutely. Yes, yes, yes. That can be achieved through word use, for sure, like what word choices you're making, but then also through sentence structure, how are you constructing your sentences?
Joshua Doležal: It's a really elusive concept to teach. I used to try to teach the lyric essay. I mean, I think I did teach it well enough as much as you can, but so much of that is about what you hear. It's a kind of intuited sense of things. I don't know if my students have good memories of this or if they just walked away thinking I was a crazy professor, but I would play examples from the band U2 because a band's sound, their distinctive sound, is similar to what you're describing as your voice, that you're constructing through pacing and rhythm. And there's something uplifting about U2's music. It's buoyant. And what you hear is typically the note goes up at the end of the chorus, instead of going down, as it did for a lot of the grunge bands that I liked, you'd always go down to the minor chord, and it had that depressive effect, whereas U2 was always kind of literally lifting you up.
I would play some of Daniel Lanois’s music, he was the producer that gave them that distinctive sound, and I would try to explain that that's kind of what you're trying to do as a writer, is decide what's the effect, the emotional effect you want to have, and then how do you achieve that through, as you're saying, a combination of sentence structures.
You know, sometimes it might be fragments, or you might need compound, complex sentences in the Emersonian, more jazz-like style but it's something that you hear, that you sense. It's not something that you can break down in a kind of template.
Kern Carter: Yeah, absolutely. A lot of it is intuition, to be honest. And I know this maybe speaks to something we're going to talk about in a little bit, but for me, just knowing when I'm reading good writing is when I can actually hear and feel it. You know, when I could, when I could hear the writing in my mind, or like, I don't even want to say ears.
I don't know how you hear it, but in my mind, when I could hear it in my mind, and when I could feel it, I think you just, it's so difficult to explain. So I think even the way you explain it was actually really well. I couldn't explain it as well as you just did. But definitely for me, it's about sound.
It's about rhythm and it's about that feeling that you get to just know that, okay, this feels right. But although I'm saying that it's difficult to explain, I actually think that you can teach it. And I also think that you could get better at it. I don't think this is, you should just kind of be okay with or feel like, oh, I'll never, I don't understand this pace and rhythm thing, I'm just never going to be good at it just because it's a complicated thing to grasp. No, you could actually get better at it. You know, you could actually improve your writing if you understand rhythm a little bit more. And if you understand how to actually hear your voice a little bit more and listen to it. And then adjust it when you need to adjust it. I think it's, it's definitely something that can be taught. And just, sorry, a quick side note. I teach once a week too at a college here in Toronto and I start my classes with music. That's how I start because I think it's that important. And I'm trying to get my students accustomed to listening to sound and melody and the movement that, that comes along with music. So it's very interesting that you said that that's strange.
Joshua Doležal: Well maybe there's just a close affinity between literary writing and music in that way. You give me some hope, because when I started teaching back in the early two thousands, it was a time before Pandora and all the algorithms, so people actually knew what they were listening to and could articulate why and what they liked about it. So I would do the same, you know, often be playing something before class and swap ideas, artists, with my students and, you know, got exposed to some good things that way. But I wonder if writing craft and the market realities are kind of another version of that algorithmic shift in music, where Pandora just kind of took care of the playlist in the background and you stopped being aware of who the band actually was or what the nuances of the sound were, to sort of bring that to the light and actually listen mindfully. And then try to duplicate that in writing is, I think, a great teaching approach.
Kern Carter: Yeah, definitely. You actually said something that's interesting, that is true, I think, or at least the way you said it is true. Because of streaming, you actually don't listen deeply anymore. And you're not as intentional with what you listen to because you're not actually buying it, you know, you're just casually listening to it. But if you walk to the store, to the record store, bought the CD, put it in, you're going to sit down, and you're going to listen to every word. I've never actually, that seems so simple. I never thought about that.
Joshua Doležal: You're talking about being able to teach pace and rhythm and these principles, these pillars that you've sort of placed at the center of your writing practice. When did you learn those? Or what were some of the breakthroughs when you think about your formative experiences in that apprenticeship to craft? When did you feel like you'd begun to master those techniques or got them to a level that you felt you could trust?
Kern Carter: I've actually had a journey with this. So the first time I remember my craft being criticized when I first started writing my first novel. And there was something, there's some kind of initiative happening here where you could send in your novel to a published author and they would read it, read the first few chapters, and give you some feedback.
And during my first draft, I sent him maybe the first chapter, which ended being 10, 12 pages. And he read the first two paragraphs, wrote me back and said, I can tell that you're a beginner writer. And here's why. And he listed out some craft things that I was doing that from the first two paragraphs, he picked up right away.
So that was my first kind of introduction into, okay Kern, you have a ways to go before getting better. Then I would say, writing my second novel, I was reading Jhumpa Lahiri, and I'd already written about 40,000 words at this point, I was reading Jhumpa Lahiri's book, a novel called The Lowland, and that, if you read the introduction to that, so the first page, her prose are so simple, you know, like she does not waste words, but there's almost a semi-poetic value to it.
And I read that those, I read the way that she was writing, and immediately went back and deleted about 30,000 of the words that I had because I'm like, wait, no, this is how you're supposed to, this is how I wanted to execute at least that book very specifically. But Jhumpa Lahiri taught me simplicity, reading her actually taught me how to how to use simple prose to get my point across or to articulate what I'm trying to say.
But the biggest breakthrough happened to me probably around 2019. And to give a little bit of context, in 2018, I went to a literary conference, but it was a conference mostly for agents, where an author got to sit and present the idea of their novel within five minutes to a collection of agents. So I did that. Five of them requested my full manuscript. So, I went back to Toronto, the conference was in New York. I went back to Toronto, sent all five of them my full manuscript. All five of them ended up saying no. But the last agent said no, but with feedback. And you know that is a blessing, agents don't get feedback.
And they gave detailed, harsh feedback. About things I thought I was doing well, even simple things, showing, not telling – I was filtering, like, just so many things, they were just going off, and it hurt, it really hurt, because at that point, I had already self-published two novels, I had already received the criticism earlier that I just mentioned, so I was really conscious of, of making sure that I was studying the craft outside of just writing my novel, and to get that criticism was actually really, was really hard, but, After I kind of got over my ego and that hurt, I got that email in November or so, January of that year, of the next year, which was 2019, I enrolled myself into a full time novel writing course, eight months long, two semesters, and I really just dove into craft, and over those eight months, those two semesters, my level of writing improved so greatly – just being able to see the mistakes come back to me in real time and then be able to adjust those mistakes and then have that back and forth with that author was invaluable for me. And that was the first time I would say I felt like, Oh, now I get it. Now I understand how to actually build characters.
Now I understand how to manage my pace. Everything just really came together. So I would say 2019 that was working in that eight-month course with that published author was the first time I felt like I had command of my writing from a craft perspective.
Joshua Doležal: I had a mentor, Ted Kooser, who's a poet primarily, but also wrote some memoir and just the constant one-on-one feedback and becoming more attuned to him as a reader and as a highly discerning reader, and even a word that he would often use, just a single word, overcooked, as soon as he would write overcooked in the margin, I would know exactly what he meant, you know, and so that kind of feedback from a reader that you respect, I think is a really important part of it.
Kern Carter: Absolutely. Absolutely. It makes all the difference. I believe so much in feedback from a mentor, be that an editor, however you want to phrase it or frame it. I'm not sure you can actually be great at writing without feedback. I don't even know if it's possible. You could study all you want and do it individually or independently, all you want, and you will improve, but I don't know how great you will get at writing or how much let's say how much of a command of the language you will get without feedback.
Joshua Doležal: Well, how are you trying to deepen your craft now? Are you working with editors? Do you have a group of writer friends you exchange drafts with? How do you push yourself further?
Kern Carter: All of the above. So I, first of all, being very intentional about how I read books and how I read novels, like, really reading them and enjoying them, obviously, but still being critical and being observant of what I'm reading to see what this author is doing technically from a technical perspective and from a storytelling perspective that works for that novel and are there pieces of that, that I could pull into my own writing. So being very intentional about, about deep reading.
Still taking classes, like last year I took two classes, and when I say two classes, two classes that are day classes or one-on-one with a mentor for like four hours, like those type of classes. I plan to take more this year, so just making sure, I'm still studying the craft.
Then just really leaning on my editors. The benefit of being signed to big publishers is that the editors, at least in my experience, have been really good, like my editors are excellent. The suggestions they make and their understanding of craft is high, like, they're not just storytellers. They're editors who are really good with craft.
And really make my prose better. And there are times where I get a little bit too wordy. There are times where they're like, Kern, you've been using the gerund the entire time and now you're shifting away from it. They're really into it. So for me I feel like I've also gotten really lucky with editors who have acted as mentors for me.
So all of the above. I want to always get better. You're doing yourself a disservice if you are not really trying to be great at the craft because it improves the way that you could communicate your message and tell your story.
Joshua Doležal: It's nice to know that it's not just beginners who need that kind of guidance or discerning reader at every stage of the process. So you'd mentioned Lahiri as one of your influences, and I have two questions about writers that you're drawing inspiration from. So Lahiri would be in the first category, which is about 10 years ago. So what are some other writers from maybe 10 years ago or further back that have influenced you the most and maybe what you took from them?
Kern Carter: Junpa for sure, I already spoke about her. Khalid Hussaini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, which is one of my favorite novels of all time. He showed me how you can write these deeply personal stories that's still moved with pace, like there's still an excitement and a pace to them that it wasn't explicitly literary. I know your audience will understand what I mean when I say literary. He was expert at that. And I love that. He still understood pace despite these stories being intimate and personal. Then Toni Morrison, we could have an entire episode on her.
It was actually when I reread her novel Beloved when I started my novel writing journey in earnest, like I was just, I had read it before, but I reread it, and when I was in university, I was just like this is how I want to make people feel when they read a book. Her just greatness overall really influenced me.
And I have to say to Donna Tartt. Talk about an incredible technical writer. Donna Tartt is probably the best technical writer that I can think of, her technical ability, it's speed and density, that's how she thinks about her writing. A book like The Goldfinch or even Secret History but more so the Goldfinch where so many things are happening and she gives you so many details of setting and description.
But at the same time, the story is still moving a thousand miles an hour this way, that is technical ability at another level. So Donna Tartt to me is, yeah, she's one of my favorites.
Joshua Doležal: I think of you as in the cohort that began maybe in the last 10 years. So 2019 was your breakthrough, and that's fairly recent. So are there other writers who are more recent who are doing work that excites you, who are your influences within the last 10 years?
Kern Carter: Yeah, I would start with some Canadian writers that are to me amazing. One is an author named Noor Naga who is just… she'll take one element of a story that and twist it, that makes it feel like that would put a wrench in everything, you know, so she had, for example, this book in verse called Washes Praise, and it's just a story about an affair. But the twist is that the main character is a Muslim woman having an affair with another Muslim man. You know, and it puts just such a wrench in everything because it really does twist up the entire plot.
Omar El Akkad is another Canadian author who I think is probably right now the best Canadian author. He has a book out called What Strange Paradise that came out a couple years ago, a few years ago. And he’s able to blend genres better than like, wow. So he's actually the inspiration for the way I write now because he's able to take this deep, political stories, like these things that are happening in different parts of the world, but almost write it like it's a thriller, you know, like he's writing these political stories that have to do with displacement and immigration and stuff like that, but you never feel like that. You never feel like you're right.
You're reading a political story at all. You feel like you're reading a thriller and I don't know how he accomplished that. But it's really been inspiring for me. And then also I have to mention Marlon James. Marlon James wrote another one of my favorite novels ever called A Brief History of Seven Killings, and he's able to take fantasy and blend it with literary and take risks in his writing that work. I don't know how, but they work. Like super, super, super big risks, huge risks with language and with the actual characters. I don't know how he does it, but he blends fantasy with literary better than any author I've seen.
When I read A Brief History of Seven Killings, I was like, it almost gave me permission to be like, oh, so I could actually still do this and it'd be commercially successful. You know, like when I read that because it ended up winning, winning the Booker Prize and whatnot, but it really influenced me to give my writing a little bit more freedom.
And understanding that I could take these types of risks and still not alienate anybody, not alienate readers or anything like that and still feel very true to myself. And one more, sorry, because she's more new, although I'm very critical of her in some aspects, I think R.F. Kuang is absolutely fantastic and exciting.
I think it's very hard to read Babel and not think that is of the most incredible stories that you're going to read. It's very hard to read it and not feel like Babel is fantastic. So, although again, there are parts of her writing that I actually criticize, which we could talk about another time, but her, just overall, I've read three of her novels right now, and I think overall she is absolutely fantastic. So, R. F. Kuang for sure.
Joshua Doležal: You are kind of challenging a claim that I made last year, which is that craft is dead as a market force or as a market principle. So it seems like you've found writers who are defying that, who are still performing at a high literary level and finding representation and outlets for that that are not based purely on book sales or cults of personality. But your own story is kind of illustrating that principle since you've had to back away from things that were more market driven or more guaranteed returns on investment. And so the risk taking is a lane, I suppose, that you've had to reclaim for yourself.
So kind of circling back to the beginning, when we think about those initial reasons for writing. That are not about making money or getting the next contract. What are those for you? How do you answer the “why write” question for yourself?
Kern Carter: Yeah, I really had to think about this question. I honestly feel that writing is a necessary part of culture. It shapes the way people think about themselves. It shapes the way the world functions. And other than the fact that writing is at the core of most creative endeavors, or a lot of creative endeavors, I think there is no more pure creative craft than books, than telling a story that's in your mind and putting it into words.
I feel like the filter that happens from your mind to the page is shorter and more clean than any other art form. And I think it's important. The reason that I write anyway, because for me, I had to answer this question in so many ways, because the reason I write is just straight passion. I just absolutely love it. There’s nothing more that I could say about that. I just love it. There's a calling in me that just feels moved to write and moved to share these stories that I would do for free and I have been doing for free for years and years and years.
There's a reason why physical books are still the most popular form of books, of reading in 2025. There's a reason for that. We have not found anything yet to replicate the experience of turning the page. There's nothing that could replicate that experience. and I don't think we should try to replicate it. I think we should just live with that magic and enjoy that magic and keep it with us as long as we can.
Joshua Doležal: That’s “the thing not named” for today. Thanks for listening. I’ll be back in March with
. In the meantime, stay tuned next week for a craft essay on the accordion of time.
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