We Are Already Ghosts: Reflections on Composition
Abstract In this piece, author and critic Kit Dobson discusses and analyzes the composition of his debut novel, We Are Already Ghosts (University of Calgary Press, 2024). He analyzes the novel along at least three axes: first, as a novel that can be classified as a character-driven “summer read”; second, as a work of experimental fiction; and, third, as a text that analyzes and interrogates the spaces that make up the Canadian province of Alberta. Dobson notes influences on the novel from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse; to the poetics of bpNichol; to the tension between settler and Indigenous understandings of land, territory, haunting, and presence. Throughout, Dobson notes that the time in which the novel is set, between 1996 and 2011, marks a period of transition for the Briscoe-MacDougall family members who populate the book, and for the world and society that these characters represent.
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Beaulieu, Derek. Please, No More Poetry: The Poetry of Derek Beaulieu. Edited by Kit Dobson, Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2013.
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—. Some Lines of Poetry: From the Notebooks of bpNichol. Edited by Derek Beaulieu and Gregory Betts, Coach House, 2024.
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Queyras, Sina. Autobiography of Childhood. Coach House, 2011.
—. Expressway. Coach House, 2009.
—. “Lyric Conceptualism, A Manifesto in Progress.” Poetry Foundation, 9 April 2012. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/featured-blogger/63720/lyric-conceptualism-a-manifesto-in-progress, accessed 9 November 2024.
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Stein, Gertrude. Tender Buttons. 1914. Book*Hug, 2008.
Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization is not a metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, vol. 1, iss. 1, 2012, pp. 1-40.
Woolf, Virginia. Between the Acts. 1941. Oxford UP, 1998.
—. To the Lighthouse. 1927. Oxford UP, 2006.
—. “II.” Notes for Writing. Berg Collection, New York Public Library, 1926. http://www.woolfonline.com/?node=content/image/gallery&project=1&parent=6&taxa=16&content=732&pos=4, accessed 9 November 2024.
Beaulieu, Derek. Please, No More Poetry: The Poetry of Derek Beaulieu. Edited by Kit Dobson, Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2013.
Birney, Earle. “Can.Lit.” The Essential Earle Birney, edited by Jim Johnstone, Porcupine’s Quill, 2014, p. 30.
Chariandy, David. Soucouyant. Arsenal, 2007.
Compton, Wayde. Toward an Anti-Racist Poetics. U Alberta P, 2024.
Davey, Frank. AKA bpNichol: A Preliminary Biography. ECW, 2012.
Dobson, Kit. We Are Already Ghosts. University of Calgary Press, 2024.
Goldman, Marlene. DisPosession: Haunting in Canadian Fiction. McGill-Queen’s UP, 2012.
Hanson Dobson, Clementine. Untitled. Blue felt object, Calgary, 2023.
Keeshig-Tobias, Lenore. “Stop stealing native stories.” Globe and Mail, 26 January 1990. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/cultural-appropriation-stop-stealing-native-stories/article35066040/, accessed 9 November 2024.
The Kino-nda-niimi Collective. The Winter We Danced: Voices from the Past, the Future, and Idle No More Movement. ARP, 2014.
Moodie, Susanna. Roughing It in the Bush. 1852. Ryerson University, 2022, https://pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca/roughingitinthebush/, accessed 9 November 2024.
Nichol, bp. Love: A Book of Remembrances. Talonbooks, 1974. https://bpnichol.ca/archive/documents/love-book-remembrances, accessed 9 November 2024.
—. Some Lines of Poetry: From the Notebooks of bpNichol. Edited by Derek Beaulieu and Gregory Betts, Coach House, 2024.
Nichol, bp, and Barbara Caruso. From My Window. Seripress, 1978. https://bpnichol.ca/archive/documents/my-window, accessed 9 November 2024.
Queyras, Sina. Autobiography of Childhood. Coach House, 2011.
—. Expressway. Coach House, 2009.
—. “Lyric Conceptualism, A Manifesto in Progress.” Poetry Foundation, 9 April 2012. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/featured-blogger/63720/lyric-conceptualism-a-manifesto-in-progress, accessed 9 November 2024.
—. Women, Writing, Woolf. Coach House, 2022.
Smyth, Katharine. All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf. Crown, 2019.
Stein, Gertrude. Tender Buttons. 1914. Book*Hug, 2008.
Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization is not a metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, vol. 1, iss. 1, 2012, pp. 1-40.
Woolf, Virginia. Between the Acts. 1941. Oxford UP, 1998.
—. To the Lighthouse. 1927. Oxford UP, 2006.
—. “II.” Notes for Writing. Berg Collection, New York Public Library, 1926. http://www.woolfonline.com/?node=content/image/gallery&project=1&parent=6&taxa=16&content=732&pos=4, accessed 9 November 2024.
Dobson, K. (2025). We Are Already Ghosts: Reflections on Composition. Canada and Beyond: A Journal of Canadian Literary and Cultural Studies, 14, 163–174. https://doi.org/10.14201/candb.v14i163-174
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