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.