All Things Seen and Unseen

Paul Dhillon talks to Vancouver author R J McDaniel, about his debut novel All Things Seen and Unseen (ECW Press, 2024)

10 minutes read time.

Paul Dhillon: Congratulations on your debut novel. Can you explain the genesis of the title?

RJ McDaniel: Thank you! The title actually comes from a particular English translation of the Nicene Creed, which is a Roman Catholic profession of faith. The first line goes, “We believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen.”

I grew up very Catholic, and I remember saying that version as a kid before they updated the translation to “all things visible and invisible.” There was something about the change from “seen and unseen” to “visible and invisible” that stuck in my brain. “Invisible” seems like a solid, objective statement: if something is invisible, you can’t see it. “Unseen,” though, doesn’t clarify whether the thing in question can be seen or not. It’s only saying that it is currently not being seen by the speaker. It might be genuinely invisible, or it might be hidden, or obscured. And when I was thinking about a placeholder title for the novel, that distinction seemed to really resonate with the main character Alex’s journey, even though this book is one of the less Catholic-themed things I’ve written. I didn’t think the title would end up sticking with the book all the way to publication, but everyone seemed to like it!

 Paul Dhillon: All Things Seen and Unseen has plenty of elements of gothic fiction: the newcomer, unsettling interior spaces and homes, and the threat of the supernatural. What is it about the setting of the story on a Gulf Island in British Columbia that makes for such a fertile ground for the Gothic? 

RJ McDaniel: I was lucky enough to spend the summers of 2020 and 2021 on Bowen Island with my partner’s family. I hadn’t spent any time on an island before, and I was so struck by how distant I felt from the world of the city, even though Bowen is about as close as you can get to the city while still being on an island. It very much felt like a world unto itself, and a kind of physical isolation I had never experienced before. At night, there was true silence, true darkness; during the day, just going to get food was a trek, and when you did see people, they always seemed to be the same few people. An island started to seem like the perfect place for a Gothic — a place for a character who is out of place, isolated, and disoriented.

Another thing about BC’s islands that made them seem like a great setting for a Gothic is how starkly they show the ongoing effects of colonization and income inequality. They are simultaneously world-famous tourist destinations, playgrounds of the wealthy, and very under-resourced rural communities; they are stolen Indigenous land, and the reminders of the colonial, even in the names of the islands themselves, are constant — yet, for most of the last century, undiscussed. The Gothic contrasts its imposing edifices of wealth with the moral rot and decay within, and I was really interested in how it could speak to some of the contradictions of these places.

Paul Dhillon: Alex is a compelling character and the reader is privy to plenty of their internal world. What struck me is how the natural world impacts Alex’s well-being, especially compared to their time in the city. Alex shows plenty of affinity for nature, especially birds. What is it about birds that are so compelling for you to write about, but also as a symbol for Alex?

RJ McDaniel: I’ve lived in Vancouver my whole life, so I’ve always had some level of proximity to nature. But especially when I was really struggling mentally, it was as though everything else alive in the world was invisible to me. I was in this concrete bubble of the mind.

During the COVID lockdown years, though, my partner and I started walking down to this pond every day. It was basically our main form of entertainment since the world had shut down. And we kept seeing these birds in the pond. Mallards, of course, I knew, and Canada geese, but there were all these other birds that were totally unfamiliar to me, even though I knew logically that I must have been seeing them my whole life. It absolutely blew my mind. It was like I had been walking around with my eyes closed, and suddenly I had opened. There was so much alive in the world, right in front of me, and I hadn’t even noticed.

Birds are vulnerable, yet resilient; they are omnipresent, in every environment, yet they make effort to notice. Like us, they travel, socialize, vocalize, and yet so much about them is strange and almost unknowable. And their lives are profoundly intertwined with ours, whether we realize it or not. Over the course of the book, Alex begins to realize just how much they are not alone in the world — how much connection they still have with all that is alive. I thought birds were a beautiful way to illustrate that.

Paul Dhillon: This book tackles some difficult topics such as mental health, abuse, and attempted suicide. All these elements push Alex in their journey to learn to trust themselves. In the end, you leave your readers feeling hopeful. How important was it to strike this balance and show hope in your story?

RJ McDaniel: As a reader, I’ve always been drawn to work that accesses really dark places. Being in the middle of those experiences in real life can feel very isolating because it can seem like no one else sees or acknowledges what’s happening to you. Especially as a teenager, I clung to books that weren’t afraid to touch that darkness. It was so important to simply feel like I wasn’t alone in what I was going through, that someone else out there had felt it too, even when those books ended in bleak ways.

At the same time, I always wanted the core of this particular story to be the possibility of love, trust and connection, especially between fucked up trans people. It can be difficult, and it doesn’t solve every problem, but it’s worth pursuing. There are a lot of reasons to feel hopeless, and a lot of hopelessness in the world. Still, we need hope to move forward and to try to build the world we want.

Paul Dhillon: Identity and trust are a few themes in the book. What draws you to writing about these elements and how do you see them supporting one another?

RJ McDaniel: I think identities don’t develop in a vacuum. You learn about yourself through learning about the world and engaging with others, and this process of learning continues throughout your lifetime. But your capacity for understanding yourself is diminished when you aren’t able to trust what’s around you when there’s nothing secure to cling to — whether that’s through adverse experiences or through isolation. When you’re in a state of constant fear, you become distant from your own perceptions: everything is something to be doubted and cautious of. It takes opening yourself up to others, opening yourself to all of that risk and vulnerability, to be able to see yourself clearly and to trust your own vision. That openness is hard to access, but it’s essential.

Paul Dhillon: What was your process and challenges while crafting the novel?

RJ McDaniel: I wrote and rewrote the first 20-ish pages of this novel for years. There was something about the character that kept bringing me back, and I had a vague idea of what I wanted the novel to be about, but I kept hitting a wall with it. Realizing the potential of using the Gothic as a template really put the pieces in place, and I wrote the full draft in a very compressed time period. I followed the exact same gruelling writing schedule every single day until it was finished. And though I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that process to others, for someone who had never written a novel before, doing that really made me feel like writing a novel was possible, which had been a big mental barrier.

Of course, I was only able to work like that because I quit my job two months before starting my MFA. I was completely broke because of this, and if I hadn’t had the certainty of knowing the MFA was around the corner, I wouldn’t have been able to pour all my time and energy into writing the novel, because I would have needed to work to live. I’m still figuring out the best way to write around having a normal full-time job, which is definitely one of the biggest challenges for any writer.

Paul Dhillon: What was the best piece of writing advice you received? What advice would you give a new or emerging writer?

RJ McDaniel: The best piece of writing advice I’ve ever received (and I wish I could remember where I read it) was to always stop writing before you want to stop. I used to struggle profoundly with cycles of procrastination and burnout when writing, and keeping this advice in mind helped me break those cycles and return to the page every day feeling energized and excited, rather than drained and lost. And, related to this, my advice to anyone who’s trying to build a writing practice is to not put too much pressure on yourself. There’s a lot of pressure to work in a specific way or to reach for particular milestones, and it’s easy to compare yourself to other people and feel like you’re coming up short, especially when you’re dealing with stuff in your life that prevents you from putting all your time and energy into writing. I think good things happen in finding what works for you, specifically, and brings you joy and satisfaction.

Paul Dhillon: What pieces of art (film, novels, music, visual art) help inspire and support in crafting the novel?

RJ McDaniel: As far as books go, I was hugely influenced by In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado, which opened me up to the possibilities of using horror and the Gothic to understand queer experiences of abuse. I devoured Shirley Jackson’s novels, especially The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle; Toni Morrison’s Beloved; and Gothic novels like Rebecca. I think Northanger Abbey shows up in the novel as well! And Small Beauty by Jia Qing Wilson-yang felt like a lifeline.

I was also really influenced by the TV series The Leftovers and by David Lynch’s works as a whole, but especially Twin Peaks. The rich imagery of those shows and their commitment to not providing easy — or, indeed, any — answers for some of the unsettling questions they raise was really thrilling and emboldening for me.

Paul Dhillon: What specific piece of art (any medium) could you not imagine having in your life? 

RJ McDaniel: I would not be the person I am today, in a very literal sense, without Mad Men. It’s an artwork I’m always coming back around to and seeing new things in, and it seems to get richer as I get older. And I feel like I’m only just understanding how important it was to me as a teenager in the process of forming my identity. (I’m writing about this in my next book!)

Paul Dhillon: What is your favourite writing snack?

RJ McDaniel: Black coffee and a croissant!

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