Author Q&A with Nick Thran

This is the second "Author Q&A" that we are sharing for National Poetry Month 2026, this time looking back at a title from our Spring 2025 season. Get to know Nick Thran through his Fiddlehead Poetry Book Prize-shortlisted collection Existing Music.

From where did you write the majority of your book?

From my desk at home in Fredericton, New Brunswick. And, hopefully, from some points of view that were inaccessible to me in my earlier books.

Did anything surprise you during the writing process?

After publishing my mixed-genre book, If It Gets Quiet Later On, I Will Make a Display in 2023, I got very excited about making poems again. With both that book and Existing Music, a simple outward turn has changed my process: instead of writing about my own sadness or melancholy, why not write about the companionship I feel when encountering sadness or melancholy in the work of others? The surprises after that turn boil down to this: I loved writing these poems.

Do you have any routines or rituals that help you write?

I was learning some songs on guitar and gradually starting to sing them to myself in the mornings. When I decided to make my passion for sad music a subject, the learning I was doing on guitar and the practice itself made me certain about the additive value of the poem-making process, not to mention the differences between the two art forms.

Is there a sense, memory or feeling that embodies your book?

I think the cover embodies the book. I’m grateful to Natalie Olsen for it. A similar image to the cover appeared recently outside the window of the Sandman Hotel in Abbotsford. It was early morning. I put the album caroline 2 on my headphones and, alone in the room, ended up doing some combination of meditation and interpretive dance. That’s a memory that’ll always embody the book for me.

What advice would you give to aspiring writers?

Just to always be that: aspiring. Nothing is fixed about the term “writer.” It can be lost as easily as democracy, decency, ecosystems. . .

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Trillium Book Award-winner Nick Thran explores the companionship of wistful music in his fourth collection.

The poems in Existing Music both celebrate and interrogate the idea of the “sad song.” The lyrical narrative mixes autobiographical poems with fantasies about the speaker’s favourite musicians—from the long gaps between one artist’s records, and grief over another’s suicide, to the marvelling at another’s ability to write “beautiful songs about potatoes.” The long poem “The Minim” considers the sad song from the point of view of an amateur musician at practice, using language that riffs upon an existing dictionary of musical terms with an eye towards making “vigorous chambers, frivolous rooms.” Lastly, the collection considers the sad song as a collaboration within communities: whether at the bookstore, within a family or between two poets who write in different languages.