As Pride Month comes to a close, along with all the celebration and joy it incites, it’s important to remember those who came before—people of the LGBTQ2SIA+ community whose struggles and heartbreak and triumphs must be honoured. It made a real impact on me, when Ellis confides below that it was important to “contribute to the canon before it was too late.”
Please carefully consider Ellis’ words, and I truly hope they draw you to his excellent novel. He was born in the U.K. and grew up in Canada, and has published nine stories in literary journals, including The Iowa Review, Yolk, and The Fiddlehead. His first short story was nominated for a 2020 Pushcart Prize. Night Terminus is his first novel.
1. What life events and/or preoccupations shaped this book as you wrote it?
My debut novel, Night Terminus, relies on my experiences as a survivor of the AIDS crisis. Though fictional, many of the characters are amalgams of individuals I have met or inspired by personal stories I have heard over 45 years. Time moves differently and collapses as one gets older, and when death strikes so young. Only a handful of AIDS novels have been written in the last ten or fifteen years, and few were about the people who watched their friends and lovers die but who lived. These elderly individuals, who are nearing the end of their lives, possess the wisdom of history. There will be no witness to that terrible time left to tell their story, and so I wanted to contribute to the canon before it was too late.
2. What was one of your biggest challenges in bringing the project to fruition?
The novel came easily. I discovered that all the stories were there, waiting to be written. There’s an emotional toll narrating tragedy while still including joy and moments of levity. But writing about catastrophe is better done indirectly; one circles around it or views it from a certain distance. It carries more weight that way. What was more challenging was the subsequent hustle, including trying to find representation. I queried dozens of agents, but it’s a bit like uploading a profile on Tinder. The author is overwhelmed by submitting, and the agent is overwhelmed by submissions — a right swipe seemed miraculous. I thought that getting published without one would be difficult, but my first unagented submission succeeded.
3. What other stories or books inspired it, and why?
W. G. Sebald’s small collection of novels influenced the metaphysics of Night Terminus. His prose transports readers into a haunting archaeology of history, memory, and catastrophe. Novelists like Michael Cunningham, Andrew Holleran, and Edmund White write lyrical, elegiac, and edgy novels. I learned about narrating the heartbreaking choices we must make as gay men and a deeper understanding of how suffering stays in the body and is carried intergenerationally.
In the stories of Ben Shattuck and Tim O’Brien, even long-ago relationships surface through rediscovered artifacts or found objects. The narration needs no embellishment to deliver its emotional blow. In writing about the everyday violence both during and after a war, both authors reminded me of prizing love and morality. Writers like Jenny Erpenbeck and Anne Carson taught me the importance of absence, silence, and liminal spaces in storytelling. What lies between the lines is essential.
4. What kind of impact do you hope it makes?
I hope my novel encourages more stories to be written about AIDS, which was one of the greatest health crises of the 20thcentury, but is still burdened by stigma, even almost half a century later. There are so many stories to tell. And I hope that the reader’s world shifts a little from reading Night Terminus; they are transported or stirred. That lovely sense of belonging — one feels less alone after reading a wonderful story.
5. Is it connected to your next project in any way?
I wish I knew! The challenges of promotion and ongoing illness mean I must delay the start of any new work, but I’m entertaining second novel ideas, which take time to brew. My next book may take a distinct form and won’t be about the same subject, but will contain similar existential themes of resilience, transience, and concatenation.
A big thanks to Ellis, and thank-you so much for reading his Story Behind the Story.
What an important topic, and I love the novel's title. I'll look for this.