Magazines 2025 Jan - Feb Culture critic Daniel Coleman

Culture critic Daniel Coleman

15 January 2025

Culture critic Daniel Coleman on fostering wonder in writing, his writing process and his new book

Why is fostering wonder so important in your writing?

Everything around us has a story to tell, if we have ears to hear, eyes to see. Wonder is a posture of attentiveness that is ready to be amazed. It takes a kind of undefended curiosity to engage with lives that exceed our current understanding. This posture is important if we are to be changed by the human and more-than-human stories around us.

How does your writing process vary between academic and literary?

Both depend on research, but scholarly writing is driven to explain and verify ideas while literary nonfiction is driven by the sentence – following intuition from sentence to sentence to the larger point. I develop extensive notes and outlines for a scholarly book, whereas I jot down only a few points when I’m writing literary nonfiction. This lets the unfolding sentences show me what to say next.

Your new book Grandfather of the Treaties is a collaboration with Indigenous scholars. How does collaboration affect writing?

It widens and strengthens what I understand. It also brings a responsibility to respect and highlight my conversants’ thoughts, which keeps my voice from being the final word. This process is crucial to understanding treaties themselves – we need to hear the Indigenous-Crown conversations that generated the treaties before they were deadened into written law.

Daniel Coleman is professor emeritus of English and cultural studies at McMaster University in Hamilton. His books include In Bed With the Word: Reading, Spirituality, and Cultural PoliticsWhite Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada; and The Scent of Eucalyptus: A Missionary Childhood in Ethiopia.

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