“Toronto is my obsession”: André Alexis on his new short story collection, Other Worlds

André Alexis immigrated from Trinidad to the small town of Petrolia, Ontario, as a child, eventually settling in Toronto at age 30. His 2015 novel, Fifteen Dogs, which follows canines that have been endowed with human consciousness, has since been adapted into a hit play by Crow’s Theatre. Other Worlds, his latest book—and his first since his five-volume Quincunx series—is a collection of nine stories exploring parenthood, childhood, loss, grief and gratitude. We spoke to Alexis about moving to Canada at a young age, why he loves Toronto and airing family secrets.

Where did these stories come from? They were all written under the sword of Damocles, which was the death of my father in 2019 and the progressive loss of my mother from dementia. They’re all elegies for the parental—what it means, how strange it is and how strong that love is.

There’s a recurring character, a Trinidadian Canadian doctor who has affairs with his patients. Is that autobiographical? That came from my own childhood memories, although I’m not sure how much of it is real or imagined. I never would have asked my father about it when he was alive. It caused my mother so much pain. He was a complicated, needy man with a complicated history. At the same time, he was a great father.

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How did you decide to air those details? I feel that, to honour my father properly, I have to honour his imperfections. There’s a line in Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on a Wire”: “I swear by this song, and by all that I have done wrong.” I used to think it was a silly rhyme, but as I get older, I see that to do wrong is to become yourself. We grow through our mistakes, and being wrong is part of what’s sacred about a person.

Many of your stories are set in southern Ontario. What is it about this place that captures your imagination? Like most immigrants, I have an intense relationship with my adopted home. It’s the place of my second birth. I was only four when I left Trinidad. The shock of a different culture is like being plunged into cold water. It’s a baptism. You pay attention to the new world in ways you always took for granted. Canada—and southern Ontario specifically—was about learning a new environment: snow, social conventions, accents. Being Canadian is a thing. It’s a way of being in the world, of speaking and inhabiting an environment. It’s been the focus of my psyche since I was a child.

Toronto also appears in several stories—one character calls the city banal. What makes it a good setting? It’s a great setting. It wasn’t until I was sitting in Stanley Park one day, writing Fifteen Dogs, that I began to appreciate Toronto. I had to think about how it might seem to a dog: how it smells, what it feels like, what it looks like from two feet off the ground. It made me rethink my feelings toward the city. The novel that followed, The Hidden Keys, is about what I’d miss if I never saw Toronto again. I remember standing outside the Wheat Sheaf, at King and Bathurst, and looking south. I realized how beautiful the lake and the southern part of the city are. Toronto is my obsession.

The Fifteen Dogs stage show returned for a second run last year. How did it feel to see it take off? Complicated. I didn’t want to claim any ownership over it, because while it contains a good deal of my prose, I wanted the piece of theatre to exist on its own. When I watch it, I’m moved by the same things that moved me when I wrote the book. But also, I’m a bit tired of the story. I’ve seen the play like five times, from early iterations when it was a four-hour reading of the book to its current form. Then again, I don’t usually like my work. Each story is just a way to get to the next one.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.