This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Paige Lewis, whose debut novel, Canon, is out today from Viking. “Listen,” Lewis writes at the beginning of this satiric epic, “once a person becomes a hero, their past self retroactively becomes a hero, too.” For one protagonist, the teenage artist Yara, that past includes experiencing male touch as an act of suffocation; they become a hero in accepting—under duress—a contract from God to defeat a military “Bad Guy” known as “Dominic the Sinful.” Meanwhile, the warrior prophet Adrena chafes at being rejected for the part. (God: “You’re old hat.”) Adrena decides to take matters into her own hands and persuade General Harpo to let her colead the army of Good Guys; Harpo sets the tone of their collaboration when he gets a papercut opening of copy of the Aeneid. In the Chicago Review of Books, Michael Welch described Canon as “an odd duck of a novel in the best way possible—it’s a polyphonic, meta, hilarious epic that recontextualizes the hero’s journey for modern audiences.” And Tommy Orange praised the book for being “not only structurally pristine and brilliant, but a page turner, and a profound meditation on the meaning of this human journey we are on alone, together.” Paige Lewis is the author of the poetry collection Space Struck (Sarabande Books, 2019) and coeditor of Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction and Deliverance (Sarabande Books, 2023). Lewis teaches at the University of Iowa.
Paige Lewis, author of Canon. (Credit: riel Sturchio)
1. How long did it take you to write Canon?
It took about eight years. I remember exactly where I was the day it started—I was writing in the most unhip place—a Starbucks in Tallahassee. It was a two-minute walk from my husband Kaveh Akbar’s studio apartment, and it was the place that opened the earliest, so we’d usually arrive around 5 or 6 AM and then write for eight hours before going to class. Canon started as a poem about the character Yael from the Book of Judges. I finished what I thought was a one-page poem and showed it to Kaveh. He said he loved it but that it seemed like I had more to say, which is a very nice way to say the poem was unfinished. It turned out I had a lot more to say, and this one-page poem turned into an epic poem, which then morphed into a novel. I finished Canon in my favorite coffee shop in Iowa City (not a Starbucks!)—which is where I’m sitting right now as I answer this question.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
It was really challenging to write about God while knowing that eventually my very religious mother would want to read what I had written about God.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I have this incredible writing space in my home: a large standing desk, my favorite books within reach on a nearby bookcase, a fancy ergonomic chair. I never use any of it. My cats and my dogs and my video games are always present and it’s hard to get anything done with this triumvirate of distractions around. I tend to work best in coffee shops—partly because I don’t have as many distractions, but mostly because my anxious brain tells me that everyone in the café knows that I’m there to write and they will notice (and be extremely disappointed) if I’m wasting my writing time. The coffee shops in Iowa City are filled with writers, so I try to get there right when they open. I’m a morning writer and will likely be a morning writer until the world ends. I try to write daily; I try to remind myself that any of my other daily obligations can be completed after I’ve had a few hours of writing.
4. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Longmans, Green & Co., 1886), and I’m enjoying it so far. I really do hope that Hyde leaves Jekyll alone.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
I think all living poets deserve wider recognition, but the three that come immediately to mind are Tianna Clark (Scorched Earth, Washington Square Press, 2025), Jenny Xie (The Rupture Tense, Graywolf Press, 2018), and R. A. Villanueva (A Holy Dread, Alice James Books, 2026). Buy all their books!
6. What, if anything, will you miss most about working on the book?
I miss having the book as an anchor. I could sit down every morning and, although I didn’t know where the writing would take me, I at least knew that I would be writing in the universe of Canon. I’m feeling a bit unmoored now, but I’m hoping it’s normal to wonder, “What if I don’t have any more books in me?” after finishing a book. And I hope this question eventually is answered with the production of a new book.
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you?
When I first showed a draft of Canon to my agent, Jacqueline Ko, I was planning on sending it to publishers as a poetry book. I was sure it was finished—I mean, I had worked on it for many years, how could it not be finished? Jackie read it and within a few days called me to tell me exactly what I didn’t want to hear. It wasn’t finished. And then she said something I didn’t expect—it was a novel. She worked with me through so many drafts of Canon before we eventually did send it out as a novel. Her confidence in and dedication to my book even in its infancy will always stay with me.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Canon, what would you say?
I would tell myself to show drafts of the book to trusted readers sooner. After I showed Kaveh the first few pages of an early draft, I decided it would be a good idea to work on it in complete isolation and not show anyone anything until I was holding a completed text that I was happy with. This meant that when I had trouble writing a scene or worming my way out of a plot issue, I had to trudge through the problem on my own, when it’s very possible that another reader would have had solutions for me. Sharing the work with others would’ve saved me a lot of time and frustration.
9. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of Canon?
Canon is not a science fiction book, but I found myself most inspired to write after watching science fiction films. This is perhaps because films like Solaris, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Robinson Crusoe on Mars are often bursting with loneliness, and Canon is very interested in loneliness.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
This is an impossible question to answer! “To be a good writer, you must be a voracious reader.” It’s so simple and yet it’s always true. You can surely be a writer who doesn’t read. But you won’t be a very good writer.
