Knight Terra Press
littera manet sed lector oraculum
est. 1995
Midnight at the Arcanum:
a monograph
by Quinn Tyler Jackson
When someone stares you in your constant eye,
Not unlike a thousand instances yet,
Then what this regard in moments will do
Seems not to matter anymore at all,
But instead what is of sure consequence
Is that the person who adorns the look
Exists in a continuum that was,
And is, and will be, not that this moment
Singularly came and went and may return.
This work delivers an intricately woven tapestry of fractured recollection, longing, and relentless artistic drive. Drawing thematic inspiration from a mosaic of experiences, from his youth in British Columbia’s logging camps to the sweltering summer streets of Montreal in the late ’80s and New Westminster’s seamy weekly rentals in the early 2000s, Jackson crafts a narrative at once intensely personal, gritty, and transcendent. The journey invites readers to leave the page and traverse both the cityscapes of Canada and the anguished interior of a struggling soul as the protagonist teeters between slow starvation and total isolation.
By interlacing poems, short stories, essays, a meta-autobiographical novel, a three-act play, illustrations, and extensive self-reflective interactions with these media, Jackson offers a multifaceted, intermodal poststructuralist view into the complexities of identity, place, and time. Deeply and ambitiously authentic, Midnight at the Arcanum is not content to be a single literary work; but strives to be an overarching examination of itself and the poststructuralist tradition that underlies the work’s intricate scaffolding.
Hardcover/Paperback editions available at:
Front Cover Art: Julia Hedge (@coppersongbird)
“In this deeply self-reflective work [Jackson] blurs the line between fiction and autobiography, transporting the reader from these stories to a breathtaking view of the whole journey. This meditative culmination of the author’s work is rarely seen in literature.” — review on Amazon
Born and raised in Western Canada, Jackson grew up as a child in logging camps, where radio plays and reading were his only forms of entertainment. Upon his return to the city, he felt the call to write fiction, and approached art with a passion and fury. Rather than jump directly into authorhood, he first edited, and then promoted others’ writing as a literary agent. Eventually, he moved forward into his own art, and his first three novels were published in the United Kingdom between 2000 and 2002.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2006. He is a member of the Writers’ Union of Canada.
Jackson lives in Western Canada, where he continues to write fiction and work in scientific research.
