Kai Conradi shouldered the sky and looked down. The land expanded, color rushing in, taking on the contours of a relief map.
Then, a strip of sand appeared, sea on either side, and it flexed like an arm with an unfurling fist, beckoning them.
Conradi came from Vancouver Island with one partner, Al, and two dogs, Albie and Finn. They drove across the continent, leaving in the rearview mirror a feast of rain-fat forest, blue mountains, and pancake-flat prairie. All those television-box lives flickering past.
When Conradi set out, they had a first novel about a trans character on a cross-country road trip also in the rearview.
“I don’t like driving very much,” they say. “But having to take the time to get here, I have a clear sense of what we traveled through to get to this part of the country.”
Conradi, a writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, came to this fist of land and settled in its palm, rising early each morning to follow its lines, a series of semi-distorted parallels.
They came to be quiet. To rest. To think. To live an unstructured life.
This, too, is writing. Their work is built of stunning, simple lines — skeletons and artifacts of past lives, only partially excavated.
Conradi finished an M.F.A. at the University of Victoria in 2022 and holds stories close, as if they know how overexplaining starves meaning from a thing. They speak that way, too, guarding silence.
To pass them in the woods or on the beach is to sense how they have become an extension of the landscape: ears open, thoughts traveling through frozen ground, white-and-tan dog in tow. A blue coat like a cutout of water or sky or both — a bridge between above and below.
“I find it hard to write about the place I’m in,” says Conradi. “But I do think it influences the work in ways that will maybe become clear once I’m not here anymore.”
Conradi’s work orbits the idea of home — not just geographically but in the body. Home now, Conradi says, is wherever they are with their partner and their dogs. But they came to this edge of the continent and found themself writing about growing up on K’ómoks territory in Cumberland, British Columbia, on the other edge.
“I realize the place that I’ve constructed in my mind isn’t like that anymore,” Conradi says. “I am revisiting and re-interrogating old memories, holding them upside down to see what falls out: new insights, conflicting accounts, and unfinished histories.”
Memory bends. There are things they don’t remember. Things that have changed. To read them is like running your fingers through a flame: proximate and vital but impossible to fully hold.
“There’s a lot of room to imagine what could have happened,” they say, “or parts I don’t remember, what maybe did happen or didn’t. Being so geographically far from family and from the place I grew up, is prompting me to think about them and that place somewhat obsessively and maybe in new light.”
Conradi’s writing balances narrative and lyricism. It’s about identity and perception, translating and transitioning. A 2020 chapbook, Notes From the Ranch, has observations that knock the wind out of you — like falling from the monkey bars, that half-state between breathing and not.
In a poem called “I am learning to be calm,” they write, “Their smiles dangle like keychains,/ them laughing, me laughing,/ my laughter like an empty space full of bird feathers,/ their laughter like dogs bent over their dishes & feeding.”
In “My cowboy grandpa never visited this ranch,” they write, “My grandpa’s coat blows open & I see/ his shirt breasts embroidered/ with all the faces of the sons he never had/ … I look at my own shirt/ & see two names embroidered there,/ but can’t read them upside down.”
Conradi lingers in these charged fork-in-the-road moments, where the relational dynamic is about to shift irrevocably. The looming transformation is like a gull passing over an empty stretch of sand, its shadow ebbing before distance or a cloud winks it out of sight.
But the truth remains: it was there.
Conradi’s new poems, they say, are in conversation with those in Notes From the Ranch, drawing out relationships with figures like their grandfather and other family members.
They sold their forthcoming first novel, Old Pal, which imagines the experience of a trans character who sets out to cross America by bus, a few weeks ago. It will be published in 2027 by Hogarth in the United States and McClelland & Stewart in Canada. They are at work on another novel, a sister project to Old Pal that follows a trans man approaching middle age as he returns to his hometown in the interior of British Columbia.
Conradi checks in with the work every day but doesn’t follow a strict routine. They sit at their desk and read, stepping between poetry and fiction, between attention and looseness.
But first, they rise early with Albie and trace the lip of the bay, the path of the old train, the otherworldly bends of beech or the curves of the Province Lands.
In “All the ranchers are asleep under the Chilcotin sky moving,” they write: “It’s only my mother might know/ I am out here, ghost or imagined shape,/ lighter being./ I stand in the field so consumed by night/ I become it: permeated, travelled-through,/ thoughts like wind,/ nothing you could write down.”
Conradi will read their poetry during a group showcase at FAWC on Friday, March 21 from 5 to 8 p.m. The event will also feature work by writer C. Mallon and visual artists Dani Levine and José De Sancristóbal.
