Blood squelches as the first woman plucks her eyeball from its socket and shoves it into her video camera’s battery slot. An IV filled with blood tethers the second woman to her word processor. Blood drips onto a clean white canvas as the third woman extracts her heart and lungs from her chest.
Before reading Suture, I’d never considered how ripping flesh, spilled blood, and displaced eyeballs could be written so tenderly. But when Nic Brewer joins the Zoom call, I understand how warmth can leak into even the goriest of writing.
Brewer sits on a blanket in the park, occasionally interrupting her own thoughts to pan her camera toward her dog, and tells me about the university satire class where her debut novel, Suture, took its first breath ten years prior. It began with a short story about a visual artist whose medium of choice is the bloodied mess of her own extracted heart.
“I wanted something visceral,” she tells me. “Something to represent what it feels like to make art, and it feels like ripping out your heart sometimes.”
However, this story wasn’t enough for Brewer. She realized there was a whole universe she needed to write into existence – one populated with artists who, quite literally, tear themselves open in the name of art. The initial story would later bloom into Suture. Brewer brings three women to life in these interweaving stories: Eva, a filmmaker who uses her eyes as camera batteries, Grace, a writer who uses her blood to power her word processor, and Finn, a visual artist who cuts herself open and uses her internal organs to fill the canvas.
“That’s the thing about all that blood,” Brewer writes in Suture. “It wasn’t just a story. It’s the worst parts of who I am, distilled over the hours and days and weeks of my worst self […] I get paid to stay in the hard parts of it long enough to make sense of them.”
Suture is not quiet about the allegories for pain’s role in art and the extent that self-destruction can be tolerated in relationships and creativity. Brewer takes an empathetic approach to writing, as Suture was born from the desire to articulate a shared – but often unspoken – loneliness.
“The [book’s] dedication is for a friend of mine who died by suicide and I know how many creatives flirt with that so much more than we would like, so much more than we would hope, and how hard it is to love somebody who feels like being dead is a better option for everyone in their lives than being alive,” Brewer says.Exploring loneliness in its various forms – whether experienced alone or in the presence of love – is central in the stories of Suture. “I wanted artists to be able to find themselves in this book, but I also wanted people who love artists to find themselves in this book — to find some relief and companionship and solidarity.”
Over the span of ten years, the book Brewer was writing grew alongside her, but it was Suture’s queerness that represented the final part of finding authenticity in herself. For Brewer, coming to terms with her own queerness and meeting her wife was the catalyst to developing the novel’s emotional core: a love story between two women.
“When I met the love of my life, I finally understood what love was supposed to feel like when it’s good and true,” Brewer says. “The queerness in Suture is absolutely essential because it shows, more than anything, the good, I think.”
Writing her debut novel spanned the entirety of Brewer’s twenties – a tumultuous decade marked by many lessons that became integral to the fabric of the novel. Ultimately, it was Suture that “taught [Brewer] how to be human.” She acknowledges that learning these lessons in the decade leading up to Suture’s publication was intricately linked with the act of writing.
“A part of it was probably a desire to communicate these lessons learned to someone else through Suture. I really don’t think I would be the same person I am if I hadn’t been writing a book the whole time that I was learning how to be in this world,” Brewer reflects. “By the time I was finished writing, I felt like a whole human with a bit of an understanding of what it means to be alive and doing good in this hellscape of the planet.”
You can find Nic Brewer at https://notnicolebrewer.com/
Bernice Santos is a Canadian fiction and non-fiction writer based in Mississauga. She writes short stories and articles, and loves to explore storytelling in different forms. She holds an HBA from the University of Toronto, where she studied Professional Writing & Communications Technology. Bernice published her debut book, Ghosts of a Cure, in April 2023 and was a finalist in the 2023 Whistler Independent Book Awards in the fiction category. She now works as a writer in the non-profit sector and freelances as a writer and editor when she’s not working on her second book. You can find Bernice at bernicesantos.com