Conor Mc Donnell: On process and practice: The evolving work of a writer
- Sheelagh Caygill
- Sep 4
- 6 min read
Dr. Conor Mc Donnell is a physician in the Department of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine at The Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto.
He is the author of two collections of poems (most recently This Insistent List, ThreadNeedle Publishing, 2024) and three chapbooks. His poems have appeared in various Canadian and international publications as well as noted medical journals such as JAMA and CAMJ. He is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto, where he is also editor in chief of Case Repertory, a narrative-based medicine publication which seeks to engage and promote the voice of patients in collaboration with their healthcare givers.
Conor's next book, What We Know So Far Is, is published in October, 2025. It is a powerful long poem that captures the disquiet of our age with cinematic language and imagery, and harkens back to the previous century in its daring. Drawing from his Irish heritage, his experience as a pediatrician and many other sources, Conor has created a work that echoes the scope of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Hart Crane’s The Bridge. Both ecstatic and challenging, the lines of the poem are filled with allusions and references, with biology shading into history into cultures both ancient and contemporary, where words are predators and “memes disseminate cultural genes.” Through it all runs Conor's fascination with language, ever-shifting, beguiling, mutating, and virus-like. In these questioning, DNA-like lines, Conor shows us how to unmake and remake our understanding of the world. Here is Conor Mc Donnell: On process and practice: The evolving work of a writer. He shares his concerns about AI, and the process of getting published.
Conor Mc Donnell: On process and practice: The evolving work of a writer
OCW: Has your writing evolved over the years? If so, how? Through writing experience? Reading a lot? Writing courses or communities? A combination, or something else?
CMD: I’d love to think my writing has evolved over the years. It’s certainly changed a lot, but I sometimes find old pieces and don’t recognize that writer anymore. I also occasionally find an older piece and think ‘wow, this was good’ and wonder if I am capable of writing that well now.
I did a lot of courses, seminars and writing retreats between 2010 and 2015 which helped me in terms of discipline, experimentation, and the value in writing every day even if it’s just for a few minutes.
One aspect that has remained consistent in all that time is my reading. When I am working on a project, I consume books as a font of knowledge, ideas, and a means to surround myself with creative energy.
Increasingly, I find my poetry collections need a bibliography at the end identifying poems, books, films, music, people, etc. The collective whole of everything I consume during that time creates the headspace I inhabit in order to address the ideas I’m wrestling with.
On AI: A threat to creativity and human connection
OCW: Do you see generative AI as a threat or benefit to writers?
CMD: As a scientist a physician and a writer I see generative AI as a threat to everything. Anything built on a triad of laziness, ‘efficiencies’, and ‘what if/what the hell’ planning will certainly make Google, Amazon and Siri appear more impressive, but will also remove humans from the workspace and decision-making. Add to that a binary-based decision-support stratagem and the inability to appreciate nuance and we have created what everyone feared in the 1950s, too much poorly-considered power sitting behind a single-operator button; only this time around we are removing ‘the human element’ from the most critical aspects of decision making.
My non-clinical academic and research portfolios comprise patient safety, quality improvement, and error and harm reduction, so I do see the benefits of mining large amounts of data to better inform decision-making in scenarios where humans have to make visually-based judgement calls, e.g., some tasks in radiology or dermatology. However, I have also seen reports like the clinical-decision support AI which recommended curettage / evacuation of an embryo that had died in utero. The AI was not programmed to look for a second heartbeat so, the non-viable embryo was successfully removed as was a perfectly healthy embryo that the AI was not aware of ...
In addition, blame/liability in such scenarios does not lie with the creators of the AI, nor the administrators who choose to implement the AI; the person at fault is/will be the physician (human) who follows every suggestion made by AI yet does not know when to go against what they are being told is the correct course of action to take – damned if you don’t, damned if they do.
While AI may make some aspects of life easier it will also engineer one in a million scenarios no-one ever saw coming that lead to loss of life. It’s already happening.
OCW: Do you use social media to engage readers, writers, or publishers and, if so, which platforms?
CMD: I used to but not really anymore. I find social media mostly exhausting.
I am far from being a luddite; in my day-job I consistently embrace adopt and champion new technologies and I am constantly learning just to keep up, however, social media is not an individual thing, it’s exponential. You start with 10-100 friends & family; if you work really hard at it you can expand by a factor of ten into the thousands; if you do something huge or someone with a huge profile spotlights you then you hit the millions. But it doesn’t move at the pace of embracing the individual or giving an idea time and space to germinate.
For me, the best examples of effective social media are examples such as #METOO, and The Red-Hand Files. The ratio of input to content gathered people as it gains momentum, as opposed to trampling everyone in a race to reach the prize.
OCW: Do you edit as you write, or write and edit later?
CMD: I edit as I write, I have to! Increasingly, I write poetry with a book or collection in mind; therefore individual poems feel like pieces of the whole. My latest, What We Know So Far Is (Wolsak and Wynn, Fall 2025), is a long poem and I was constantly editing, reshaping, curating, expanding and pruning as the work advanced. It might be a product of the very little free time I have outside of work but I tend to come up with high-concepts, then work towards/within those. It sometimes feels like an act of assembly and is maybe another reason why I often think I was a better writer a few years ago; however, that may also be self-judgement on idiosyncratic word choices as opposed to ‘world-building through language’.
I am currently working on three separate projects:
My fourth poetry collection: which is set within an absolute moment in time in a very distinct universe so, each new piece changes what came before it and I find I am moving backward and forwards through the manuscript every day.
A novella: a high-high concept which is a lot of fun to write. This is proving helpful at the moment, because I can direct all my ‘non-fourth collection’ thoughts and ideas towards this.
A collection of essays: This is a good location for me to deposit some of my more ‘personal/emotional’ writing as it may never see the light of day but provides these pieces and moments a place to live and breathe anyway.
(It also ‘helps’ that I suffer from severe insomnia).
Finding a home for words: From journals to readings
OCW: If you’ve been published, how did you find your first publisher?
CMD: This is a really good question, for a whole bunch of reasons. I read Natalie Lim’s comments here regarding her first submission winning the CBC Poetry Prize and it was interesting to hear her say ‘if I knew who won this before me I might not have bothered’. I think that perfectly captures the mix of right time, right place, right reviewer that we all have to live with.
My first poems were published in The Fiddlehead. At the end of a writing course taught by Paul Vermeersch, he suggested I send two poems to The Fiddlehead and they were accepted! Easy, right?
Paul introduced me to Jim Johnstone, who worked hard to refine and publish my first chapbook, The Book of Retaliations, with Anstruther Press. Paul and Jim mentored me, read awful first drafts, etc. and I am sure a good word was had with Denis de Klerck (Mansfield Press), which lead to the publication of my first poetry collection, Recovery Community, in 2021.
And, so it goes. Who was my first publisher? Fiddlehead? Jim? Denis? Paul? I think they were all vital, and remain so. If I am 1000 per cent honest, I find it difficult to publish individual poems now. I submit like everyone else, but my work doesn’t chime with reviewers/readers right now and that’s ok. The experience remains when I stand up and read to hooman faces in a real physical space, I get the engagement I was hoping for in the first place. Right now, I am in a phase of connecting in person rather than on the pages of any one journal. That may or may not change but, like social media, I don’t seek validation from sources that don’t have the time or energy to appreciate what I’m trying to do so, I simply do the work, I publish the books and I live simultaneously in what I am writing right now versus what might or might not be published in an undecided future.