Q: You have a book coming out this fall, The Writing on the Wind’s Wall: Dialogues about Medical Assistance in Dying (The Porcupine’s Quill, 2025)—a collection of moving, thought-provoking dialogues about Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) with a wide range of voices—doctors, doulas, faith leaders, survivors, and prospective recipients—set in the healthcare hub of London, Ontario. What question’s answer will make somebody buy a thing? In this case, your book?

A: In the context of this book, the trouble with the question-answer format are several. But don’t worry: dopamine comes later.

First, a question that can be answered is a bore, is a solved proof, partakes of an understanding of exchange whereby a need inherent in the opening is satisfied resolutely in the reply; worse than a linear A-B, it is A-Z, a beginning and an ending. This is not the work of the humanities; this is the work of marketing, the simple satisfaction of a need.

The work of a good book or a good art or an et cetera is to make it harder to live, to invite the reader to stretch beyond the settled narratives and reduplicative forms to which they’ve become habituated, an injunction ever the more keen in a world so stricken with capitalist call and response, itch and scratch, that the moral obligation to look longer, allow greater complexity to be revealed, and not categorically to encapsulate one’s satisfaction by acquiring the product of an echo is the greater.

Second and carrying on from there, an answer, being contained, is a product, is a complete thing, is separable from its environment, an individual ego bereft of an understanding of its context, unconnected to more than the dyad of commercial exchange in which it partakes.

Fourth, it is the product of what Paolo Freire calls the “banking model of education:” an answer replicates an old order, limned with Grecian dust, in which the questioner (the student), knowing nothing, appeals to the teacher (knowing everything), but this fundamentally neglects to recognize the subjectivity of the student (whom Freire calls the student-teacher in complement to the teacher-student, both of whom are enjoined to the process of conscientisization, of mutual liberation through continuous subjective exchange) while also anticipating that every student is equally blank of history—you hear overtones of Skinnerian and Pavlovian programmatic call-response/stimulus-reaction here—rather than full of unique experience, rich and complex and individuated. The same could be said for the interview format, which after over a decade in practice I’ve foregone in favour of dialogue.

Zebrath, if the sequencing of paragraphs “second” followed immediately by “fourth” troubled you, allow me to invite the poor proverbial cat out of the bag by offering a paragraph begun as this one is to remind you that the expected sequence in response to a simple provocation is not living reality but habit, rather what we might expect of the algorithm. When you are open to it, meaningful dialogue, like reality—trigger warning—is full of unexpected surprises by the provoked torsion and friction of whose incoming difference demands you differ yourself in response to the novel (which, #TLDR, this “answer” is becoming).

What I love about dialogue is exampled by the practice of a wonderful artist Pascal Hachem I spoke with a few days ago.

Pascal and I met following the installation of his first solo show in São Paulo which he created during a residency in Brasilia—to which he arrived, as he always arrives to residencies, with nothing more than a notebook. No paints, no glue, no objects or ideas preconceived and therefore unresponsive to the environment: he simply showed up with “trust” enough that what “dots” would need to be “connected” would present themselves simultaneous to his apprehension of how to connect them. The result was Whispering Skies, a relational cat’s cradle between Brasilia and Lebanon, analogizing the kite-fights of Brazil to the military drones forever whispering from Lebanese skies coupled with notice of locations that will be bombed, with or without warning, an element of Pascal’s representation of which was a tongue-in-cheek invocation of the smart phone locals will hold up from the street next to an anticipated bombing to watch; red string, evocative of the glass-covered string of battling kites, evocatively strewn along pieces of corrugated roof, themselves indicative of favelas, of stubborn life persisting despite, and connective personally to Pascal because of how he was taught in Lebanon to seek shelter under as many layers of roof as he could to survive—usually, because a storage space is often to be found in the ceiling of a bathroom in Lebanon, meaning these layered ceiling structures provide more protection from incoming explosives, in a bathroom—an edict made obsolete by the development and deployment of modern drone technology that will level a building with a single modern bomb; roofs which “I’m not used to this, but in Brasilia, the roof was like this: it depicts everything: one tiny lizard walking on the roof; it depicts one bird walking; it depicts the leaves and the wind, et cetera. So for me it was interesting to understand this project until one day, one mango fell on the roof. And this [incomprehensible]. And by forming this, it made the sound of, like, BOOM. Suddenly I was like—It’s interesting, because suddenly my perception of what’s the roof is completely different from what I’m surrounded. So, I said, I should place it and exchange it as a story because it’s very crucial and I’m amazed by nature how it’s very close to me—and I’m not against that, but—it was like a ping-pong of things between my experience of life and where I am now.” (Here is a link to Pascal’s show.)

Falafelth, many of the above words would have been characterized as run-on sentences and dismissed by institutions of learning that obstructed the education meaningful long-form dialogue would provide me through my twenties—along with extracurricular study and production of theatre and publication of poetry and art, music, and film criticism—a consequence of which dialogic practice is this book, The Writing on the Wind’s Wall: Dialogues about Medical Assistance in Dying, to which I’ll address myself more directly now.

The book is not written in the digressive, performative, syntactically complicated, and lexically stunting style of the foregoing. Rather the book is written for as wide an audience as possible because it aspires to an accessible act of service in line with the lives and careers of the two people whom by their fatal encounters with the Canadian healthcare industry prompted the book—my late father, a professional public servant of thirty-eight years in London, Ontario, a dedicated past president of the Optimist Club of Oakridge Acres, the local chapter of a charity designed to raise money for children’s sport, including what has become the world’s largest sledge-hockey tournament (The London Blizzard Invitational, which my dad helped found in the early aughts), retired professionally for nearly five years before a furious cancer spread throughout splitting his bones, a man entitled to MAiD but who for a fugue of reasons died without the good quick death he requested in Victoria Hospital on July 10th, 2020; and his mother, a nurse and teacher of forty years and a dedicated community servant for longer, a woman who was knitting sleeping bags for the unhoused until despite requesting MAiD died days after her 91st birthday by conscious phlegmatic asphyxiation at that same hospital on February 8th, 2025.

By the book I sought to catch and enlotus their tortures into polyphony defiant of public discourse as binary and it’s on the image of the lotus that I’ll close: as I aspired in microcosm here to do in response to an iterative invitation to partake of a banking model of education, the itch a scratch solves—capitalism as psoriasis—the lotus sits upon and among the swamp, transmuting the stink of the muck into many-petalled balance, fragrant presence, and radiant light; and so do I daily and so might we all aspire to that invitational act of transmutation in—I trust you’ll agree—fertile times.

P.S. Allow me to address you directly with an invitation. This book on Medical Assistance in Dying has led me to another, First Do No Harm: Ten Years as a Death Doctor, as well as that second book’s limited-series adaptation to the screen, Death Doctor, which I bring to your attention because I’m looking for visionary collaborators in the publishing and film-and-television industries to contribute to making these happen.

I’m also developing a feature film, The Phoenix, about the life and work of revolutionary theatre director Zé Celso, with Teatro Oficina of São Paulo, Brazil; a dystopian news-parodying sketch-comedy limited series; a dozen titles of world-class IP from leading Canadian publishers for adaptation to the screen; multiple books of dialogue with avant-garde artists from around the world; multiple books of formally unique poetry; and multiple collaborative art installations.

In addition to my work in the arts, as one of the first venture capital investors in Revolve Surgical, which recently made its first sale for pioneering a minimally invasive surgical robotic device capable of mending the splitting spine of a foetus in utero, I’m also actively seeking to engage additional companies in the field of medical robotics provided their ambit is to minimize suffering; and as an Ambassador for Green Field Paper Company, on whose recycled seed-paper two of my recent books have been published, and as Vice-Chair of the Board of Directors of Changing Ways, a non-profit in my hometown dedicated to ending violence against women, I’m always open to connections and collaborations in the non-profit, ecological, and social-justice sectors too.

If you wish to support my or my international community’s work in any way, or if you want to connect or collaborate on any imaginable project in any of the arts, you can always reach out to me at kevin@astoriapictures.ca.

*The Writing on the Wind’s Wall: Dialogues about Medical Assistance in Dying* (The Porcupine’s Quill, 2025) by Kevin Heslop.

About The Writing on the Wind’s Wall:

The Writing on the Wind’s Wall listens at length to the voices of those affected by 'Medical Assistance in Dying' in the city of London, Ontario, a national healthcare hub: a death doula, a sound-healer, a psychiatrist, a scholar, a doctor, a medium, an ethicist, a prospective recipient, a politician, a reverend, and several recipients' survivors. Facilitated by Kevin Andrew Heslop, these dialogues are informed by the work of a wide variety of cultural leaders, including Paolo Freire, John Cage, Li-Young Lee, Thích Nhất Hạnh, and Robert Hass. The collection documents how euthanasia, while in the spirit of individual liberty, increases proportional to the world’s socioeconomic, ideological, and (therefore) ecological unsustainability. The Writing on the Wind’s Wall is a testament to what a community felt and believed in the 2020s about living, and dying, together.

About Kevin Andrew Heslop:

Kevin Andrew Heslop (b. 1992, Canada) is the author, most recently, of The Writing on the Wind’s Wall: Dialogues about Medical Assistance in Dying (The Porcupine’s Quill, 2025).

Currently serving his hometown as Vice-Chair of the Board of Changing Ways, a non-profit dedicated to ending violence against women, Kevin is also one of the first venture-capital investors in Revolve Surgical, which recently made its first sale for pioneering a minimally invasive surgical robotic device capable of mending the splitting spine of a foetus in utero, and an ambassador to Green Field Paper Company, on whose recycled seed-paper two of his recent books have been published.

Supported by the London, Ontario, and Canada Councils for the Arts, Kevin’s directorial work with Nicole Coenen—notably White, Things She Wants, and Ripley’s Aquarium—has won prizes from the Toronto Short Film Festival, the Vancouver Independent Film Festival, the Independent Shorts Awards, the Berlin Shorts Awards, and the Los Angeles International Film Festival, screening at dozens of festivals around the world. In 2022 he founded Astoria Pictures to develop, finance, and distribute projects in film and television for which to will serve as writer, director, and/or producer.

Kevin’s poetry has been published by The Blasted Tree Art Collective, Frog Hollow Press, Anstruther Press, Gordon Hill Press, Baseline Press, Rose Garden Press, and, mostly recently, The Fiddlehead; collaborative art installed with McIntosh Gallery, Westland Gallery, and Centre [3] for artistic and social practice; and dialogues amplified via Parrot Talks, The Miramichi Reader, and The Seaboard Review, a selection of which are forthcoming from Guernica Editions as Craft, Consciousness: Dialogues about the Arts (2027, vol. i & 2028, vol. ii).