One inquiry, written in several languages

Lawrence Nault's newest book, Laird: Between Him and the Dark, tells the story of loss from the other end of the leash: a grief memoir narrated by Laird, the rough collie who lived beside him. Nault is releasing the digital edition permanently free because he does not believe a book written to accompany people through grief should begin with a price barrier.

Laird is not an invented literary device. He appears with his sister, Skye, in Nault's documentary work and sat beside him through hundreds of recorded videos. The dog telling the story exists throughout the visual archive — footage is available to producers. Nault describes the book as a documentary in words: not a fable, but a true account told from the other end of the leash.

Three fiction sequences for different generations of readers, documentary films, a podcast, independent research, and a policy publication — all developed from Alberta's Badlands through a largely self-directed creative practice. This is not a productivity-hack story. It is a conversation about what becomes possible when a writer stops waiting for institutions to validate the range of the work and begins building the publishing, research, audio, and film structures needed to carry it — structures Nault has been assembling across more than twenty years of independent publishing.

Before becoming a full-time author, Nault worked with materials, animals, technology, and systems: architectural blacksmithing, woodworking, farriery, information technology, and governance. The continuity is not the résumé but the method. Each kind of work requires attention to structure, stress, failure, consequence, and the obligation to stand behind what has been made. It is a conversation about unconventional routes into literature, multiple working lives, and fiction constructed by someone trained to notice where things break.

Nault writes speculative and ecological fiction for middle-grade readers, teenagers, and adults: the MacIver Kids adventures, the four-book Draconim series, and the adult Symbiosis Sequence. These are not versions of the same story repackaged for different markets. They ask related questions at different levels of complexity: what people inherit, how power shapes the world around them, what humans owe the living planet, and whether the next generation must simply accept the systems handed to it.

Lawrence Nault calls himself the Mountain Hermit, yet he publishes, records, and films continuously. In Echoes of a Hermit, the subject and filmmaker occupy the same solitary landscape. The apparent contradiction opens a larger question: what if solitude is not withdrawal from the world, but a method of paying closer attention to it? With On Nature and Writing now in production, Nault is continuing to examine how landscape, isolation, animals, chronic experience, and creative work shape one another.

The hoodoos, coulees, exposed strata, and deep geological time of Alberta's Badlands are not merely scenery in Nault's work. They shape how he thinks. A landscape that carries millions of years visibly in its walls changes the scale of words such as consequence, inheritance, extraction, and disappearance. That sense of time runs beneath his fiction, documentary work, and policy writing: stories about what survives, what is buried, and what one generation leaves for another.

Most conversations about technology treat nature as a resource or an obstacle. Most conversations about nature treat technology as an intrusion. Stone & Signal begins in the space between them, asking how human beings make meaning while living inside both technological systems and the natural world. Its next season provides a timely opening for cross-podcast conversations about what changes when a writer, researcher, and filmmaker approaches the same questions through voice.

The author of ecological dragon novels, interplanetary adventures, adult speculative fiction, and a grief memoir narrated by a dog also publishes public-policy proposals, open research, and a citizen's handbook for evaluating data-centre development. The work looks unusually broad until its central question becomes visible: who controls land, data, and resources, who is excluded from those decisions, and who lives with the consequences?

The clearest example of the pairing: his research on data extraction and consent, and RePHleXions, his novel about a society that accepted the bargain one convenience at a time. This is the whole-profile angle for arts programs interested in why one writer refuses to separate imagination from public systems.