Nightwalker
You’re on a walk.
It’s night.
Near silence.
A leaf falls, and sounds.
You’re alone.
Late, November, start of winter.
The days are short, air is moist, when respiration makes itself visible, gas condenses into liquids inside of hot volumes, heat creaks, out of furnaces, another winter, arrivals, the people, they retreat, shelter, they’re all, indoors.
Neighbours, acquaintances, cousins, strangers you see at the grocery store, last week, and then next, watching flatscreens, kneading dough, dancing old tunes, under light, always, under light, warm, heat, hearth, light, warmth, insulated, inside, isolation, but you, no, not you, you’re outside, walking, watching, no, waiting.
You go there, gently.
Quiet is the footfall that takes the greatest step.
You, Nightwalker.
I first met Eric Francisco at CanZine 2023, a zine and independent press publishing fair in which Eric was tabling for Reflex Editions, which is a an artists’ book and zine publishing collective that he co-founded in 2022. Reflex Editions publishes small editions of hand-made zines, artists’ books, and print objects, with an emphasis on collaborative process and themes of the built-natural environment. Eric, as I came to learn through our ensuing friendship, is particularly interested in publishing work that engages the pyscho-geographical — or, the way each individual holds and uses a mental image, or imprint, of the world(s) around them. Like me, and many others, he’s inspired by the lineage that is Dadaism-Surrealism-Situationism. His serial travel photozine, Souvenir, for example, serves as “psychogeographical document and a tangible memento of the landscapes, textures, and visual poetry of the places he visits.”
Meeting together at Kensington Market’s Pamenar one afternoon, Eric asked me if I would be interested in working with him on a new project: a photobook of images captured during nightly walks in the suburbs using only ambient light. He called it Nightwalker, after the English title attributed to Louis Aragon’s Le paysan de Paris, and wanted to know if I would contribute poems for this collection.
What Eric didn’t know is that I already had the text written. In 2019 I took a creative writing seminar on science fiction in the geography department I was studying in. The seminar was an experiment from a professor whose specialization on paper was health geography, but whose real passion was science fiction and imaginations of different worlds run by different rules. After a semester of reading Ursula K. Le Guin, Philip K. Dick, and Octavia Butler, I wrote my final project as a three-part short story entitled Light in Three Tenses. I was interested in exploring the idea of light and its forms, and how I could speak of light in past, present, and future tenses. The last part of this project, written in the future tense, followed a lone protagonist drifting through nocturnal streets, ruminating on the capture of light energy into light matter and harnessed by light appliances. He observed what people did with this capture. It was called Nightwalker.
I’ve worked on this new artists’ book with Eric since September 2024. What started as an idea or a dream quickly took on flesh, became real. We begun by bringing together our material: Eric, his photos; me, my story (which I was in the process of transforming into verse). Seeing how they interacted, we started imagining how to shape them together into a unified experience, and quickly landed on the ideas of automatic editing, randomized sequence, and pages of three different sizes.
Over the autumn, we matched photo with text, chose the size format of each image, and assembled 18 unique spreads of 54 double-sided pages. Fast forward to August 2025, and after months of Eric’s hard work experimenting with the details of the publication’s form (slip case, foil stamping, coil binding), and Eric and I are in Reflex Editions’s studio assembling by hand the randomized sequence of the 18 spreads into 55 copies of our book, Nightwalker, in which each copy is in itself unique.
The final form of the book presents Eric and I’s nocturnal ambulations, conducted in very distinct contexts (between Mississauga and Mexico City), through pages drifting between image and text, black and white, realist and abstract. As its eventual reader, we invite you to lose yourself in Nightwalker’s labyrinth of hypnagogic landscapes, phantasmagorias, and effervescent textures.
Join us for the book’s launch this Sunday, September 7th, from 4-6PM at Contact Photobook Lab (80 Spadina Ave, Suite 205). The launch includes a book presentation, discussion, and collective reading. There will be light refreshments for free and copies of Nightwalker for purchase. Doors will open at 4PM, and the event will begin at 4:30 🎑
In the meantime, a little treat: a playlist Eric and I made for you of sonic inspirations for this project: Oklou, Grouper, Ethel Cain, Kelela & more.
Eric and I have put much love into this project and would love for you to join us in giving it light, bringing it into the world, sending it off . . .
