Brock Eldon
About Brock Eldon
“Where Language Breaks, Truth Begins”
Brock Eldon is a novelist, poet, and essayist whose work explores the intersections of memory, exile, and the search for meaning in a disenchanted age. Educated in English literature at Western University and Queen’s University in Canada, he has lived and written across Asia for much of the past decade, teaching in Vietnam, China, and South Korea. His fiction and criticism trace the fault lines between inner life and social collapse, blending modernist introspection with post-industrial realism.
He is the author of Dominion Ashes: A Book of Decline, his debut story collection The Darkroom Exhibits, and novel The Longing for Form, to be published by Ballerini Books Press in 2026-27. As well as his work on Null Point and The Commonplace Book on Substack, his essays and poems appear regularly in Salmagundi Magazine, The Metropolitan Review, and C2C Journal, where he writes on literature, film, and the moral imagination.
Eldon’s aesthetic has been described as “metaphysical realism”—gritty, bodily, and haunted by beauty. His influences range from Dostoevsky and McCarthy to Oates and Malick, but his tone remains disciplined, fatalistic, and quietly lyrical. He writes out of the conviction that style is an ethical act, and that language, at its most precise, becomes a form of resistance.
He currently divides his time between Canada and Hanoi, Vietnam.
Null Point
A studio for fiction, poetry, and experimental prose.
Here language collapses and remakes itself—stories written at the edge of endurance, where memory, form, and emotion converge. Null Point is the mirror image of the critic’s page: not the analysis of meaning, but its creation.
→ Narrative Built from Collapse.
Visit Null Point
The Commonplace Book
A journal of literary criticism, philosophy, and attention.
Each essay traces how art endures when belief falters—how the act of seeing becomes an ethical act. From Homer to Beckett, from Simone Weil to Paul Thomas Anderson, these pieces map the hidden correspondences between vision and discipline.
→ Longform Criticism. Faithful Attention.
Visit The Commonplace Book
I write toward the fracture. Every work begins where language fails—where truth, beauty, and belief no longer hold their inherited shapes. Writing is not redemption, but exposure. It is a way of learning how to see again after the world has gone blind with noise.
I believe style is an ethical act. Every sentence must earn its existence. Precision is the last form of rebellion in an age that confuses abundance for meaning. A writer’s task is to choose the single necessary word over the thousand available ones—to build from silence rather than add to it.
I do not write to comfort, or to instruct. I write to endure. The page is both mirror and instrument, a place where memory and invention negotiate the terms of survival. Fiction and criticism are not opposites—they are two dialects of the same speech: one reaching inward, the other outward.
My work stands at the intersection of thought and form, language and fracture, the lived and the imagined. It seeks a clarity forged through dissonance, a beauty that refuses ease.
What remains, after everything else, is attention.
Creative Mission
Workshops & Services
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The Discipline of Form
Every piece of writing is a negotiation between impulse and structure. My workshops are built around that tension—the place where raw voice becomes deliberate art. These sessions are not about tricks or templates. They’re about clarity, endurance, and the pursuit of sentences that can survive time.
Each workshop combines close reading, guided discussion, and line-by-line editing. Writers leave with sharpened instincts, concrete revisions, and a renewed sense of artistic purpose. Whether you’re working on a short story, essay, or novel-in-progress, the goal is always the same: precision, proportion, and truth.tion text goes here
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The Ethics of the Sentence
Editing, at its best, is not correction—it’s revelation. It’s the slow act of discovering what your work is actually trying to say, and helping it say that with precision and integrity. My role is not to rewrite your voice but to refine it—to pare away noise until the signal is undeniable.
I work with writers of fiction, nonfiction, and criticism who take their craft seriously. Every project is treated as a collaboration: an attempt to make language equal to experience, to ensure that every sentence bears the necessary weight.
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Conversations that Matter
I’m available for interviews, podcasts, and public discussions on literature, art, criticism, and the creative process. My work spans fiction, essays, and longform criticism, often exploring themes of language, exile, and moral imagination. Whether the focus is craft, philosophy, or the state of contemporary writing, I welcome dialogues that approach art as a living discipline—not a product.
If you’re a journalist, editor, podcaster, or curator interested in arranging a conversation, please reach out. I’m open to in-person and virtual formats and can tailor the discussion to your publication, classroom, or event.
→ For booking inquiries, contact: brockeldonschnurr@gmail.com
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The Craft of Attention
I teach because writing is not a solitary act—it’s a conversation across generations, between the living and the dead. Every classroom is a continuation of that dialogue. My approach is rooted in close reading, moral imagination, and the belief that language is a discipline before it is an art.
I work with students and writers who want to go beyond self-expression toward mastery—those willing to test their limits in pursuit of clarity, structure, and truth. My courses blend literary analysis with practice: studying how the great sentences of the past reveal the architecture of thought, and how that architecture can be inhabited today.
I’m available for guest lectures, university seminars, and independent mentorships in fiction, essay, and criticism.
→ For invitations or course inquiries, contact: brockeldonschnurr@gmail.com