At first, he thought he had to know everything.
The hair color, the eye color, the backstory.
He mapped the landscape until there was nothing left to explore.
And then, quietly, he stopped writing.
Until, just as quietly, the story returned.
Fifteen years after setting aside his pen, Steve Mitchell came back to writing not with answers, but with questions. “I started using writing instead as a way to explore,” he says. “Exploration being nonrigid and open-ended.”
This shift—this leap toward the unknown—has defined Mitchell’s work ever since. His stories rarely follow a traditional arc. Told almost exclusively in the first person, his characters move through time in fragments—thoughts jump to the past, spill into the future, loop around in tangled emotional logic. “People don’t think and feel in a three-act structure,” Mitchell explains. “No one in my stories knows everything. Not the characters, and not the reader.”
It’s this open-ended, immersive approach that sets Mitchell’s voice apart. His 2018 novel, Cloud Diary (C&R Press), unfolds from a single viewpoint—a man navigating life alongside a partner who has chosen her own death in the face of terminal illness. The novel became more than just text: Mitchell invited 18 musicians to respond to the book through music, crafting an original score that echoed the emotional resonance of the narrative without ever reading the full manuscript. The result was a live, cross-disciplinary reading experience—part performance, part conversation.
That interest in collaboration and cross-medium storytelling continues with Mitchell’s most recent project, Body of Trust. Created with Christine Kirouac and Andrew Saulters, this handmade novel is told through four distinct voices, set against the backdrop of a societal collapse no one in the story fully understands. Like much of Mitchell’s work, the novel doesn’t pretend to offer clean resolutions. Instead, it asks what we cling to when the world stops making sense.
Published as a limited-edition art object, Body of Trust is the kind of book you hold carefully, turn slowly. It features three bindings, 25 original drawings, and subtle shifts in design that mark each section of the story. “The text is a starting point,” Mitchell says. “It’s not fixed. New ideas may be generated. New directions may open up as the conversations proceed.”
The project was made possible through an Artist Support Grant from The Arts Council of Greater Greensboro.
“This whole project would not have been possible without it,” he says. “It covered the cost of materials, allowed us to fairly compensate our collaborators, and honestly, it was a kind of reassurance—to know that this made sense to someone else. That the vision made sense to someone else.”
That vision was also international. Christine Kirouac, who contributed the visual artwork, received support from the Canadian Arts Council to travel to Greensboro. The trio met on Zoom for months to align story and design, then worked together in person to finalize the pages, one by one. “The ACGG and arts councils help projects like this gain traction and become a thing,” Mitchell says. “This could not have been something any one of us could have done alone.”
Mitchell is also the co-owner of Scuppernong Books in downtown Greensboro, where Body of Trust is available for purchase. “It’s $50, signed and numbered, and includes a hand-painted piece by Christine,” he notes. “We’ve sold 61 of the 100 already.”
As both writer and bookseller, Mitchell is deeply invested in how language interacts with art, with music, with physical form. In his own words: “I’m very interested in how the written word can be expanded or augmented by collaboration with other artists and media.” When someone engages with his work and sees something he never intended, that’s the moment he writes for.
Because, as Steve Mitchell reminds us, fiction isn’t about providing answers. It’s about opening the door—and letting the reader step through.
You can learn more about Body of Trust and Steve Mitchell’s work by visiting his website.
