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Go ahead, ask Lawrence Weschler – the author of 12 devouringly readable volumes of “passion pieces” on artists, activists, forgers, despots and other obsessives – why, with all his concern for literary voice, he's never written fiction. True to form, he'll tell you a story about someone twice as extreme.

In this one, he is visiting a class along with Ian Frazier, another writer from Weschler's former long-time employer The New Yorker. A student asks each to name some favourite novels. Weschler rattles off a list; Frazier says he doesn't have any.

Weschler is agog. “What can you possibly mean?”

“I can't read fiction,” his colleague replies. “When it begins, ‘John was walking down the street…,' all I can think is, No he wasn't! ”

Weschler's tales always unfold in such eccentric twists. The bestselling Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonders begins with Weschler stumbling on a museum of odd curios in Los Angeles. As he burrows down the rabbit hole of its exhibits' far-fetched claims, fact and hoax and art and science blur – to the point that one patron later asked the museum's director, “Tell me the truth: Does that guy ‘Weschler' really exist?”

This is narrative as psychoactive drug, an effect Weschler produces whether he's writing about dissidents in exile or about David Hockney painting on his iPhone.

“What unites my writing is that it's about people or places that catch fire,” he says. “They were moseying around in the dailiness of life and suddenly took off. In individuals, that can be fun to watch, whether it's magisterial or comic. In the case of a body politic, it's enthralling.”

And there's the real reason the 57-year-old, California-bred author, who appears in Toronto Dec. 2 and Dec. 3, doesn't write fiction: For him, reality is already crammed with plot and epiphany.

He teaches a class in literary non-fiction at New York University every year that is evenly split between graduate students in journalism and graduates in poetry. “I'm trying to create a generation of investigative poets,” he half-jokes. “Or lyrical reporters.”

Unfortunately, as he warns his students, that doesn't mean the publishing world is busy readying a home for them, too. “Editors think everybody else doesn't have time to read, because the editors don't, with the pressures that are being put on them. But writerly non-fiction makes time. … People get lost in it.”

That was once the hallmark of The New Yorker, where Weschler was hired in 1981. But its aesthetic, he says, dimmed in the 1990s under Tina Brown – whose tenure Weschler is proud to have outlasted even though they had “insane fights … the kind where people in the office would be leaning out of their carrels saying, ‘What the hell was that?'” – and current editor David Remnick.

“The general impression I have of The New Yorker now is that David Remnick is the greatest editor The Washington Post ever had. … It's much more overtly political, covering issues of the moment in a journalistic, but not necessarily writerly, fashion.”

Weschler left in 2002. A year later he produced a gorgeous prototype for a new general-interest magazine called Omnivore, but could never find a sponsor. For now he fulfills his curatorial yearnings as director of the New York Institute for the Humanities and the Chicago Humanities Festival.

He doesn't put all the blame on publishers. “To some extent it is a function of a world in which instead of emotion you have emoticons. Twitter is the reductio ad absurdum – everything is reduced to abbreviations. It's a substitute for any kind of patterned sensibility.”

Even the medium in which that sensibility best thrives seems at risk, as he'll address in his lecture tonight on the “book-vs.-digital divide.”

“I love the Web,” he says. “But a book is centripetal while the Web is centrifugal: A book draws you in, while information on the Internet keeps throwing you outward.

“I also address the issue of permanence. … Granted, the Rosetta Stone for permanence is the Rosetta Stone – anything since clay tablets is less permanent. We've lost seven-eighths of the plays of ancient Greece because they were on papyrus. But now we're losing the entire Clinton administration because it was on floppy disks.”

But it's mainly a smaller, more intimate event that brings Weschler to Toronto. Author Sheila Heti and artist Margaux Williamson have invited him for a somewhat vaudevillian happening called “What's the New Line?”

He'll join a cast of local creators to explore whether, if you erase the border between fiction and non-fiction, there's a more relevant division to use in 21st-century thinking. It's a curious proposition, considering that in his own work, “lines” are almost always connections rather than boundaries.

“It seems what we'll do,” says Weschler, sounding both quizzical and game, “is try to hone the question, ask what it means. … Answers are boring. The only kind I like are the sort that lead to more questions than we started with.”

Lawrence Weschler appears Dec. 2 at 7 p.m. at Innis Town Hall (2 Sussex Ave.), free, and Dec. 3 at 8 p.m. at CineCycle (129 Spadina Ave.), $10.