12 or 20 (second series) questions with Mallory Tater

Mallory Tater is the author of four books: This Will Be Good: Poems, The Birth Yard: A Novel, Lockers are for Bearcats Only: Poems & Soft Tissue: A Novel (forthcoming with ECW Press in 2028). She was the publisher of Rahila’s Ghost Press, a now-retired chapbook press. Mallory currently lives in Vancouver, where she teaches at the University of British Columbia’s School of Creative Writing.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

In all my works—be they poetry or fiction—I am fascinated by the way patriarchal systems shape the body, identity, and society. My writing often explores the enduring effects of childhood experiences, purity culture, and institutional religion, analyzing how early lessons on gender roles, shame, and family disconnection arise from the body. This collection poses queries about the survival of friendship and selfhood, how we bear the marks from the organizations and connections that mold us, and how we can transform those into something healing or creative. All of my work circles the same themes I feel like—whether delving into friendship and grief, motherhood and personal agency, or the struggle between genuine self-expression and aspiration—to understand what it means to live meaningfully within (and against) structures that seek to restrict and constrain us.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I find working with an editor awakening, encouraging and vital to transform my work into something beyond the self. My spouse, Curtis LeBlanc, always says writing is a selfish endeavor with the most compassionate results. An outside editorial eye is the initial cultivator of that shift from the individual to the collective. For this collection, working with Jim Johnstone was invaluable as he helped me embrace the mess of the page and to experiment with lineation and shape/form more than I typically do. Editors invite risk and risk enhances the poem.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

So simple—write the work that you want to read.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I welcomed a baby last spring, so I do not write on a daily basis. Writing when I'm not always particularly inspired, but when time allows, is a new experience for me but I am trying to embrace it and treat it as time well spent no matter if it’s a generative or ‘good’ sitting. Every day for me starts with baby cuddles, a french press amount of coffee and watching old fashioned, dread-filled cable news.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

My friends here in Vancouver (Hi, Jocelyn Tennant, Mica Lemiski, Rachel Jansen and Selina Boan!) are really talented writers. I meet them for coffee or a walk and we talk about our stalls, our hopes, our process. I always want to write afterwards. Their company and conversation is a magic balm!

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Gain laundry detergent.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

I love television as an art form and escapism. A good docuseries deep-diving on an unconventional family or a travel show exploring somewhere I’ve never been instantly captivates me. I can lose an entire day to television if I let myself. Sometimes I do.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

The collections of Canadian poetry that I’ve enjoyed most from recent years are The Program by Megan Fennya Jones, Exhibitionist by Molly Cross-Blanchard, and Midway by Kayla Czaga. These are books that boldly embrace intimacy, humor, and sadness in a way I always want my own work to.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I’ve always wanted to write a horror screenplay with Curtis LeBlanc and Shaun Robinson. We watch a lot of horror movies together and I think we’d come up with something really beautiful, contemporary and intense.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I love the origins of language and etymology and helping people. If I had a keener science-oriented brain, I think I would’ve loved to have been a speech pathologist.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I’ve been writing since I was very young. My first story was entitled The Dragon That Couldn’t Blow Flames. I think it’s because I love to talk but I can’t talk all day—not enough people will listen that long. Writing is a place I can continue conversations with myself in peace and in solitude without annoying everyone.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves by Sophie Gilbert.  And I just rewatched Parasite on a plane and it held up even better than I remembered!

20 - What are you currently working on?

I have a novel coming out with ECW Press called Soft Tissue and I am in the midst of working with my editor Pia Singhal and darkening the tonal arc of the book. It’s about reality television, stage parenting, dance culture and the darkness of social media fame.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

ongoing notes: mid-June, 2026: Joshua Wilkerson + Zoé Mahfouz,

We will see you at the ottawa small press book fair this weekend, yes? Reading on Friday at Anina’s Café and fair itself on Saturday at the Glebe Community Centre. Can you believe we’ve been doing this for more than three decades? There’s probably other stuff too. Oh, I’ve been posting a slew of interviews with above/ground press authors via the above/ground press substack, and starting to post sections of an extended journal from my week-plus at the Banff Centre back in May, so there’s that.

Brooklyn NY: From Brooklyn-based poet, editor and publisher Joshua Wilkerson comes the small chapbook FUME LAPSE (Brooklyn NY: Urizen, 2026), an assemblage of odd, quirky, first-person descriptive narrative poems and texts that shimmer, ever so slightly, against the light. Wilkerson’s lyrics are quiet, bubbling with wild energy just underneath the surface, offering a thinking in real time lyric sentences. “I remember my father woke me up from my tent to say the earth’s shape is curved, round,” he writes, as part of the second “Fuse Lapse” poem, of which there are several scattered through the collection, “like a stone column. I remember he said the earth rests on water, like wood, that the first animals were enclosed in thorny barks: cockles, moon snails, pear conchs, serpent stars, speaking and singing.” There’s a way these poems set underneath the skin, become hard to shake. “Everyone is obsessive / Just to different degrees,” begins the poem “Two Cities,” “That’s why the years went by so fast / Overhanging branches stroke the trains as they pass [.]” These are poems that pass through memory and intimacy, carefully set and considered, writing with the exuberance of considered youth, from only the slightest distance. Or, as that same, second, four-page sequence “Fume Lapse” ends:

I remember my father woke me up from my tent to show me
Alpha Centauri through the telescope – its four year old light
against my eyes. I read that somewhere, I overheard that, I made
that up, then furrowed it into the dull thunder of this painting,
which is a poem, which is another subway ride to work.

Chicago IL/Paris France: From acclaimed French writer Zoé Mahfouz (with a new book of short stories out this year, apparently) comes the chapbook Borges Must Be Rolling in his Grave (Chicago IL: dancing girl press, 2025), a series of intriguing constraint poems, most of which are held to the boundaries of four-line stanzas, with poems of three or four stanzas, most of which are centred upon the page. “Zero-gravity teardrop cocoon / No atoms to carry a sound wave,” begins the opening poem, “THE SUN BEARER’S POLLEN,” “The cataracts of the Nile boon / A cloudy-lens deprivation cave.” Form, as much as anything, seems to be the purpose here, and there’s even a haibun included, for good measure. Mafouz’s poems are propulsive, simultaneously energized and restrained. Composed as explorations of boundaries, and variations on constraint, but one that revels in a precise pattern of sounds and syllables, writing a lyric so tight not a wasted word, sound or stutter. These poems might just need to be heard.

BASAL GANGLIA DOMINION

Cheek by jowl, Hypnos with pink granite
Crumbling uranium, isotopes of potassium
Shadow-melding insectum plight
Coral keister befalls cysts, maelstrom. 

Foreign sycophant involving crawling
Like sand through a ravaged hourglass,
Oviparous, birthing bricks intestines,
Sun-blood trade, egest in flasks. 

Defer the harvest amidst matchboxes,
Scraping from under the dermis,
Chewing nutrients, anemia outfoxed,
Dry-cough Clozapine blunts. 

Insecticides tropho-goner,
Lethargic, excoriated palms,
Asclepius’ urinalysis qualms,
Delusional parasitosis collar.

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Tamara Jong

Tamara Jong is a Tiohtià:ke (Montréal) born writer of Chinese and European ancestry. Her work has been published in the Humber Literary Review, Room Magazine, and The Fiddlehead, and has been both long and shortlisted for various creative nonfiction prizes. She is a graduate of The Writer's Studio at Simon Fraser University, and a former member of Room Magazine’s collective. She currently lives and works on Treaty 3 territory, the occupied and ancestral lands of the Haudenosaunee, Anishinabewaki, Attiwonderonk, and Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation (Guelph, ON). Worldly Girls is her first book

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

In every way! I’ve had some readers reach out that I wouldn’t have met if not for Worldly Girls and for that I am very grateful. It also means that all those years taking courses, writing, re-writing, doing workshops, and submitting and submitting work has all come to something tangible. I didn’t start off wanting to necessarily write this memoir. I had wanted to write a book but it was going to be a book of fiction. That seems so far away now. I haven’t been doing a lot of free writing really, just a small piece about dépanneurs (convenience stores) in Laval, where I grew up which is just in an early ember stage. I feel like writing my memoir helped me see that I need to start in embers, kernels in order to get my writing and thought process going but also how finishing a project can be important as a writer.

2 - How did you come to non-fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or fiction?

I did write some poetry growing up and in some English classes. I even got my poetry into a type of anthology in high school (I still have it even though it’s rather funny to read them now) but it’s hard for me to stake a claim as to be a poet. I often wrote stories as a child and I had a teacher Ms. Sauriol who let me read them aloud in class in fourth grade and they were silly things but it meant a lot to me for teachers like her to make space for me. I had many teachers who encouraged my writing even in high school where I did continue to write when I could. However, I eventually got very religious with the Jehovah’s Witnesses and put aside ambitions especially when it came to writing to the side. It was later in my late thirties, when I was slowly leaving the Witnesses that I came back into writing and for my birthday, I applied to the Humber School for Writers with a work of fiction that was really quite autobiographical and got some encouragement and hung out with a community that left me wanting more. I took a course at the University of Guelph that was an introduction to creative writing with Zoe Whittall and worked on a short piece of non-fiction that was called Leave-Taking and that ended up in the memoir. It wasn’t until I took non-fiction courses with Ayelet Tsabari that made me fall deep for non-fiction. This was after my friend Shelagh had highly recommended her. After that I just kept going because of Ayelet’s encouragement and guidance and the writers that came out of those classes and became part of my writer’s community. I also went to The Writer’s Studio and worked with Claudia Cornwall in the non-fiction co-hort and I got myself sorted out more to keep going with the story after feedback and workshops.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I am definitely a slow and percolating kind of writer. It can take years, years! Although, I don’t always know which ones will come to be an actual story. I do try to follow the energy of the piece and see if it will let me continue to write it. My first drafts normally do not resemble the final shape of the piece. They get dissected and removed and shuffled quite a bit before they’re ready to be a story. At times, the notes are inserted within the story so I can leave it as a placeholder until I have time to do more research, if I don’t go down that rabbit hole of research, that is.  

4 - Where does a work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I honestly never intentionally intended for my memoir to happen. I usually begin with a memory and then see where it takes me. Before I may have started with an idea or thought that appealed to me in fiction (so long ago and you know children’s brains). I did think it was possible to write a book before I knew about all the work a book would be. Then, I was unsure, really, as it can be kind of daunting but I decided to continue. Encouragement, community and advice from other writers did help me continue on, chapter by chapter, no matter what that looked like.  

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I do enjoy readings! I feel it is important to hear the writer read in their own voice and words that they wrote. That you can get the intention in which they wrote the words. It’s like the inside thoughts are the outside now. I also feel like it’s a way of connecting with each other. 

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

When I started, at times, I didn’t know what I was necessarily asking of myself as a writer so I just started writing. Later it became apparent that I was a searcher, a seeker, looking for answers. I believe it was Ayelet who said, as a writer we have a need to know (I may be paraphrasing here). So, the questions I am seeking or wondering about would be about belonging, my origins, who am I and what am I without the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who is my community, how to forgive, give grace to myself and others are among some of the questions or thoughts I am thinking about.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

Growing up in the Jehovah’s Witnesses, we had a very curated diet of information that was given to us. We were quite honestly to be separate from the world, so not to be influenced by the world or it’s affairs. Being no part of the world meant not being involved in its politics or worries as we were waiting on the coming of God’s Kingdom and that we were living in the last days so anything happening on the world scale, pestilence, war; these were signs that Armageddon was coming. I didn’t know to have much of an opinion about anything as I didn’t think I knew anything about anything and who was I anyway? My voice had been silenced for decades in many ways by silence in families like mine who were experiencing difficult lives at home, with parents who were dealing with mental health issues, alcoholism and a religion that maintains a shroud of secrecy around it. I do think it’s important to have a voice and to use it but I am still fearful in some ways. Worldly Girls is part of that, using my voice to speak up. I still have parts of me that are fearful of speaking up for myself or for anything. It is something I am working on to get better at. 

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

It may depend on the relationship I feel, the trust that happens between you. Once I’ve written my piece, I do find that working with someone outside of my process can be very helpful as they don’t know my writing or style or history and can bring a new perspective to the work. Something I’ve missed because I am filling in the gaps. I’ve always come away with something useful, that makes the work better. I know that without my amazing editor Stacey May Fowles Worldly Girls would not be what it became without her.   

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

The importance of first lines in a story, was great advice that I heard from Rachel Thompson who I took courses with online. It really stuck with me and made a difference in my work when submitting to literary magazines. It also helped with applying to anything writerly. I found the advice helped me slow down and think about where the reader was going to go.  

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (non-fiction to creative non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

It seemed to be very natural. There’s something about creative non-fiction that freed me to write in a way that just plain non-fiction couldn’t for me. It still has to be a story but it allows for if I may say, whimsical to appear. That’s what I’ve always enjoyed about creative non-fiction. It makes me think of Linda Trinh’s Seeking Spirit: A Vietnamese (Non) Buddhist Memoir and Emily Urquhart’s Ordinary Wonder Tales who do this so very well in their memoirs.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I don’t have a typical routine but of course I can’t wait for inspiration. I don’t write every day and at the moment, I am still doing writing related to Worldly Girls. I have that one story I’d like to get back to that I mentioned earlier on and I will. Normally, I’ll write in the evenings when I can, even if it’s just a line and do some reading or research and see if that adds to what I am thinking about. However, I do try to be open and be a work in progress when it comes to what works.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I find that reading helps me or watching a movie or program. If it’s stalled, either I am feeling a resistance to what comes next or I need more information to go ahead. I find that usually helps me step away and then come back to it. I have had writing I have started that I scrapped. Sometimes, I will take some of the old lines or thoughts and borrow them for a new story. I don’t think it’s wasted really. I needed to get stalled in order to figure it out.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

There’s something about the smell of summer. I used to say to my sister,”This is going to be the best summer ever! And she’d say, “You always say that,” and laugh. When I smell summer which may be the hot sun on the dry grass or the morning after the dew forms on the grass, or the chlorine from a pool (a fave childhood memory), that reminds me of home in Chomedey, Quebec where I grew up.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Maybe some writers can write in silence but not me. I like to have music around or put tv shows on, listen to podcasts or movies. I’ve done many re-writes and edits with background noise on. I’ve also been influenced by reading graphic novels and comics. I was into many of the superheros like Spider Man and Superman growing up and more recently Teresa Wong’s All Our Ordinary Stories and Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls. Also kid’s books have been such a way to tell a story in such short and impactful ways. I think of Kyo Maclear’s Spork and Leonarda Carranza’s Abuelita and Me.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Wow, great questions. Oh, I have so many writers that have shaped my work and are meaningful for me and the list grows and grows! There was Lucy Maud Montgomery, Jane Austen, The Brontës, earlier on. Then Alexander Chee, Mary Johnson, Mary Karr, Jan Wong, Ayelet Tsabari, Zoe Whittall, Claudia Cornwall, Teresa Wong, Kyo Maclear, Lina Lau, Emily McKibbon, Leonarda Carranza, Doretta Lau, Nicole Breit, Logan Broeckaert, Jagtar Atwal, Laura Sky, Preeti Kaur Dhaliwal, Hege Lepri, Obim Okongwu, Yilin Wang, Phoebe Wang, Leanne Dunic, Catherine Lewis, Susan Scott, Melissa Febos, Carrianne Leung, Jen Sookfong-Lee, Annahid Dashtgard, Hollay Ghadery, Stacey May Fowles, Emily Urquhart, Sarah Minor, Wayson Choy, and Chelene Knight come to mind right off. This list is constantly growing.    

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I would love to go to Hong Kong. I’ve heard so many good things about the food and culture there. Some of my family hails from there too, so would love to visit places and learn more.

I would also love to learn Mandarin more fluently. I am currently trying to learn with a very patient teacher and I am terrible but I so enjoy our time together. 

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

In another life, I would have loved to play professional soccer. I also tried hockey but hey I was terrible, haha. So, because of my religious devotion with the Jehovah’s Witnesses and also the times I grew up, there wasn’t a time or place for me to pursue sports back then. I came to soccer later in life like my thirties after leaving the Witnesses and loved it so much. It was being part of a team, winning and losing together and that my contributions did matter. I learned a lot about myself and it gave me confidence. I also gained new friendships I would have never had. 

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I did feel like it chose me again and again and I kept coming back to it no matter what. 

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

The Unravelling of Ou by Hollay Ghadery. It knocked both my socks (hehe) off. I am hoping to get some more free time by summer to read more great books.

I haven’t seen any really great films lately. I saw Wuthering Heights but ‘nuff said. Nice costumes and scenery?

20 - What are you currently working on?

I am just enjoying having finished Worldly Girls right now. I had three essays that were left out of this memoir so I will get back to these essays which contain my search for my father’s story about his being a “paper son” from China and see where that goes. I have to do way more research and find out as much information as I can and hoping for more clarity. It also requires ruminating so I won’t set a specific timeline on how to get it going.  I will also get back to some children’s book ideas I had been working on before getting Worldly Girls into the world.   

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

chaun webster, Without Terminus

i am the grandchild and great grandchild of rail workers. both of them porters of the sleeping car, both of them having demands placed up their bodies that interdicted their rest. during their employment they were both suspended in the irony of the sleeping car, which stole their ability to sleep, that robbery of rest a down payment for the ease of white train passengers. it is a familiar formula. i am trying to extend the sentences that arrived to me from my mother, and later the railroad’s archive, extend them into a different kind of exhaustion and limit point, to see where their lines fracture and whether ii can step into the space made by their splitting. i am attempting to insert the curvature of the comma into the sentence and line, a speculative practice emerging from a desire to converse with ghosts.

I’m deeply impressed by American poet chaun webster’s debut work of nonfiction, the remarkable Without Terminus (Minneapolis MN: Graywolf Press, 2026), a book that follows on the heels of the author’s two Minnesota Book Award-winning poetry titles—GeNtry!fication: or the scene of the crime (Noemi Press, 2018) and Wail Song: wading in the water at the end of the world (Black Ocean, 2023)—both of which I’m a bit frustrated at not having seen. As the back cover offers: “chaun webster traces how anti-Black violence has shaped his inheritance. He begins with his grandfather Reginald, a Pullman porter who was denied rest and a pension, and follows Reginald and the train into a gloriously wayward exploration of comportment and confinement, the ancestral meeting place of dreams, and his relationships with his mother and child. Pushing sentences to their limits and troubling the grammar of anti-Blackness, webster riffs and rails on the debris within reach.”

It is interesting how webster articulates and utilizes the archive, history and family history in a way comparable to the work of American poet Susan Howe [see my piece on Howe's latest here]: offering narrative threads and extended sequences, layerings of visual collage and an otherwise poetic structure. As well, this is a title that connects directly (inadvertently, I’m sure) to Calgary writer Suzette Mayr, through her award-winning novel The Sleeping Car Porter (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2022). Through Mayr’s fiction, she writes of R.T. Baxter, a Queer, Black man in 1929 working as a sleeping car porter on a train that moves across Canada, including the prairie provinces. webster’s narrative writes of a maternal grandfather known predominantly through family story and the archive, who also worked as a sleeping car porter, across the American Midwest, based in Saint Paul, Minnesota. “a mass of stories get imposed on experience, on the archive,” webster writes, early on in the collection, “comporting its materials to its shape, becoming the less by which not only the events and sequence of the past are determined but also their meaning. you are a student of story: a familiar one is that of uplift through adversity, that those who work and toil do so with the eventuality of ascendancy.”

This reads as a reclamation project, working through the archive, whether newspaper or family story or other records, to discover the possibilities of what otherwise the author can’t access. This is not the archival process of a poet such as Edmonton-based Jordan Abel [see my essay on Abel here], attempting to access the touchstone of an absent father and, thus, a distance from a particular culture and foundation, but one in which webster seeks, quite directly, the touchstone of an ancestor known only through these stories, one that can only be better known, at this point, through this piecemeal process of abstraction, unverifiable stories and unstoried facts. As webster writes:

you cannot bring together the complex material of your grandfather’s life through story, something is always erased from the surface when you attempt to constrict the dimensions of his living with that of a scene or chapter that takes place in the forty-two-inch-by-twenty-five-inch sleeping car and is reproduced on this five-and-a-half-by-eight-and-a-quarter page. even the one hundred twenty pages from Reginald’s employment files, which you have purchased photocopies of from the National Archives in Atlanta, are compressed, comport less to a life than to its abbreviation.

As webster works to write a way through the archival facts and family stories into something known, possible and tangible, Without Terminus offers the structure and cadence of a long poem through prose narrative, the strength of such a project compounded through the layerings of narrative structures. Through researching the grand elements of history and archive, webster seeks the intimacy of their grandfather.

your mother tells you a story about retirement, your grandfather’s twenty-five years of service as a pullman porter. every time you say the title you feel the word pull stretching itself out in your mouth, a pulllllllllman porter. she told you of the constraints of his labor, its years, and how they pulled from him, pulled years from him, how he would retire without pension and then would die with no triumphant ballad, your mother is the inaugural archive, your point of origin for what you come to know about your grandfather, archive here being a slippery word, one that could indicate a physical geography where the collected materials of history have been stored or something more ephemeral, a body of knowledge, the archive of material experience, both are full of elisions and gaps, you step into them.