1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Now is when I realize that I actually can’t remember my first chapbook specifically. It was thirteen years ago, and a few of them came out in quick succession. I’m not sure anymore which was first.
My first book, however, just came out in April: Love Is A Place But You Cannot Live There (Guernica Editions). Mostly I feel relief. Yes, I am a person capable of writing a book other people will want to publish and read. Whatever doubts I still have (and there are many), I can’t have that one anymore.
From my first chapbook to my debut poetry collection to what I’m working on now, I would say the general trajectory is toward the stranger, the more complicated, and the more plural.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Absolutely poetry was first for me. Poetry is still first for me. I have no idea why, I just accept the inevitability of it. If my prose doesn’t sound a bit like poetry, I invariably think it’s no good. I have a novel coming out next year, Anomia, with Palimpsest Press, and a lot of the “chapters” probably read more like prose poems than fiction. Some may see that as a fault, but even the prose I prefer to read is the kind that’s preoccupied with imagery, and the sound of words, and enigma at the heart of language, and whatever else poetry is about.
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 do everything quite slowly. I thought about my novel for years before I started it. Then it took still more years to write. Poems are not quite so bad, but I often think about a poem for weeks or months before I sit down to it. For any genre of writing, there is usually one atrocious draft, sometimes short and sometimes long but always a mess, and then there is a draft that looks like a story or poem, and then usually there is a third version that is readable and needs only a little more prodding to be done. No one, not even the people I trust most, sees anything until it’s at least at the second draft stage.
4 - Where does a poem 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?
A poem always begins with a problem I cannot solve. At any given time in my life, I tend to be preoccupied with a certain problem or set of related problems, and all the poems I write orbit around that fixation. Sometimes I realize what’s happening in advance, and the book concept precedes the poems, but even when I don’t it’s usually apparent pretty early on.
Like with what I hope will be my second full-length poetry collection, The Work Is Done When We Are Dead, I was thinking a lot about the problems of labour. I thought about it while I was at my day job, I thought about it when I was volunteering, I thought about it when I was trying to manage my personal relationships, I thought about it when even making art had begun to feel like work. It was easy to write a big set of poems about the same subject; it was hard to make that particular subject fun. I think I succeeded, but then again I have very dowdy notions of what’s fun. Crossword puzzles are deeply exciting to me, for example.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I love doing readings. In every book, I feel it’s essential to have at least a few poems or stories or excerpts that will be thrilling (for me at least) to read aloud. Usually they are pieces where the voice is very distinct, or the rhythm is quite pronounced, or the language is slippery and playful. If I feel a piece will lend itself well to being read, I will turn up the volume on those qualities during editing.
I love doing readings but I loathe being away from home, so it can be a struggle. When I came back from my first tiny book tour in August, which was only a week long, by the way, I was about ready for a nervous breakdown.
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?
Always, but they vary from project to project. I started reading philosophy as a teenager because I was very interested in the questions it attempts to answer, but I found the way it answered them to be desperately unfulfilling. The philosophers I ended up enjoying most were the very literary ones, like Camus, and I eventually realized I wanted the promises of philosophy in the package of fiction or poetry. So that’s what I try to write.
I guess if you wanted the very simple version, there are two basic questions at the crux of my work: “Why do we bother?” and “What shall we bother with?” Each project answers those questions differently.
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?
For me, literature and sunlight are about the only consistent things that make me want to go on with life day to day. There seem to be some writers who don’t feel a great need to read, and maybe they would be happy being the only scribes on earth, but I experience reading and writing as a kind of ongoing conversation with the world around me. As in any social situation, I prefer to listen more than I speak.
If writing has any purpose other than this, I don’t know about it.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Certainly both. Unless you’re keeping a diary, writing is a communal practice. I want to know how other people will respond to my work, and to control for their reactions to some extent, while also being aware that the extent of my control is extremely limited, which is both exciting and horrifying.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Keep at it.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to collaboration)? What do you see as the appeal?
In my work, poetry and collaboration are overlapping genres. Strangely, I find collaboration easier to dig into sometimes. Maybe because you can’t have an ego about the kind of writing I do as MA|DE with my partner Mark Laliberte. “My” voice and “his” voice dissolve, and MA|DE has a single, unified “third” voice that I am a part of but that doesn’t belong to me, so I can’t feel particularly self-conscious about anything I contribute. It’s easier to sing in a choir than sing solo I guess. That is very freeing, at least at the drafting stage. Later we go back in together and edit everything so it’s harmonious and precise, which is not freeing but it is as easy as editing ever is.
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?
Not to be too bohemian about it, but for me art and routine are antithetical. If my writing process is too prescribed, I start to resent it. Instead I try to have several writing projects, and a never-ending list of related administrative tasks, bouncing around at any given time, and I’ll tackle at least one of them almost every day. How much time I spend and which one I do depend on my mood.
It’s like how someone who loves reading tends to have stacks of books all over their house and will on most days probably pick up one or two books and read a bit from them, without a need for scheduling the books they’ll read or how many pages they’ll read each day.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
If I feel like I lack ideas, I pick a book off my shelf that interests me and read. I don’t think too hard about which one. It usually ends up being relevant. If I feel restless or uninterested in the project, I’ll go for a walk or play guitar or do literally anything else. Life is too short to spend trying to force myself to be interested in things that are not urgent. If it’s a good project, my interest will return soon enough anyways.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
My parents built a log house and that’s where I lived for the first twenty years of my life, so pine always smells like home. My mom hung pomanders whenever citrus was in season, so oranges and cloves smell like home. My dad did automotive work in our basement and driveway so gasoline and engine grease smell like home. I spent all the spare hours of my childhood and adolescence in a horse stable, so hay smells like home, too.
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?
It’s only books that make me want to write books, but it’s the other things in my life that give me things to write books about. I spend an awful lot of time thinking about our home garden, and how it’s a way of interacting with the local flora and fauna. Just before I started this interview, I was reading this great thread by writer Leah Bobet on practical things we can all do for the environment—and no it’s not a list of things you can give up, it’s about constructively beneficial actions we can take, like making pollinator gardens in any space, no matter how small.
I also spend a lot of time with “true crime” media, which might seem odd because I am a die-hard pacifist who hates causing or experiencing harm (I get genuinely upset when bugs die), and who has enormous qualms about judicial and prison systems, but my interest in “true crime” goes back to my preoccupation with problems we can’t solve. Murder is a rather fascinating example of a problem that can’t be solved, per se, and yet there are so many ways to lessen the likelihood of it happening and to deal with the aftermath when it does, if we can understand how and why it occurs in the first place and what the far-flung effects of it are.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Unexpectedly, Tennessee Williams has remained a long-time love of mine ever since I read The Glass Menagerie in high school. I hardly read plays, and there are few things from high school I still enjoy, but I’m well on my way to collecting every work of his that was ever published. To me he’s a great example of someone who’s not writing poetry but always has poetry in his writing.
Otherwise I’m a bit of a goldfish—whatever I’m reading at the time is probably what’s most important to me. Right now I’m absolutely delighted by The Ants by Sawako Nakyasu (Les Figues Press), a charming and unnerving collection of prose poem type pieces that “takes the human to the level of the ant, and the ant to the level of the human.”
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Relax.
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?
Well, like most writers, I have no choice but to do other jobs as well. Most of that work, for me, has been in legal clinics, but I’ve also spent a lot of time being a grad student, and some amount of time being an editor, and in previous lives I’ve worked in a horse stable and a Chinese restaurant. I suppose if I weren’t frittering away my time with poetry I’d be trying harder to become a lawyer or professor. All of my other hobbies—growing plants, baking cakes, playing instruments—are not things I would want to do full-time.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
There was nothing else.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
For this I’ll need to consult my records.
According to my booklist, some of my favourite reads of 2023 included poetry collections like Cecily Nicholson’s Harrowings (Talon Books), Anahita Jamali Rad’s still (Talon Books), natalie hanna’s lisan al’asfour (ARP Books), and Hollay Ghadery’s Rebellion Box (Radiant Press); short story collections like Corinna Chong’s The Whole Animal (Arsenal Pulp Press) and Jean Toomer’s Cane (Mint Editions); and graphic novels like Joe Kessler’s The Gull Yettin (New York Review Comics).
According to my Letterboxd account, my favourite recently watched films are George Kane’s Crashing (2016), which is only debatably a film, but I enjoy everything Phoebe Waller-Bridge writes, Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz (2011), though that might only be because it too closely mirrors my twenties, Donna Deitch’s Desert Hearts (1985), which is a queer classic and hard not to like, and Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave (2022), which was generally brilliant though I confess I was disappointed by the ending.
20 - What are you currently working on?
I think my
aforementioned, hopefully sophomore poetry collection, The Work Is Done When
We Are Dead, is basically complete, less a few nitpicking edits I will
continue to make until a publisher takes it out of my hands, so I am planning
to spend more time with a couple of MA|DE’s many projects:
- Alphabeticals, a full-length collection based on
our constrained-form chapbooks A Barely Concealed Design (Puddles
of Sky Press, 2020) and Expression Follows Grim Harmony (JackPine Press, 2023); and,
- Waste Not the Marrow, a hybrid collection of collage-sculptures and ekphrastic poetry (as previously featured in The Ex-Puritan, for example).
I’m also grudgingly contemplating what I need to do to finish and fix up my first manuscript of short fiction—the most significant challenge is trying to resist the urge to turn all the pieces into poems.
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