Gwen Aube launches Missed Connections with Tall Girls in Ottawa on Wednesday, March 25, 2026 as part of VERSeFest.
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?
Before I started Missed Connections with Tall
Girls I’d been on welfare for like a decade, so crucially it has turned me
into a productive member of society. Learning more efficient ways to milk the
system via grants has given me a confidence of self-sufficiency, which has made
me a less neurotic person. Of course it’s changed me deeply as an artist as
well, and I imagine people reading it will do this again, in ways I can’t yet
imagine.
I wrote this book mostly before my above/ground chapbook Pulp Necrosis,
but I think that work was very diaristic and rooted in solitude. It was a
meditation on an answer already given. This book is more of a house party, and
it asks a lot of questions it can’t answer.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
One must imagine themselves a temporarily embarrassed novelist. I probably would have went that way sooner if I went to school, but I did the open mic thing instead, which favours poetry. Of course poetry reigns in my heart, but I love novels, and the order of execution happened without much intention.
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?
In the case of my forthcoming collection, it was
a slow snowball over 3 years, including working with my editor. The titular Missed
Connections poems came first, and quick—writing a series of vignette poems
about oddball trannies was addictive, and that shaped the early tone of the
book. Those poems got edited lots, but their cores mostly remained the same.
On the other hand, the long poem at the end of the book, an ekphrasis on Gustav
Klimt’s Hope 1 (held at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa) went through
several hibernation periods and resulting upheavals. It’s radically different
from how I envisioned it in the beginning, as my obsession with the painting
led me to some nuts-ass places.
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?
I’m always working on a “book”, but that might just be the wretched ichor of careerism in my soul. I usually feel vaguely aware of ideas/topics for poems in my head, but it takes a second element to complicate the initial idea and spark a draft. After that, it’s less predictable. Some arrive done, some I rewrite 20 times. I always think the ones that arrive done are better poems, but that’s probably just bias.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I guess I started “taking writing seriously” by
going to open mics in highschool: Toast at Phog, Spoken Funk at
Green Bean, and drum circles at Bloomfield House. Those places really built my
idea around what literature is as a community. I love reading, and I definitely
care a lot about being a performer as a separate component from the writing.
Sometimes I want to reject performance and move towards a more page-heavy
poetics, which seems both respectable and exciting. However, Anne Waldman
inspired me a lot at Naropa to consider getting weirder with it. Seeing
Joshua Beckman read had a big impact on me as well.
Professional readings often suck. I like to get a little drunk and yell at people. I love getting laughs, too—that's probably the danger for the writing. Or at least it means I mostly read the funny ones.
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?
I’m paranoid about technology like everyone else. Sci-fi has made me anxious my whole life. I read a lot of freak shit and bug out. The destruction of labour’s power as capital increasingly generates wealth outside labour, that’s a smart-sounding thing that worries me. The total suffocation of the soul. I believe in the soul. I’m very offended by transhumanism, and as a transsexual I’m trying to understand if there’s contradictions there.
I think the Missed Connections poems quietly suggest that much of queer discourse, academic or otherwise, is a banal waste of time. Especially, like, what’s the right way to be gay. That shit mucks up literature. Like Roth, you have to treat each type of faggot (bitchy diva, cringy femboy, etc.) within the diaspora as a given, and inside that you have to play with the universal things—love, god, death, sex, wine, etc. Bring out the whole ocean.
Otherwise, I care about whatever authenticity is or can be. The MFA has vampirically drained style and I hate the MFA so I’m bullish on style. I abide colloquial voice not as texture but as a rigorous structure which everything else can hang upon. Obviously I go for a “loud trashy girl on the bus” thing, and to that end I sort of hate euphemism, passive aggression, and subtlety. I believe in being loud. I think a lot about love, and when another writer says that I trust them. We’re all thinking about love.
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?
The role of the writer is to suck the fat from the professional managerial
strata before it collapses. Hopefully you avoid manufacturing legitimacy for
backwater imperialist states.
The role should be to make something beautiful, of course, for the sake of the human project. To aspire to greatness, even in vain, as worship for the gift of life.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Essential. I was very lucky to have Cat Fitzpatrick as my editor at LittlePuss, who prioritizes a rigorous editing process which seems progressively harder to pull off in the small press world amidst austerity. Cat fundamentally changed me as a writer with her questions, critiques, and suggestions, and obviously took on my manuscript because it excited her, not because it was ready to print. She made me read Ivor Gurney and do scansion. She whipped me into shape. It was great.
Before this, I was lucky to have in-depth editing from my friend Amilcar John Nogueira, who ran Zed Press. I traded them a mattress for the pleasure. They were hard on me, too, which I appreciated, and similarly wanted to know what I was trying to do and why, then help me do it better. I have friends I exchange edits with too, of course. I love the process.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Follow me on instagram (@gwendolyssa) for career advice & inspirational quotes.
10 - 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 write mostly in public & university libraries. I need to spend chunks of days holed away from my loved ones, reading, not showering, etc. I can’t “co-write.” I wake up and eat and text people for a few hours, go to the library all day, hide in the bathroom when the security kicks out non-students, and stay til last metro.
I’m very social, and I’m “self employed”, so it’s the bulk of my alone time. I bought an electronic typewriter, and it's getting used, but I can't bring it outside. I appreciate caffeine and whatnots.
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Reading—I’m big on theft. Hanging out, same reason. Long walks, different reason.
12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Rez carton cigs. Also, a sound, but church bells. There’s a French Catholic church near my Mom’s house with lovely bells.
13 - 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?
As I mentioned, my debut collection closes with a long ekphrastic poem on Klimt’s painting Hope 1. The poem deals with all sorts of other things—motherhood and chosen family and dysphoria and r/acc memetic warfare and primordial gods. But the core is seeing this painting and feeling struck for the first time by the beautiful in art in a way that edges on the sublime. Is that the proper Kantian way to talk about it? I just stared at this painting for literally hours and it beat the shit out of me.
Then from there I got to dig into the history of the painting as object, his muse for the piece (which I may have even got wrong, alongside plenty historians, I’m kinda unsure??), and of course how the piece altered me between time spent in it’s presence—I visited this fucking painting like 4 times, I took a 5AM bus just to see it once. It’s good.
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Elizabeth Smart was a big influence on me, which
feels apt to mention in this Ottawa journal. By Grand Central Station is
a masterpiece. She’s a pathetic figure, she’s divine, like a Simone Weil of
romantic love. A genius of the heart. Aurora Mattia seems in the same house, I
really have to read her more. Writers like this obsess me. I want to be a tenth
as good as Smart.
More recently: Peter Dale Scott, Franco Bifo Berardi, Tony Hoagland, Jack Daniel Christie, Knausgaard, Kevin Killian, Torrey Peters, and I been circling
back to Diane Di Prima & Wanda Coleman & Never-Angeline North. The best
part about touring this year will be meeting new writers, I’m out-of-touch on
trans lit right now.
It’s embarrassing, but Jack Kerouac was my first love. I adore Visions of Cody, I adore Carolyn Cassady’s Off The Road. I went to Neal’s childhood church in Denver last summer in my oogle clothes. It’s awful, but I’ll never shake it. I love him. Not canonical Ginsberg or counter-culture chic Burroughs but sweetie pie dumb as shit Quebecker Jack.
In a personal vein, Sybil Lamb and Casey Plett have been vital as mentors to me. Nevada-Jane Arlow and Simina Banu as literary confidantes. The Discordia Review boys as comrades. The whole Montreal scene, of course.
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
One dozen novels, facial feminization surgery, continental freight hop, governor general’s award, escape poverty, epic poem, be 89, go to heaven.
16 - 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?
If I had never scored grants I’d probably try to get on disability, because it’s more than Ontario Works or Dernier Recours. My step-sister works for Canada Post so maybe she could get me in there—I like long walks alone. Otherwise, maybe parks or horticulture, something like that.
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Graffiti was my first passion as a teen and I wanted to be a painter. I wasn’t a very good artist, and I didn’t have anything to say with it, but I love painting. Now I paint people's dogs for Christmas, which makes me happy.
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The three best books I read in 2025 were Wound by Oksana Vasyakina (heart-wrenching queer memoir from Russia), Negrophobia by Darius James (a hilarious & experimental political novel), and Worthy of the Event by Vivian Blaxell (let’s call it“the last great New Narrative work”, why not). James & Blaxell are both writers in their 70s who deserve far more recognition.
I know nothing about film. I was in a short film called Dextra 1 last year, which takes place in Windsor. I still haven’t seen Castration Movie, I keep missing the big viewings.
19 - What are you currently working on?
I’m writing a bedbug-infested road novel about ‘Miladies’, ‘Radical Faeries’, and aging Marxists. It’s about what belief does when it has an ambiguous, concealed, or unfulfilling output to power, or something.
I'm also writing a second poetry collection. There’s a series of Montreal vignettes, and I wanna do some sort of theological long poem. I have no clue what I’m writing, yet.
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