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;

Gillian Sze, An Orange, A Syllable

 

My comparison of language acquisition to some train, some countable linearity, is embarrassingly wrong. Baby language, I soon found out, was catachrestic. The child’s speech laid bare associations and accidents. In the tub, she would point to the eye of the toy whale and say, Moon. She would clamber up the stepstool and say, Tree. And when the child pointed to the cracks in the floorboards, she would say, Hole, followed by, Ow. Point to the hole in my sock and say, Hole. Point to the circles in the rug and say, Hole. Ow. All was lace. From the child’s small mouth, she undid the world around me.

Having been startled by how quietly good I thought her prior title, quiet night think: poems & essays (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2022) [see my review of such here], I was intrigued to see Montreal poet Gillian Sze’s latest, the poetry collection An Orange, A Syllable (ECW Press, 2025). As quiet night think: poems & essays was a blend of meditative, first person lyric prose and poems around the swirls and reconsiderations of self, culture and being that accompanied her new motherhood, this latest shifts those leanings back into the shape and approach of the poem a bit further down Sze’s narrative/parenting line. This is very much a sequel to that prior collection, offering further insights into culture, language, self and possibility through the ongoing lens of motherhood, partnership and domestic patter. “What were your words when the home was at a standstill? My love / is limited. The last dish fell from a cupboard. At a talk about love, a / scholar spoke about agape. I never considered the ordered and clean / conditions of agape, the superior, transcendent, unconditional love. I / did not know it.”

An Orange, A Syllable is built as an accumulation of lyric prose blocks, seventy-six in sequence. Occasionally there might be a symbol set atop one of these blocks, as to suggest a new line of thinking, a new sequence or cluster, five in total across the collection. Throughout, Sze writes of love, of language and the new ways she’s learned to approach and encounter, both within and beyond a domestic space that almost sounds set within the Covid-19 era: “What is out there? I think I have forgotten. My world thicks down / to the sweetness in each fold of laundry. The growing tower of cotton, / tidy and eversteady. For a while, I can stop thinking and let the hands / spread across the sleeves, the hems, the stitches. The hands know where / smoothness is right, know where to put the parts and when the folds / are finished.” Again, as a furthering of her prior collection, Sze writes of engaging language, her own background and self in new ways, engaging with the immediacy, and the layers one gains through attempting to communicate such to one’s children (with familiar echoes, certainly, of my own accumulation, through the book of smaller, of prose poems through and amid a similar period of domestic, parenting small children). To attempt to speak on any of this requires one’s own understanding, after all. This is a sharp and meaningful collection, and reason, once more, to go through that prior collection as well.

Dougong is an ancient Chinese method of interlocking wood. Watchtowers and temples and dynasties have been built completely without bolts, screws, or nails. All the wooden parts—beams, brackets, pillars—fit with precise carpentry. A dialogue, too, is putting a picture together, closing all the gaps. When one speaks and the other replies, words snap together. Meanings are understood and there is a satisfying “click.”

 

Paul Vermeersch, NMLCT: Poems

 

Hello. The wetware is at it again, synthesizing mythologies from monstrosities,
hobgoblin cognition from thin err. On Golgotha, the hippogriff is singing
“Mandinka” to children. Let’s telecommunicate, cool? Let’s watch TV collectively
across a desert of broken antennae. Let’s ache for obsolescence. Let’s go. (“On Monstrosity”)

The latest from Toronto poet and editor Paul Vermeersch, following his Shared Universe: New and Selected Poems 1995-2020 (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2020) [see my review of such here], is NMLCT: Poems (ECW Press, 2025), a collection very much constructed as a book-length project, one that opens with a helpful “NOTE ON THE PRONUNCIATION OF TERMS”: 

“MCHNCT” is pronounced
machine city 

“NMLCT” is pronounced
animal city

As I’ve written prior—referring, specifically, to Hamilton writer, musician and editor Gary Barwin’s charming creatures: poems (ECW Press, 2022) [see my review of such here]—I’m always intrigued to see the first collection by any poet, following the publication of a selected; to look at a new work composed after having examined, and self-examined, even if rather broad in scope, the length and breadth of a career in poetry. “Words say there is another place.” the poem “ESCAPE FROM MCHNCT” begins. “But who will make it there?” Vermeersch’s eighth full length poetry collection (if one counts the selected, which seems only fair), it is interesting in how his work has evolved from articulating echoes of nostalgic looks at once-imagined futures from the mid-twentieth century into this assemblage of four-lined stanza blocks, themselves accumulating into a narrative structure of speculative fiction, setting a conflict between animal and machine. “Submerged in celestial shadow,” the poem “THE SECOND MOON BEHIND THE FIRST MOON” writes, “saturated and rattling with frags / of cyborg nightmares, the collective unconscious of artificial life, none / of this will be remembered. But it can be recovered.” Throughout the collection, Vermeersch builds his bricks of lyric narrative in lengthy and even gymnastic lines, more oriented in propulsive, almost staccato, sound than in his prior work. He builds his bricks, four lines per, whether through sequences of four poems, one to a page, including the opener, “On Monstrosity,” and to close, “Deep Water / Amnesia,” with the bulk of the collection, not to mention a further interruption or two, made up of self-contained poems, each of which, themselves, as quartets of these poem-blocks. His structures are rhythmic, even propulsive, offering line breaks when needed to maintain that particular four-line shape.

After ejection from a mirrored box, where you have spent your entire life,
will you understand that you have arrived in a forest—or will you believe
that you have become a forest, and the wooded landscape that you see all
around you is just the reflection of your new body inside the mirrored box?
                                   (“Inside A Mirrored Box”)

And through this assemblage of stanza-bricks emerges a book-length narrative umbrella composed to examine the tensions in that imagined future, between the binaries of machine (“MCHNCT”) and animal (“NMLCT”) (humans are most likely on either side of that particular binary, I suppose, depending). “Here you are.” the poem “WELCOME TO MCHNCT” writes. “Everything you love is now customizable with cutting-edge / character tech, but there’s always a faint trace of some remnant avatars embedded in / the most recent blueprint of MCHNCT. We’ve made some changes for your security / and convenience.” The tension is palpable, shifting between an optimism for humanity or sense of doom, interspersed throughout. Or, as his opening sequence of broadcast signals continues:

Hello. The dead will be recast. The dead are imaginary animals in the forest
of broken telephone poles. Electrified crosses are bearing what an era needs
to calm itself. The dead are source material, the end product of homeostasis
converted to narrative. The dead all have their I’s X’d out.

Composed as a response to recent more overt cultural shifts across technology (and vice versa, of course), including elements of artificial intelligence programs that continue to propagate, seemingly against our will, this collection furthers a growing (and intriguing) thread of speculative fiction across Canadian poetry, one that also includes Toronto poet and filmmaker Lindsay B-e’s full-length poetry debut, The Cyborg Anthology: Poems (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2020) [see my review of such here], an anthology shaped around speculative fiction, exploring ideas of consciousness, being, artificial intelligence and technology, and Ottawa-based poet Mahaila Smith’s own full-length debut, Seed Beetle: poems (Hamilton ON: Stelliform Press, 2025) [see my review of such here]. Much as with Smith’s work specifically, Vermeersch’s poems provide a landscape of speculative conflict as warning for the present, of where this all might be heading, akin to James Cameron’s original 1984 film, The Terminator. As the sequence “The Forest” offers:

Deep beneath Antarctic ice, a forest has waited ninety million years for its rebirth.
This is not Eden. This is the end state of every ecology. Every sprout is the crown
of this realm trying to breach our own. Great pines of epochal growth climb beneath
primeval glaciers. They signal always to the upper world their need to breathe again.

As addendum, the acknowledgements at the end of Vermeersch’s collection provides that: “No part of this book was created with artificial intelligence, chatbots, language models, or any similar technology.”

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Rebecca Hirsch Garcia

Rebecca Hirsch Garcia lives in Ottawa, Ontario.

An O. Henry Award winner, her short stories have been published in The Threepenny Review, PRISM international, The Dark and elsewhere. Her debut collection The Girl Who Cried Diamonds & Other Stories was the runner-up for  the Danuta Gleed Literary Award and shortlisted for the Ottawa Book Award.

Other Evolutions, her debut novel, is forthcoming from ECW press.

She can be found on Twitter or Instagram @rhirschgarcia

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

The Girl Who Cried Diamonds is my first (and so far only) published book. A lot of people asked me if I was excited when it was published but I wasn't. I just felt this sense of calmness. I always wanted to be a writer and it was like finally, the book is here, it exists.

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

The world makes more sense to me in a fictionalized context and always has. I'm not interested in a world bound by possibility but worlds that are, currently, impossible. I find it so much easier to get to the truth of a matter when inventing the circumstances around it, something only possible through fiction.

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've talked to other writers and they kind of seem appalled by my process because I tend to vomit drafts out really quickly and there is more cleanup than editing involved in my work. But that's really because I spend a lot of time thinking. Years, decades sometimes. I'm sure I lose a lot of good work this way but I don't move until I'm ready. Even then, the writing often surprises me.

4 - Where does a work of fiction 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 work of fiction is usually the merger of two ideas I've been puzzling over in my head. There are lots of ideas that I think over but usually when I add some strange second thought that's when I know I have something worth exploring.

I always know the form of things before I start working on them. I come from a theatre background too so I always have a feel for whether something is a play or a script, a short piece of prose or something book length. I think this comes from naturally being someone who writes "short". If I want to write a novella or something longer there has to be intentionality behind it. If left to my own devices a piece will be a short story.

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

Public readings are totally unrelated to my process and I view them as entirely divorced from writing or creating.

I don't mind doing readings. My mother  put me in drama when I was a child and then I went to a performing arts school. Those years of training mean that I am comfortable around large audiences.
 
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 always asking questions in my work and mostly it's about human behaviour which is so varied and strange and mystifying to me.

Reading back The Girl Who Cried Diamonds during editing I think my predominant question was What happens to the people who don't get survive? I think as humans it's so much more comforting to read stories about people who go through bad times and come out stronger but I'm interested in the untold stories of the people who are still trapped in their nightmares.

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?

Quite cynically before my book came out I thought no one really cares about writers. Especially ones from small presses like me.

But then I've found that as I've been introducing myself to people as a writer they get so excited for me, even if they've never heard of my book. So I think there is, still, a huge respect for writers in the culture. I'm almost treated like someone who can perform magic. It's humbling.

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

I've been lucky to always have quite good, very respectful, editors and I think the best ones are the ones who call you on your bullshit. They'll sense the weaknesses in my own writing that I think I'm getting away with and say, No, it's not working. I love that kind of ruthlessness. It's the short story writer in me but I love to cut.

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

Take what you need and leave the rest.

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 tend to write at night because I am a night owl and that's when I'm sharpest but I don't stick to strict word counts or outlines or times. Sometimes my process is just lots and lots of reading and I'm okay with that.

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

I have too many ideas to ever get stalled and I think it's because I'm constantly reading. That's my advice to any writers who are stalled. Read everything! And I do mean everything: outside your genre, outside your medium. I've found inspiration reading fanfic written by preteens who are too afraid of the writing process to even read back what they've written. The tenses skip around and there are spelling mistakes galore and somehow in the midst of this there's still one knock out sentence. They're so raw and pure. It just reminds me that as writers we're all trying and we never really stop.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

I'll let you know when I've found it.

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?

I find visual things really stimulating whether that be visual art or movies or even objects. I have this story in my collection, "Mother," that came to me when I was looking at a silver Tiffany baby comb and wondering what kind of person would own a silver Tiffany baby comb. The comb in the story isn't silver and the story has almost nothing to do with that. I think anyone reading it would be puzzled that that's where that thought experiment led me but there you go.

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

I really love André Alexis' work. I've read other Ottawa writers but he's the first one where I thought that we were experiencing the city in the same way. Asylum was such a revelation to me. That was a book where I thought it almost could have exactly been written for me.

For my work I love reading older books and by that I mean ones written in the 1800s or older. I love the Victorians. Their language and thoughts were so different from how we express ourselves today. That difference in language always sets off some spark in my own mind. I'm not sure what it is, but it never fails.

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

I want to learn how to fire a gun.

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?

I would have loved to be a film director. I always loved movies but as a kid I thought I wanted to be an actress and by the time I realized that what I actually loved was creating stories I felt like it was too late.

I suppose it's not but if people think publishing is hard the barriers to creating a film are incredible.

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

It was never an option not to do this. My family likes to joke I was writing before I was writing: in kindergarten before I could write I would dictate my stories to the teaching assistants.

I was writing before anyone was publishing my work. I'll write after.

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

The last great book I read was Seven Surrenders by Ada Palmer. It's harder scifi than I typically read and I was kind of iffy on the first book but the second book was where all the hard work of the first one paid off. It's brilliant. She's a genius.

I also want to shout out Camilla Grudova's The Doll's Alphabet. It's short stories and very eerie. It reminds me of the thoughts I used to have as a child.

19 - What are you currently working on?

My debut novel, Other Evolutions, which is coming out from ECW press.

But I've also been working on short stories. Everyone tells writers not to write short stories; no one reads them and publishers don't want them, but I can't help it. Every now and then I write one and I think, that's not bad actually. Maybe they'll find their way into the world one day.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Ashley-Elizabeth Best, Bad Weather Mammals

 

Sweet Sixteen

Mum said I had to call Dad to find out where he was.
I didn’t want to think about the day he would stop
coming around, the fist of his mouth. My mother was
always attempting to reassure herself by reassuring me.
She promised we would go to the funeral together; all of her
little foxes in the same part of the forest. Before the funeral
we walked into a field as a cast of hawks stroked a November
morning into a gaslit day. Time measures itself in a scatter
like those hawks. My social worker says I can be the axe
to break through the hold of my own misery. I’m learning
to be invisible, but these hands refuse to lift the axe.
Mum knew how to make me jimmy her heart loose.
She could be gentle then, whispering tunes her grandfather
left tucked behind her ears. I am learning what is not mine to tell.
I am not as free as I would like to be.

Kingston, Ontario poet Ashley-Elizabeth Best’s latest full-length poetry collection is Bad Weather Mammals (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2024), a follow-up to her full-length debut, Slow States of Collapse (ECW Press, 2016). Bad Weather Mammals explores illness, depression, trauma, disability poetics, and a history of violence; working through and across an array of ongoing and lingering, old and new, challenges across a first-person lyric. To open the poem “Good Sick/Bad Sick,” she writes: “The sick should be good. / It is a kind of undoing.” As the back cover offers, the collection “navigates the devastations and joys of living in a disabled and traumatized body. By taking a backward glance, Best traces how growing up under the maladaptive bureaucracy of social services with a single disabled mother and five younger siblings led her to a precarious future in which she is also disabled and living on social assistance.” Opening the collection, the prose-poem “Chapter of Accidents” sets the tone, introducing all that might follow: “I am thirty years old and this is the first year of my life I have lived in an apartment that did not have a mould problem, that did not have a man problem, that did not have a man with fists in your face problem.” This is what one needs to know before she begins, before she moves further back to where she had been, compared to where she is now. Further on in the same piece:

Disability meant housewife, meant I do everything else and he makes the money. Eleven years of water-bloated walls, mould an encroaching boundary of black on the carpet. It didn’t take much to lay my mood flat then, for the dishes to coalesce into a pile of grime that neither of us wanted to deal with, until he decided it was my responsibility. Oh, what of my joints, the sullen pop of knees as they straighten the body. Tender points signal illness, swollen knees require needles to release the fluid. I flattened myself, expanded despite my desire to thin into invisibility.

The poems in and across Bad Weather Mammals represents an unfolding, an unfurling, of reclaimed and repurposed self, despite and through whatever else had been, has come and still is. “Bronwen suggested the body / is the limit we must learn to love.” she writes, to open the poem “I Am Becoming a House,” a poem which suggests a reference to the late Kingston poet Bronwen Wallace (1945-1989). “I’m not one to love my limits: / I’m practicing being an empty house.” She writes of disability and poverty, both through her childhood and into adulthood, and the reduced options available to her through either, both. “My words,” she writes, to open the nine-part sequence “Pathography,” “always pale reflections for the language / of my organs. They say I am so lucky, to not have / a nephrostomy tube intubating my kidneys, delivering / my body of its own fluids, like E. I was lucky a nurse / didn’t have to come every other day to clean bandages / and disinfect the open wound like E. I got to stay in school, / collect a scholarship and student loans, pay rent, groceries.” She writes of agency, even when and through a seeming lack of such, forcing her way through, and hopefully past, the worst of it. As she writes, further along in the collection: “Consider: it is a privilege to have a story, to know your own / narrative as surely as you know your name.”