Interview with ​Síle Englert

Interview conducted by Kevin Heslop

Coming soon from Baseline Press

This conversation took place on 29 July, 2019 in London, Ontario. It has been edited for length and clarity.

So, I thought we might begin by discussing Threadbare, which takes its epigraph from Carl Sagan: “For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.” Thinking about “Functional Interpretation of the Knee,” “An Exoskeleton is Not the Same as Armour,” even “Diphylleia” and your ongoing series of phobia poems, nomenclature exemplifies the precision of your use of language. I wonder if you’d talk a bit about the synthesis of science and language in your work and where these two ostensibly distinct disciplines––where facts readily become opportunities for metaphor in your hands––fused in your experience.
 
I think it’s interesting that we think of them as so different, science and language, science and art. The way I look at it, there is a lot of poetry to be found in science. And when I was younger, I was just ravenously interested in everything––from dinosaurs to the cosmos to planets to evolution; and I read more science fiction than anything else, and I think I still do. And if I watch a documentary or read non-fiction, it’s always science- or history-related. So, I had that passion, and when I got to high school, taking science classes became less accessible to me because I’m terrible at math: numbers and I don’t get along well at all. And so when math became a bigger component of learning science, it turned into an either/or. My strengths were in language and art and history. I didn’t stop reading, I didn’t stop learning on my own, but I couldn’t pursue it. And I think it wasn’t until I met my wife Liz that that was reawakened. It was the way she sees the world. When I met her, she was doing her master’s in physiology, and she had just done a double BA in physiology and English language and literature. So she has one of those rare brains that can do both, and I thought that was fascinating, the way that she sees things. She can look at a poem and analyze it and critique it and she can go into the lab and do experiments on brain cells; I just thought that was amazing, and it gave me a bit of a push to explore a passion for science through my art when I couldn’t find any other way to do it.
 
And not unfamiliar to you are the textbooks that she reads? Do you incorporate her area of study into yours to an extent?
 
For sure, yeah, because it’s what we talk about. And because it blends into poetry, a lot of what she’s doing ends up in my work.
 
So, I kind of feel an obligation to get the apocalypse question out of the way early on.
 
*laughs*
 
And then we can narrow the focus a little bit.
 
It’s always there, hovering.
 
Yeah, so I guess speaking of the blend of language and science, we both recently listened to the audiobook version of The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells. And so this is potentially a stillborn and far-too-big question, but I wonder how you think of the artist’s obligation in our moment, and whether that is different from what it has ever been. Do you feel a personal obligation to address directly, through your art, questions of the sixth mass extinction and environmental collapse, or is it more something that’s naturally infused in your work as a result of it being in the ideological air at the moment?
 
I think, for me, it’s not so much an obligation as just inevitable. I think art and writing can’t help but be a reflection of the time that we live in, even when the artist sets out purposely to do the opposite. There’s always going to be echoes of what’s going on––socially, politically, environmentally. There’s always going to be the artist’s emotions infused with that. So, whether you have to or you want to, it’s going to show up in your art no matter what. So I think a lot of us, especially creative people, are existing in this existential dread right now, or feeling a sense of impending doom and heightened anxiety. And I think that’s coming up more and more in what we write and what we create and how we live.
 
Okay, well now that that one’s out of the way, can you talk to me about the choice of “Threadbare” as the title for the chapbook with Baseline Press?
 
Actually, I guess the short answer to that one is that it came out of a line in a short story that I wrote. There was a line where I chose to describe my character’s voice as sounding threadbare––I used it as the adjective for the voice. And it was a good fit for connecting all of the metaphors I used through the poems of textile art and stitching, knitting, quilting, sewing. And it brought together the idea that I’ve done with the collage on the cover of a kind of patchwork person who’s a work-in-progress and made up of all the experiences they’ve collected along the way––all of their joys and all of their pains. So, that word stuck with me after I wrote the story and I needed to do something else with it.
 
Yeah, so this idea of a patchwork person or identity could maybe also be a metaphor for the variety of artistic disciplines that you take part in, yeah?
 
Definitely. I have trouble sticking to one thing. I have so many passions and so many things that I’m interested in and curious about––things that I want to try.
 
What’s something that you ventured into recently that was rewarding in one way or another?
 
The animations that I worked on last year were very recent, very new for me. I’d never tried anything like that before––nothing on that scale that required so many small pieces. I do a lot of very tiny, intricate, careful work, but it was a completely different medium for me; and it’s something I’ve always been interested in. I love stop-motion; I enjoy stop-motion movies and music videos and things, and I thought, I’ll see what I can do with this. It was amazing to break it down into tiny, individual pieces and build it bit by bit. I had to cut all these tiny bits of paper, and it took hours and hours, but I enjoy that kind of work––that careful, monotonous, detailed work.
 
I rewatched the stop-motion video that you did to accompany Yessica Woahneil’s song, and there are dozens of uniquely cut fish, and really clever details that I found in, for example, the movement of fish: when they were going in one direction they looked one way, and then it looked like you inverted them when they went the opposite direction. Extremely careful, precise work.
 
I find the movement of stop-motion fascinating. We think of movement as something very fluid, and when you break it down into stills that are just pieces of seconds, it kind of turns it into a different creature altogether.
 
Is there some metaphor to be drawn between poetry and fiction there––the difference between a still and a sequence of stills? Maybe the better question is: How do you conceive of the distinction between poetry and prose; and what tells you it’s a story and what tells you it’s a poem?
 
I think that I don’t often know the answer to that, and I often get it wrong the first time. I might start out with something that I think is a poem, and it grows and it grows, and I look at it and think, Oh, no, this is supposed to be a story. And I think part of that has to do with the way literature is changing, because of the freedom we have to experiment more and more. The definition of what a poem is and what a story is is changing. I think the idea for me is to learn the traditional rules very well, and then smash them to pieces.
 
Mm.
 
People are pushing the boundaries and changing what we are able to do in each form. So I think with poetry it’s almost a smaller slice of time; it’s more like a moment, or a piece of a moment, that you can expand and dwell on any detail you want, and it works. With a short story, it often has to be something broader and you have to choose your details more carefully.
 
Can you riff for a second on what the increased freedom in terms of how we conceive of a poem is? I guess historically there are limitations in terms of the structure, and what’s permissible as a line, or line break. In what way has freedom manifested in the poem?
 
I think that there’s a lot more space being made for artists to push themselves creatively and push their skills in different directions. Working inside a traditional form now is kind of an unusual thing to do, you know? If you start working with rhyme or a certain number of syllables in a line, that’s become different and strange. And so doing that––giving yourself constraints––is sometimes an interesting exercise. But I also think that having the freedom to expand all of that and to break lines in places that you wouldn’t expect and use words as verbs that aren’t verbs, and just push and blur those lines and create something very new. I think there’s something to be said for both, for both following a form, and just smashing it to pieces and taking it in a completely different direction.
 
That feels sort of entropic, maybe.
 
Yeah.
 
I’m wondering if there’s a parallel between the advancement of human civilization and the way that that manifests in the development of art forms.
 
I think the funny thing about poetry too is that it is a very careful disorder. Even when it looks disordered, there is so much thought and detail and careful attention to every syllable, to every period, to every piece of punctuation. There’s a lot of contrast there that I like.
 
So, appreciating the spaciousness of what’s possible with a poem today, I feel like there’s a consistent fidelity to narrative in your poems. Do you agree with that, and if so or if not, how else would you characterize a poem that you’ve written?
 
I do agree with that. It’s interesting to me that they come out like that, because, on one hand, I’m a little obsessive about symmetry. I find comfort in order; I like things to have a shape. That’s not how I work. That’s not how I create, but that’s how they always end up. When I start something, it starts with just a little seed––a word, a shape, just a small idea––and it sort of grows organically in multiple directions. To finish, I usually have to pare down and cut it back and it almost always ends up being something in a clear shape, even if that shape is a spiral.
 
So, this idea that they grow in multiple directions and that at a certain point they have to be pared back, and your use of the word organically, it feels like there’s a sort of horticultural way that you conceive of writing––does it relate somehow to plant growth?
 
It does for me. I see a lot of things as interconnected systems, like a root-network. I’ve used that in poetry before.
 
Yeah.
 
And it’s how I see my art, how I see my writing: it often starts from one point and grows like that, branching with all these little tributaries. You could it take in any of those directions, and it depends on what you choose, how it ends up.
 
Right.
 
It ends up being a lot more ordered than I expect it to be from my work style.
 
Which looks like what?
 
Kind of a disaster *laughs*. If it starts with one word or one sentence and ends up looking like something branching out, like a mess––things going in every direction. And then I think I spend the most time chopping it up, paring it down, dividing the lines, trying to figure out where everything goes. I start with a mess of random lines and words and when I’m finished, it ends up being something very clear, very linear.
 
I’m thinking of the line attributed to Valéry that a poem is never completed; it’s only abandoned.
 
Mhmm.
 
Do you identify with that? How do you know when a poem’s finished, or do you know when a poem’s finished, or are they ever finished?
 
I think it would be very easy to keep fussing with it until you lost the essence of it entirely, so at some point you just have to give yourself a talking-to and say leave it alone. Usually, when I get the sense that it’s ready for feedback from other people, and once I incorporate that feedback, then I probably won’t make any more big changes unless it goes through an editor to be published.
 
Right.
 
So, I don’t know if they’re ever really finished or you ever really feel completely happy with them, but if you mess with them too much, you run the risk of damaging them, I think.
 
Um, at the risk of tainting your ability to give an objective, sober analysis of what workshops do for you––considering that I’m a participant in one of them––I’m wondering if you could give a really down-the-line sense of what workshops have done for you. I think you’re in two, right––one in poetry and one in prose?
 
I think for me, because writing can be such a solitary exercise––you end up spending a lot of time in your own head and your own thoughts. And as much as I want to experiment and push myself and push my creativity––I also need people to challenge me. I need people to say, this part doesn’t make sense. Or, that word is wrong. Or, I feel like you could take this further. I think it’s extremely valuable to have several other sets of eyes to look at your work in a fresh way, especially when you’ve spent a lot of time on it. I think I’ve said before that I get to the point where I can’t tell if it’s genius or garbage anymore. I’m looking at it; I’ve read it so many times that I just don’t know, and I need other people whose opinions I value to look at it and say, this is where it needs to go. And I always find afterwards that it feels refreshing, that I’ve got a bit of a new perspective so I can go in and make adjustments. I do find it extremely valuable. And aside from that, just to have other people to talk about writing with: to be able to see what everybody else is doing and where their creativity’s taking them. To be able to talk about poetry and about stories with other people gets you out of your head a little bit.
 
So, your poem “Backstitch” begins: "The subtle wrongness of this house is grinning in the windows.” We talked a bit about how poems come about; I wonder if we could talk for a minute about opening lines. That one is particularly stunning.
 
Thank you.

Backstitch

the subtle wrongness of this house is grinning in the windows:
deliberate slant that always lets the sunlight scratch her bones
and sends its little glinting slices spinning off the needle,
or malicious rainbows, circling, dizzy on her mending.
point of light that burn hot through stitches in a photograph
make her wary of the brightly-glowing places on her skin.
 
her mother taught her how to stitch and father how to skin
and flay a likeness onto paper, in the shadow by the windows,
to sew around the edges of a figure in a photograph,
making seams of places where memory meets bone.
there are waterfalls of pages as she tries to do the mending
so she holds them still like love-notes all impaled upon a needle.
 
dusty voices mumble through her present while the needle
hems a foggy landscape to the borders of their skin.
they argue raspy whispers when her hours fill with mending
and their colour fades each time she leaves them laying by the windows.
her mother said, you stitch these lines in white and make them bones––
there’s no other way to find the framework of a photograph.
 
her father said, if you’re brave enough to slice open a photograph
there’s no other way to tidy up the mess than with a needle.
and did you know that once they were all carved from sharpened bones?
there are places where their egress still leaves marks under your skin
like sepia voices pouring in with sunset from the windows,
flooding with their old-book smell the annals of the mending.
 
she sits for crawling hours patching holes in dreams and mending
hands and faces from the torn strips of a photograph.
while her mother and her father peer inside the windows
she weaves a wounded pattern through the paper with her needle.
borders blur at intervals and stitches creep over her skin;
the slint of metal soaking up the white of sharpened bones.
 
mouths and eyes are panes of glass and wood composes bone
that pours with paper faces, swirls with dust motes from her mending.
her mother told her how to mark the patterns on their skin
with fragmentary lines of chalk suturing a photograph.
her father would remind her how to dip and pull the needle
but she blinks against the rainbows smirking at her from the windows.
 
bones may come unstitched and leave a stack of rotting photographs;
a needle trailing thread will always move toward the mending.
sometimes, she says, it breaks the skin but often just the windows. 

As far as opening lines, I always think an opening line should have a little bit of magic to it. At the risk of going in a clichéd direction, I do definitely feel like they’re the hook: they have to be strong enough to grab the reader and draw them through the whole poem. I enjoy putting something surprising or unexpected in the first line to get people’s attention. And I also think it has to hold my own attention: I’m going to be reading this poem many, many times, so I would like it to be interesting for me every time.
 
What do you look for in the dialogue between the title and text? At what point does the title emerge––does it precede; does it follow; is there a regularity to how you go about determining a title?
 
I don’t think there’s a pattern or a regular way that titles come up for me; it’s a little bit random. Once in a while, the title is the first thing that I have. And at other times, the poem is complete and I have to ask other people for advice because I just can’t quite find the right one. I tend to go in two directions with titles, and they’re very opposite to each other. One is that I choose something very simple, very pointed, that doesn’t distract from the poem at all; the other thing I like to do with the right poems is something longer or more complicated that adds another line or another dimension to the poem.
 
And in your capacity as an editor, or a reader, at least, how much of the game is foregone if the opening line in something that you’re reading just isn’t grabbing you?
 
That’s difficult, because I will always give it more than the first line.
 
Yeah.
 
So, I do think it’s very very important to me personally as a reader––I want that opening line to grab me––but if the rest of the poem has enough to draw me through, then there’s forgiveness there *laughs*. It’s not a necessity, but I do definitely prefer that that first line just reaches out and grabs you and drags you in.
 
Is there something about a certain consideration for the reader’s time––it’s a sort of promise that I’ve got your best interests at heart? “I’m going to be able to reward you by the end of the poem. You’re going to get it.” But here’s a sample of––or is it less conscious than that?
 
I think that’s kind of an interesting way to look at it, yeah. Especially if the opening line is a bit surreal or a bit hard to make out; if it sounds good, you’ve got people’s attention, but it’s going to take the whole poem before they know what you really mean, what it’s really about. Often that’s the way that it works. That’s interesting, that if you just bear with me, we’ll take you through this ride and once you get to the end, you’ll have more than you started with. That’s a nice way to look at it; I like that.
 
And you said that if it has a nice sound––There’s often a really rich musicality to your poems, and I’m thinking of an extreme example of someone who’s only interested in sound, like some of Dylan Thomas. And I’m wondering whether you’d dichotomize sound and sense, and in what proportion you value one or the other?
 
I think in other people’s writing, I can appreciate both and either/or. I can appreciate a poem that I don’t really understand if it’s put together in a way that’s interesting, if it sounds amazing or disruptive or whatever they’re trying to do with the words; it doesn’t necessarily have to make sense to me, other people’s writing. In my own, I do need a balance between the two. It’s difficult for me to just form words without layering meaning. I don’t know if I can. That’s something that I haven’t really pushed myself to do, because there’s always layers of stories in what I’m trying to say, so I don’t know that I can separate the two.
 
Without layering meaning. Is the alternative to text that doesn’t have layers of meaning something like propaganda or advertising?
 
They’re saying what they’re saying and that’s it? There’s nothing to be read into it.
 
Well, maybe that’s not possible.
 
Maybe not.
 
What do you think?
 
I think that a reader is always going to be trying to determine your intent, even if you say something very very simple, or that you think is straightforward. Other people are going to bring their experiences and their knowledge to that poem. They’re always going to be digging at it and trying to figure out what it means. So, even the poems that might have been written without meaning, without intent, the reader will try to find something in it. I think it’s our instinct. We want to understand.
 
“The Museum of Dead Bees,” which concludes Threadbare, references Mary Shelley––and also I just want to take a second to acknowledge the triumph of Ruth Marsh’s work, and the way that she “staved off hopelessness” with her work reconstituting the bodies of dead bees with industrial refuse––and the Frankenstein-ian is elsewhere in your work, in “Requiem for Toys” and “The Ashes of Mrs. Reginald Hargreaves” and “Functional Interpretation of the Knee.” And I may be reading this into some of your work, but often this sense of disassembly and reassembly structures renderings of the female body: “A walking, speaking thing like Alice / with breathing lungs and beating heart is broken down. Stripped / for component parts into wife, mother.” More abstractly, we have, in “A Reason for Tiger Lillies,” the line “I forgot anger––the stranger / girls shouldn’t speak to––”. And I wonder if you’d say a few words about the patriarchal imperative to remove bodily autonomy from girls and women and how or whether that is an intentional or conscious component of your work. I’m also thinking of the sectioning of the body that comes along with the rendering of the human form in patchwork, and whether there’s a sense of an imposed disconnection between parts of oneself.
 
I think that’s definitely a conscious thing, for me. I spend a lot of time in my work, in my art, in my writing working through my own issues as far as seeing myself through the eyes of a patriarchal system instead of just through my own eyes. I think it can be a very uncomfortable, distressing thing to try to fit your body in a system that wasn’t designed for you.
 
Mm.
 
I think it’s probably very clear to most people that for generation after generation, women’s bodies were looked at more as a resource than people, used for pleasure or procreation or for unpaid work in the home, things like that. And we are coming out of that very slowly, too slowly.
 
Yeah.
 
And I think, for myself, there’s a lot of privilege to be acknowledged as a cis-gendered, white woman. There is a place that I occupy that is not nearly as complex and doesn’t intersect the way that other identities might. And still, the system that we’ve built is not one that I feel welcome in or that I feel safe in. So, that idea of deconstruction and rebuilding comes up a lot in that I feel I have that work to do: I have to break down one idea of myself and rebuild it, and part of how I do that is with my work, is with my writing. So that’s definitely an intentional theme that comes up quite frequently.
 
So, when you say that you’d intentionally break down a part of yourself and rebuild it, is it too personal a question to ask, What does that reconstruction look like?
 
I think art is probably the biggest part of it, because that is the way that I am most comfortable expressing myself, and that’s the area in which I’m most comfortable speaking out. You know, I’m a quiet person; I don’t speak up a lot; and the place where I am comfortable saying what I think is true and what I think is valid is with my work. I guess bumping up against that wall of the way that the world sees you––you know that people looking at you from the outside have a certain idea of who you should be, and how you should behave. And I think that for women, there’s been this very rigid box, this very strict set of expectations that this is who you are, or this is the space that you occupy, that this is how you behave. And we don’t do that very well anymore. We’re breaking the box *laughs*. And for me, I do that in a quieter way; I do that with my work.
 
So, it seems like a way that the claim to one’s body and also artistic work synthesizes for you––if you don’t mind my taking another personal step––
 
Mhmm.
 
––is through your tattoos. And to connect that with one of the poems, the one that begins the chapbook, we have the opening line: Would it be easier if we thought of your petals as simply white? I don’t think I got that quite right.
 
That’s okay; it’s close.
 
Do you have it?
 
Would it be simpler to think of your petals as consistently white?

Diphylleia

Would it be simpler to think of your petals as consistently white?
Or that something as benign as rain (which wears rock down, remember)
couldn’t turn them transparent? Now yes, mumble something about blood
& water, adages & aphorisms. Or glasswing butterflies. How leaves and
other insects are visible under their wings. Sand isn’t enough armour,
even when you burn it. Have you ever seen the x-ray of a seashell?
Fibonnaci curls spiralling inward on each other. How puffer fish bones
might convince you in a photograph that they intertwine. Think of that
cephalopod teapot with tentacles curled around spout & handle or the
words cephalopod teapot and then in your thoughts turn them crystalline.
Like those disturbing books from when you were small, where the little
vampire rabbits exsanguinates vegetables. Leaves them pale & empty.
Lifeless. You’d have to use words like hyaline & gossamer. On our
lunch break, we realized we could convince a spinach leaf it was human
heart tissue by stripping it of its memories. Vitreous, that’s the other word.
How we persuaded it to beat. Newborn cells clinging to leaf-veins didn’t
know the flesh they made was a window. A ghost shrimp or glass frog,
tortoise shell beetle; those soft sounds, vowels and s’s all coming back
to glass. Not every creature evolves camouflage. Some of them see
right through you. 

​As consistently white. So that already seems to be a sort of statement on a kind of perceptual box imposed by the viewer, and yet you’re in dialogue with this plant, ascribing to it a capacity for communication. (Maybe we’ll suspend the tattoo question for a second.) This is not an uncommon means of investigation in your work, where you’re in dialogue with something that’s otherwise inanimate, like dolls, for example. Can you talk to me a little bit about that?
 
Asking questions of objects? *laughs* Knowing they’re not going to reply?
 
It feels like a manifestation of empathy; it just seems to me to be empathy.
 
I think empathy and compassion and putting yourself inside the mind of others––whether it’s people or animals, things like that––there’s not enough of that, and it’s so important to me. And it makes such a difference in the way our world and our society works. So, I think having the imagination to step out of yourself a little bit and imagine things from another perspective is a really important skill to have. And I think, too, I just enjoy the twist of thinking of things as not what they are. Nothing is ever really what it is. Everything that I write about is always something else at the same time, so imagining objects as things that could think and feel and act if they wanted to is a really interesting exercise to me.
 
To subvert certainty.
 
Mhmm. I like to do things in ways that people wouldn’t expect.
 
Where’s that coming from, this mischievous tendency of yours?
 
This tiny little bit of anarchy? I think that existing as a sort of quiet, introverted person who doesn’t make a lot of noise, I guess that’s my way of making noise; that’s my way of pushing the boundaries and being seen. Twisting things, changing things, making them strange.
 
Um … could you talk me through a couple of the tattoos that you have?
 
My tattoos, for me, serve two purposes that probably sound like opposite things, but it works for me. You’ll see references in my work to armour.
 
Mm.
 
For me, they’re very much armour. They make me feel stronger. They metaphorically cover up vulnerable parts with something beautiful and strong. And the other thing that I like about them is basically that idea of wearing your heart on your sleeve, of carrying things with you that you love. I think the world can be a pretty scary and unsafe and dangerous place, and it makes me happy to keep the things that bring me joy with me. To remind me to be grateful. So, I started with a small one that was to mark after I had my first baby: I have a little stylized fetus growing inside a sun. I wanted some kind of permanent acknowledgement of strength and creation and of what my body can do, what I can survive. Because that’s a very difficult thing; you don’t think of it that way, but pregnancy and childbirth is incredibly difficult and taxing. I wanted that mark, and it sort of grew into a mosaic of things that I love and things that I wanted to remember. I have characters from movies that I like; I have song lyrics; I have my favourite flowers and bits of Poe and “The Raven” and “Nevermore.” All the dark creepy happy whimsical things that make me smile––moths and bees. And it feels more like me to have them than I felt without them, which is maybe strange, but––
 
Beautifully put. Um, I guess this one’s a bit of a Rorschach, and again slightly askance of your work, but I wonder what you recall as your earliest memory.
 
The thing that I think is my earliest memory is very suitable for me as far as my personality and my work *laughs*. What I remember is standing on a patch of bare ground that had been dug up––it was dry and cracked––and I was looking at the skeleton of a house, a house that was being built and didn’t yet have walls. It just had the framing, the wood framing. There was no roof; there were no walls; it was just––
 
Without armour.
 
––bones. Yeah. It was potential. That’s the first thing that I have is just this bare, empty, vulnerable thing that was nothing but possibility.
 
Lovely. So, in-progress is a phrase that has recurred as a self-description, and I think you used it earlier to describe the collage on the cover of Threadbare. Could you riff a bit on that phrase?
 
It’s evolution, I guess. It’s that constant change. I guess it can’t help but be movement forward, but whether you think of it that way or not, it’s just always moving, always learning, always changing––those are the things that are the most important to me, that I just keep learning, and keep picking up skills and keep developing what I have. I don’t know what to do if I’m not busy and learning and creating.
 
Do you go a bit sideways if you’re stagnant? For me, if I’m not engaged, I self-destruct, basically.
 
Yeah, I’m not fun to be around if that happens *laughs*. I pretty much have to keep busy and keep creating all the time, and if I get stuck, if it gets stagnant, it’s not pleasant *laughs*. But I guess that’s one of the nice things about being interested in so many things: if I get stuck with my writing, I try to work on some art. If I get struck on the art, I can go to something else. I always have way too many projects on the go at any given time.
 
Can you give me a sketch of what you’ve got on the go at the moment?
 
Sure. *laughs* Well, we finished getting the Baseline book ready, but I’ve got editing coming up for my next chapbook. I have been sending out a full-length manuscript, looking for a publisher for that. I’m working on a bunch of short stories. I try to submit regularly, once or twice a month, either stories or poems. I am working on projects for the house. Liz and I make a lot of things by hand, partly because we care about it and partly to save money and use materials that are more environmentally friendly, so we’ve always got things going on like that.
 
An example of one or two?
 
Liz makes all of our bread and baked goods at home. We repurpose old sheets and clothing as rags or make them into handkerchiefs so that we don’t buy Kleenex or paper towels. To try to avoid the waste of fast fashion, we buy secondhand, sew some of our own clothes, and everything else from purses and shopping bags to quilts and blankets. Between the two of us, we knit socks, sweaters, winter gear. Which means we’ve also become fairly adept at mending and repairing things. Basically, if we can reuse it, repair it or make it at home for less money and with less waste, we learn the skills and we do that. 
 
And here I am having arrived with an enormous styrofoam container.
 
No!
 
*laughter*
 
No, it’s not cut out completely; that’s not really possible. We just do our best. And I’m starting to work on some hand-quilting that I would like to potentially do an art show with. I’m hoping to transfer some of my skills with collage into fabric, and the one I’m working on right now is about half new cotton and about half repurposed fabric. I’m hoping to be able to re-use things that would otherwise just go into a landfill and make art pieces out of them.
 
Hand-quilting.
 
Mhmm.

What is that process?
 
Very slow. *laughs* It’s very slow and a lot of small detail. The one I’m working on right now is something called English Paper Piecing. For example, I’m using hexagons, so I have to cut out paper hexagons, wrap them in fabric, stitch them closed, then I stitch them together. Once I’ve got a big enough piece, I put appliqués on top of that––for example, right now I’m doing a bee on top of honeycomb.
 
Right, right.
 
And I’ve got to put a backing and a middle, and when that’s all put together, then I start hand-stitching all the details along every line. It’s a long process; but I enjoy the work, and it’s not something that I have to think too hard about except when I’m designing it, so I can do it while I’m talking or while I’m watching TV or while I’m listening to music. It just keeps my hands busy.
 
Um. Bees.
 
Mhmm.
 
The canary in the coal mine at the moment?
 
It kind of feels like that, doesn’t it? Yeah.
 
Could you talk a little bit about your reaction to Ruth Marsh’s work?
 
Sure. I came upon her work by accident. I think something linked me to a CBC article where they interviewed her, so it was just stumbling upon something really fascinating. And what she’s doing––not only was the idea of it very appealing, but––it appealed to my aesthetic. It was that …
 
Steampunk.
 
Yeah, steampunky and that combination of creepy and beautiful that I really like. It was putting something whimsical together with something dark and kind of melancholy. That’s a contrast that I enjoy and that takes up a lot of my thoughts and my work. Seeing that she was taking this possible extinction, this death, and memorializing it using the bees’ bodies themselves and reconstructing them as if they were little cyborgs, little robots––and she’s even been doing some animation––I think stop-motion with them––sort of bringing them back to life. I just thought that was fascinating, and it really inspired me. I just wanted to write. When I come across something that appeals to me that much, I want to explore it in multiple mediums. I want to write, but I also want to make it into art, so that kicked off a bit of a bee tangent, which is why I’m stitching bees now *laughs*.
 
Right. Let’s see. Oh yeah: so, I wanted to be sure to gush about the objects that Baseline Press produces. They are as beautiful and as carefully fashioned as any chapbooks anywhere and Karen is a gem and we love her. To stitch this to a question: how has Karen been as a co-designer and editor to work with, and how did you two find the heart of this chapbook?
 
Karen’s been amazing to work with; she’s just wonderful. And knowing––as I’m sure you do, and anyone who’s spent any time with me––how much I appreciate careful, handmade work and things that are aesthetically pleasing, having my work come out first in a Baseline book is just a dream for me. It’s such an amazing feeling; I feel so grateful and so fortunate that this worked out the way it has. Baseline books are just treasure. They’re all little works of art in themselves. The writing, and the covers, and the careful work Karen does putting them together. She has such a careful eye for detail. She notices things that I would not notice, even in my own work; and so she applies that to the books, physically themselves, but also helps me do that with my work. I feel like each poem she looks at ends up polished and shining and comes out so much better than it went in. I feel like my work has benefited so much from her eyes. It’s really a treat to have been able to work with her. She was accommodating enough to let me design the cover art for my book myself, and for me that collage that I did––that patchwork woman––was the essence, the heart of the book. It was representative of what we were talking about, of a person as a work in-progress, and all these pieces coming together to make something whole and beautiful. Even if it’s patchy, even if it’s scarred-up, it’s still beautiful.
 
So, I get the sense that you’ve picked up different pieces of the creative quilt, say––means by which to express this or that––different disciplines at different times; and I was wondering if you could lay out the chronology of that accretion.
 
Sure. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t make art. I think it’s probably that as soon as I could hold a pencil, I was drawing. That came very naturally to me. I grew up in a house surrounded by art: there was art on the walls; there was music everywhere; there were great movies. So, it was––if I can use that word––organic to me; it was just a natural, instinctual way for me to express myself, especially when I find it more difficult to do that verbally. I find it much more difficult to just speak and say the things that I want to say, so it’s easier for me to write, to draw, to paint. I remember when I was young, it was more of a conscious decision to pick up the textile art skills––embroidery, sewing, quilting, knitting. That started out as a way for me to connect with the older women in my family, the grandmothers and the great aunties. I used to have this worry that once we moved away from those skills and those arts, that they would be gone, that we would lose them. So it was a way for me to spend time with them and it was a way for me to hold on to that piece of something. And as I got older, these particular arts turned into almost a feminist act, for me. They became a way to reclaim something that was pushed on us, you know? It was something that was expected of women: you sew, you knit, you do these acts of care for your family partly because you care and partly because you’re supposed to; but it wasn’t real work and it wasn’t real art. And now it’s like a reclaiming: it’s taking it back and making it work and making it art. And I’m very inspired by seeing men doing it more and more. There are men sitting knitting in public, and it’s fantastic because it’s a very relaxing thing to do; it keeps you calm, and you’re productive, you’re creating. And there are women using it as a form of protest, as a form of political and social commentary. You see people doing yarn-bombings and knit-ins and there are people who embroider political protest statements. I find it fascinating and inspiring. So I think that was much more of a conscious choice than just creating in general.
 
Yarn-bombing.
 
Yes. *laughs*
 
What is that?
 
That is when people go out and sort of surreptitiously cover objects in public with knitting––a telephone pole or a bicycle or even a car. Just to make a statement about normalcy and messing things up a little bit.
 
So we have drawing, writing, music taking place more or less at the same time, and then a more conscious inheritance of sewing and knitting and needlework; and stop-motion is something that has emerged recently.
 
Mhmm.
 
Are there other components to this extraordinary and enormous creative capacity that you possess?
 
*laughs* Oh. Let’s see. I used to sing; I used to play the bodhran drum. I don’t do many of those things anymore. When I was younger I was in a couple of bands, and I did a lot of a capella vocal work; but I’ve let certain things go over the years because you just can’t fit all of it into your life. You just have to choose the things you love the most.
 
All fourteen of them.
 
*laughter*
 
All fourteen things that you love the most, yeah. But it depends what mood I’m in and what needs to be done. If there’s something coming up for which I need a gift for someone, for an occasion, I’ll often pick up a new skill in order to make that thing. Because I prefer to make things by hand and not have to buy something packaged in plastic. I’ll be able to give someone something that I worked on myself. So, my wife taught me to make little handmade journals with stitchbound spines. And there will be times when we need something for the house, so I think all right, I’m going to make curtains, or learn to upholster something. It depends on what we need and what’s happening. I’ll pick up a new skill and I might stick with it and I might not, but I like to do things with my hands.
 
Did you ever, particularly as a kid, feel stifled by that capacity? Did you ever feel overwhelmed by it, or perhaps do you still? I mean, maybe it’s for want of trying in some people, but it’s an uncommon gift magnified several times over that it seems you’re in possession of, and I’m wondering if it ever felt encumbering.
 
It can, sometimes. There are ways in which it feels almost like a restless urge to create, to be constantly moving, constantly doing something. I mean, I guess an example is if there’s a bit of salt spilled on the table, I have to put my fingers in it; I have to touch it and move it around and make it into something else.
 
Right.
 
So, similar to what you said before, if you get stuck and you can’t do it, there’s that uncomfortable feeling of not being yourself, of not being productive, of not creating. That can be a very uncomfortable, very distressing feeling to have. And there’s the fact that it doesn’t fit into everyday life very well. You’re supposed to choose one thing: you’re supposed to choose a job, an occupation, and do that thing every day. And I don’t work like that; I don’t fit there. I can’t. If someone handed me something that I liked well enough and said you have to do this thing every day for the rest of your life, I don’t know what I would do.
 
Right. So you never took an aptitude test, in other words.
 
No.
 
*laughter*.
 
No, I definitely need that freedom to move from thing to thing. But also, it can be overwhelming. If I take on too much, there are days when I think I have twenty projects on the go, and I just can’t …
 
So, I don’t have exactly the phrase, but within these couple of sentences just uttered was something like, you start to lose a sense of self if you’re not creating. And so I wonder if that gestures towards a self that consists of focus on external––How do you conceive of yourself, is what I’m trying to ask you. Another soft ball.
 
I’m just thinking.
 
Take your time, please.
 
I think because of the way I write and the way I look at the world, a lot of things are metaphorical for me. And that can feel very real. So, it’s quite possible that I see most of myself in the things that I make, so that it is a very external exercise––that working on myself and who I am is a physical thing. It’s taking the mess that’s in my head and pushing it out into something productive, into something beautiful or bothersome or whatever it needs to be. I think it feels like I have more control if I take it and do it with my own hands instead of just working through it in my head. It feels more substantial, more physical, more manageable. So if I lose that––if I lose the ability to do that and I’m left only with my thoughts––
 
Pull the plug. Liz will––
 
*laughs*
 
Liz will accommodate. “Trust me; she would have wanted it; she’s having a tough time in there.” So, what about phobias caught your attention?
 
The phobia project started out as an alphabet book. It hasn’t turned into that, but it was meant to be an alphabet book. It was along the lines of and inspired by books that Neil Gaiman has written––and I don’t know if you’ve seen much of Edward Gorey’s books, his alphabet books. I like the idea of taking an upsetting, bothersome, dark subject matter and presenting it in a kind of whimsical way. I like that juxtaposition of things, so I started out trying to make it an alphabet. And of course, because of the way I work, I didn’t do it in order. I started with whatever words inspired me the most, and I started with lists of phobias and wrote down the ones I was interested in. And as I went along, I realized it wasn’t going to be an alphabet because there were certain letters that didn’t have many phobias attached to them––or that I was interested in––and there were letters like C and O which were too many to write. So, it’s just become a rambling collection instead of an ordered, organized thing that the alphabet would have been.
 
So, I had the pleasure of reading of a few of them, and I’m wondering, when you’re looking at a list, what characterizes a phobia that would captivate your curiosity? They’re not often conventional phobias.
 
No, I do like the very strange ones. A couple of them would be things that I find slightly terrifying––maybe not quite to the point of a phobia, but––I find clowns terrifying, anything to do with teeth, mimes. I just find them really unnerving. So, I find it interesting to write about things that bother me, and I guess coming back to that putting-yourself-in-the-place-of-other-people, thinking about how such an intense fear can be centered around something that seems pretty innocuous to other people. I have one that I haven’t finished where I was writing about linonophobia, which is a fear of string or anything that looks like string.
 
Wow.
 
And it seems like such a strange, quiet, unassuming thing––string––to be afraid of, but––
 
It’d be everywhere; it’d be terrifying.
 
Exactly. And fear is probably our strongest emotion; it sticks in our minds more than joy does. And we arrange a lot of our day around what we are afraid of, and that was a really interesting thing to explore. To take something like the moon or the colour blue or a swan and imagine how that thing could be terrifying, and what does that do to your life and the way you move through the world?
 
So, on that note, I’ve sometimes thought that veteran actors, who’ve played like 150 different characters, because they’d seen the world from so many different perspectives, they’re no longer sure what theirs is––that maybe at a certain point such an actor can only explore the truth by means of character. And I’m wondering whether, given these repeated, conscious acts of empathy, you’ve felt a movement away from a kind of certainty towards uncertainty. Or, are there things that you’re certain of?
 
I think there are probably very few things that I’m very certain of, but that seems to me-–I could be wrong–– like a very human thing. I think if most people really think about it, they would feel that way, that most of the world and our bodies, how we exist, is chaos and uncertainty. And the way that I work is my way of bringing some order to it, and deciding what I think about the world, and what I think is fair and right and what isn’t fair. And that changes over time: the more I learn, the more I explore, the more I talk to people, I try to keep myself in a place where I can always change my mind, which I guess leaves you open to a lot of uncertainty.
 
It feels like a necessary space to inhabit in the interest of the in-progress-ness of one’s evolution.
 
Mhmm. I guess it comes back to the idea of science and evolution, too. It’s that you only know as much as you know in that moment, and you have to be open to changing your mind when someone presents you with more facts.
 
To what extent do you feel like evolution by natural selection informs your sense of how and why we are creative? What would the evolutionary––I know that this is not, on paper, your area of expertise, but it’s also not unfamiliar––what would the evolutionary explanation for creativity be, do you think?
 
When I think about aesthetics in other animal species, what I know of when birds have mating rituals or different things that fish do underwater––they make piles of sand in certain shapes––or crows that will collect shiny things, a lot of the time they’ve done it––It usually seems like something that’s supposed to attract attention. You’re supposed to do something special, something beautiful that gets the eye of someone, something that you’re interested in. And I imagine that it probably started out that way––that we might have started decorating ourselves, or painting, or singing to differentiate ourselves from other people. To feel more like individuals. To feel like we are special, that we have a skill, something to offer the world that other people don’t have. And it turns into a way to connect. You call attention to yourself by making something that no one else can make, and in that way you connect with other people who appreciate it. I think it’s become so ingrained in us as a species, too. I feel like as long as we’re creating, we have hope, because these are the things that last longer than we do. The things that we make are not just for now, but for the future. So as long as we keep creating, we hope.
 
This reminds me of Ruth Marsh’s statement that her work has “staved off hopelessness.” I’m sensing that in addition to a kind of dread, one of the things that creating does for you is to stave off hopelessness.
 
Absolutely. The reason that I included that line from her interview is because it resonated with me so much. The only time that I feel comfortable and right and settled and hopeful is when I’m creating something––when I’m taking the mess and organizing it into something positive, something productive.
 
Do you like reading poems aloud in front of an audience? What’s that experience like for you?
 
That’s tricky for me because, oddly enough, I don’t enjoy being the center of attention. I don’t like being stared at; I don’t like being in the middle of the room with everyone looking at me. But the act of actually reading it is usually enjoyable for me. I like to be able to share my work in an environment where I know people will appreciate it. I enjoy the feeling that it might resonate with other people, that it might wake something in them that they feel compelled to comment on or talk to me about. I like the feeling of connection with people that comes from sharing my work; but the actual act of standing up in front of them and reading something aloud is pretty terrifying.
 
How do you feel in response to compliments?
 
Oh, very uncomfortable *laughs*.
 
Always?
 
Always very uncomfortable, yeah.
 
Talk to me about that uncomfortability.
 
I think it’s just this constant sense of imposter syndrome. I have this terrible feeling that at any minute everyone’s going to discover that I don’t really belong here and that my work isn’t what they said it was, or isn’t what I thought it was. It’s this sense of needing desperately to belong and to connect but always feeling like I don’t, really, and that there’s always something that’s going to be discovered that means I shouldn’t be there. As much as I love it when people like my work, I also think, Oh, they must have made a mistake. *laughs*
 
Right.
 
But I think that also is a very human thing. I remember reading, I believe it was Neil Gaiman meeting Neil Armstrong at a party. And each of them felt that same feeling.
 
"… I started talking to a very nice, polite, elderly gentleman about several things, including our shared first name. And then he pointed to the hall of people, and said words to the effect of, ‘I just look at all these people, and I think, what the heck am I doing here? They’ve made amazing things. I just went where I was sent.’
 
“And I said, ‘Yes. But you were the first man on the moon. I think that counts for something.’”
 
Each of them felt that same feeling: a best-selling author and an astronaut who had been on the moon both felt that they didn’t belong in the presence of the other person. So, I think that’s pretty consistently human, but I have it pretty intensely.
 
Well, as Neil Armstrong can look back and say, I was on the moon, I wonder if there are things that you would point back at and say: those represent the manifestation of imposter syndrome that was least intense for me?
 
*laughs* Having some of my work accepted and published is a huge validation. Knowing that people whose opinions and education and knowledge-base I respect are taking these things that I created and saying this should be out in the world; people should see this; I want to do something with this. I think those are the accomplishments that matter the most to me. Having the book come out with Baseline. Having bits and pieces of my work come out with literary journals. I’ve designed tattoos for people in the past. Having people ask for my drawings to be put on their skin forever. That sort of thing is extremely validating. To think my work means enough for you that you want to keep it. Those things make it worth going through the discomfort, knowing that you’ll run into people who love what you do and will want to share it.
 
So, what a profound honour it would be to have somebody request a tattoo from you. That’s amazing.
 
It’s amazing. I think there are three or four people who have my work tattooed on them, plus myself––the work on my back is my own. It’s an incredible feeling. That’s forever; that doesn’t go away; you can’t change your mind.
 
…
 
…
 
Would you like me to move the cat off of your questions?
 
No, no. It’s fine.
 
Okay.
 
I dare not disturb a cat.
 
That’s what she thinks too.
 
*laughter*
 
That would be a kind of blasphemy. I wonder if we could take a really close look at a poem from the chapbook. Have you got the chapbook on hand?
 
I do, yeah. 

This Body as a Rube Goldberg Machine

In The Great War of Your Limbs vs. The Furniture
it’s true, what they don’t say about the sixth sense:
proprioception––awareness of what space this body occupies.
To move a world around inside a world.
 
On the smallest of scales, when atoms collide,
you observe the chemical make-up of reverberation.
Tiniest tilt of bone at one extreme of your blood-and-meat universe
causes a ripple effect, dominos through every muscle and joint.
 
A cat’s eye marble falling from your hand is the trigger.
At point of impact, its weight turns a carousel,
tugging the thread that holds you upright toward a candle flame.
A red balloon is released at a needle and bursts,
startling the mouse, which runs frantically
nowhere, inside its wheel––
 
this is how you wave goodbye, enter a room, kiss goodnight.
Air or speech displaced by one wing grazing another.
In falling, gravity does the work for you.
This is how your fingers curl to grasp other fingers.
 
Machine cobbled from an uncertain set of bones,
wrapped in a nightgown the colour of scar tissue.
Toes catch on the sag of loveworn hand-me-downs.
It goes
                tumbling.
                                    misstep.
                                                      ricochet.
 
These elbows, these hips blooming infinitely
dark underneath; your shadow like a boy
stitched to the wrong side of his skin.
That ink-spilled-in-water look.
           
There are muscles functioning as pulleys,
a maze of movement behind the curtain.
Red rabbit holes and narrow bridges, cantilever hands
come together in oscillation paler than prayer.
 
To achieve balance between this body and the world’s sharp edges:
 
Separate depth perception into its component parts.
Give them their own sentences.
Lack of depth. Lack of perception.
Expect unexpected corners.
See how multiple surfaces occupy the same planes,
the whole house Picasso’d into unattainable angles.
Cut the words kinetic and perpetual into individual letters;
use them to patch the damaged areas.
 
Accept that you do not know how to work this machine. 

I wonder if you’d tell me about the genesis of this poem.
 
Well, this came out of two places. One of them was what we talked about earlier, about my wife’s work creeping into my poetry. I spend a lot of time sitting with her, working while she’s studying. And because now she’s studying human locomotion, she’s learning about how the body works and how each bone and tendon and muscle connects to the next. You can injure a part of yourself and feel pain and cause disruption somewhere entirely different that you would not associate, but because everything is so connected, so intertwined, the damage reverberates. And that really spoke to how I see the world, how interconnected things are, how twisting something in one place causes something very different to happen down the line. And I had been watching a video of a Rube Goldberg machine that was an instrument using marbles and tone-bells and things. It was that whole idea of machines, of interconnection, of how one part moves the next part and the next part. And it was the fact that I have terrible depth perception. And when I walk around the house, I regularly smash into things, break my toes, hit furniture. Sometimes it feels like a very difficult thing for me just to move my body through the world. And my wife told me about that word, proprioception, which is supposed to be the actual sixth sense, which is a sense of the space you occupy and how you move in the world.
 
It’s a loaded word.
 
Mhmm. It is.
 
“Accept that you do not know how to work this machine.”
 
Just always kind of stumbling through, crashing into things. *laughs* Making my way the best that I can like everybody else, but with a lot of bumps and bruises.
 
There’s a good line in Brecht’s In the Jungle of Cities that’s something like: Human beings––in order to protect themselves from their environments––they consciously thicken their skin; and it would work, too, if only they could stop the thickening. And so eventually you have people bumping into one another and into corners and not feeling it (obviously as a metaphor for how we encallus our sensitivities in order to survive). And I feel like artists are people who aren’t as good at producing those calluses.
 
For sure we’re not *laughs*. We feel everything and we feel it deeply and we don’t know how to protect in a balanced way. There’s always that risk of protecting so much that you don’t feel anything anymore, and so little that everything hurts.
 
And so home becomes sanctuary?
 
Yeah. It’s the safe spot that you know. But there’s always dangerous things around you no matter what you do, right? There’s no place that’s really safe.
 
Yeah.
 
The idea of trying to move this clumsy machine around, even in a space you think you know––furniture angles come out of nowhere. It’s a metaphor for existing in the wider world.
 
This kind of takes a bit of a dark turn, but in a poem you workshopped recently, there was a line: a speaker and her partner are walking on the sidewalk and somebody drives by and just hurls some nastiness out the window. So, I was talking with a friend of mine recently who’s from the UK but his family’s from India, and I asked him how many times a day he experiences acts of racism, and he was like, Multiple times a day. And I was doing this residency recently: one of the exercises was to walk around downtown for about an hour and a half and we were to return and discuss what we experienced; and invariably, all of the young women who were a part of that group who went out independently said that they’d been cat-called multiple times over the course of like an hour, hour and a half. And so that’s all to say that I feel like I’m just starting to get a sense of how different the experience of walking on the same street, depending on who’s doing the walking, can be. So, to phrase that as a question––or maybe I don’t need to phrase it as a question. I wonder if there was a period in your life––or perhaps a period that, to some extent, you’re still in––when you wanted to avoid the spontaneous acts of ignorance or stupidity or anger or vitriol that can sometimes emerge in the world for one person or another for one or another reason and just stay home. Was there a time when you just said, Fuck it. I’m staying home. I’m not leaving
 
*laughs* Once or twice a week.
 
Once or twice a week.
 
I think it takes a lot of energy and a lot of bravery and a lot of courage if you are a woman, or walking and being affectionate with a partner of the same sex, or if you are a trans person, or any kind of visible minority or a dis/abled person––it takes a lot of energy to move through the world and brave whatever comments, whatever stares, whatever things are going to inevitably get hurled your way. Just the act of being out there and taking up space puts you at a significant risk. And that risk increases as your identities intersect, as there are more …
 
Ways in which you’re different from the monolith?
 
Absolutely, yeah. And I think when I said before about the difficulty of trying to exist in a system that’s not built for you, the system was built with men as the standard human. And not just men, but cis-gendered, heterosexual, able-bodied––and in our part of the world––white men. That’s who this system was built for. And the problem is all the people who don’t fit in that system actually outnumber that group. There are so many of us! And trying to move through that can be exhausting, and sometimes there are definitely days when you just choose not to engage or you choose just not to interact. And I think also as a person who’s extremely introverted, I do tend to feel exhausted by any social interaction; so when it turns negative …. There are times when I’ve been screamed at out of cars; where I’ve been cat-called; where I’ve had people make comments about me walking with my wife, about our family; I’ve had––sometimes it extends to––threats of violence. Even with my tattoos, making me quite visible, also seem to give people permission to touch me without asking. So, there’s the feeling that just leaving your house and walking out in public can make you vulnerable. And I don’t really know for sure what it’s like to be more of a visible minority. To have more exposure to that has got to be exhausting. I don’t know how people do that every day, and I  spend a lot of time every day just wishing that wasn’t what happens. I know that we can do better, and I just want people to do better.
 
So to add a moment of humour, appreciating that the anecdote that I’ll momentarily recall took place between two white guys, two comedians, Seinfeld and another guy with a beard: Seinfeld asked the guy, Why do you wear a beard? And he said something like, It’s like the only thing that guys have left––the only thing they don’t feel like they will cede as equilibrium overtakes the society. So, that seemed to me to sort of encapsulate, in a way, what has manifested in the rise of somebody like that Peterson fellow where you get this backlash from men––particularly white, particularly cis, straight, able-bodied––feeling that their hegemony is slowly ceding to a place of equality; and it’s that sense of a loss of power in order to collectively empower all of us that they’re reacting to with frustration and anger and even more intense emotions than anger, sometimes. So, in terms of … trends and momentum––um––where––wh––what the fuck is happening around us at the moment?
 
*laughter*
 
Things you say to yourself a hundred times a day. *laughs* Yeah, I guess I can imagine that being a part of a privileged minority for generation after generation, it could be a scary, threatening thing to feel like you are losing something that was rightfully yours, that you’ve had all this time, that is something you consider valuable. I have also seen––probably in memes and twitter comments––people saying that the reason they’re so angry and so afraid is that they feel like equality means they will start being treated the way they’ve treated women and minorities for years, that it’s going to be completely flipped, and that that’s why it’s so scary for them. *laughs* But yeah, the backlash is a pretty scary thing, isn’t it?
 
Yeah.
 
It feels like it takes more strength and more bravery to speak out against the injustice and the unfairness all the time, because the more we speak, the louder we are, the scarier the backlash gets. And I don’t know what to do with that because there are not––we don’t have endless resources as far as energy, as far as space, as far as having our voices heard. There’s only so much each person can do before you get tired of being fought against, before you get tired of vitriol and violence. So, that’s probably why I do things in the way that I do, because this is the only way that I know to fight and still take care of myself.
 
You say “the only way”––
 
Each of these fourteen dozen ways are the only way I know.
 
*laughter*
 
This might be a sort of throwaway question, but: is art inherently political?
 
I think that answer probably changes depending on different artists that you ask. I think that some people would like to think that their work isn’t, and some people would say that they determinedly stay out of politics. And sometimes art is escapism––it’s a way to get away from all those stressful, scary things that we have to deal with on a regular basis. But that idea of art being reflective of the times that it’s created in probably means that it’s gonna show up in funny places whether you want it to or not. When I write something, even if I don’t set out to call attention to some issue that I see in society or some problem or––it often happens anyway because I’m feeling these things. Because I’m living these things. I’m still writing about myself and about my experience and the people that I know and the people that I love. Writing about what’s happening to all of us and the world around us, I think it’s just gonna creep in whether I try to do it or not.
 
So, adjectives that could be read into the word “threadbare” could include a kind of revelation, an exposure, and in terms of a voice––a threadbare voice, in its original phrasing––maybe exasperation could be part of it?
 
One of the other poems of mine that you read––“Requiem for Toys,” where I used a piece from The Velveteen Rabbit––it was along those lines, along the lines of being worn down by time and by love and by hardship and difficulty and joy. And how you don’t become real until that happens to you. You’re not real until you’re damaged and improved by your experiences.
 
Wow.
 
So being threadbare is––We have a quilt that my wife’s grandmother made and it’s all handstitched pieces of velvet, and it’s starting to fall apart because we’ve used it so much. But we have the skills, we know how to fix it, right? So we can put these pieces back together and it almost means more because of the damage, because it’s had hands of different generations working on it and it’s been through interesting things. It’s damaged and fixed and put back together; it’s threadbare; it’s worn out, but it’s beautiful. That’s what I was getting at, is you’re not real until you’re a little damaged. 

Síle will launch Threadbare with Baseline Press in London on 1 October at 6pm at TAP Centre for Creativity, and in Toronto on 25 October at 6:30pm at knife/fork/book, alongside Emily Lu, Nisa Malli and Terrence Abrahams.

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Kevin Heslop is a London, Ontario-based poet and actor whose second chapbook, there is no minor violence just as there is no negligible cough during an aria, is forthcoming with Frog Hollow Press; his first chapbook, con/tig/u/us, was published by The Blasted Tree in 2018. His poems won Poetry London and Occasus Literary Journal prizes in 2015. As an actor, he has appeared as Creon, Katherine Minola, and Saul Levi Mortera. Kevin is also the resident interviewer for Poetry London and organizes LOMP: reading series.