Interview of Murgatroyd Monaghan

Important Editors' Note: In the interests of uncovering the experiences of BIPOC writers and artists, we have decided, due to instances of hostile tone and an attempted equivalence between white and BIPOC experiences in Canada, to simply remove the interviewer's portion of this interview instead of revising it. We think it is important to disclose this problem rather than attempting to "fix" the interview and thereby concealing an unfortunately common BIPOC experience.

Murgatroyd Monaghan's answers are provided in their original form, in full and without edits.

(Off Topic Publishing, 2025)

Murgatroyd Monaghan

[Interviewer asks about Monaghan's focus on community health]
 
Murgatroyd Monaghan:  The health of our communities is paramount. I have always known this. Humans have lived in community since time immemorial, and the health of one or some of us affects the health of the whole. Black and Indigenous communities have been faced with multiple health inequities since colonization. On present-day Turtle Island, these inequities are baked into everyone’s experiences, whether we are benefitting from them or suffering from them. I would like to think that the victories won by marginalized peoples here are much more than small—many of the improvements in community health that we have experienced since colonization have been hard-won by the work and lived experiences—and often the deaths—of BIPOC. In white spaces I wanted to honour these legacies while becoming increasingly aware of the ways I personally have both suffered and benefitted from colonially constructed inequities.
 
[Interviewer asks about unusual formal elements in white spaces where we learn to breathe, such as unusual spelling and punctuation, unexpected line breaks, etc.]
 
Murgatroyd Monaghan:  I’m not aware that I battle for freedom at all. If anything, my intention with white spaces where we learn to breathe is to direct the average North American’s attention to the accomplishments and sacrifices of those who actually have battled for freedom at great cost. I am keenly aware of the privilege I have had to avoid many battles because of the colour of my skin and the racially ambiguous nature of my appearance. Part of maturity for me has been making the conscious choice to avoid using white privilege to avoid direct harms, while deferring to the leadership of those who are most impacted by racism and colonialism.
 
You touched on the use of language in ‘white spaces’, and it’s something I think I’m more equipped to speak on, because it’s an issue that has affected me personally and persistently. Both as an Autistic person and also as someone who arrived here without documentation, I have been on the receiving end of systemic and person-to-person abuse because of my natural use of language. I worked hard in Canadian school as a newcomer to learn English the “right” way, but linguistic assimilation erased a large chunk of who I was. Decolonization for me has been largely led not just by code-switching in vocabulary, but reverting to language that feels natural—more oral, more logical, less legislated, anti-policed. As I do this, I begin to heal a lot of intergenerational traumas in myself. I also become painfully aware of how much inequity exists in the experience of failing to uphold colonial language norms, and what assumptions are made about my intelligence and validity—resulting in victimization and harm—on this basis, especially when this is intersected with my identities as a woman and an Autistic person.
 
[Interviewer asks about possible difficulties in reading the poems aloud]
 
Murgatroyd Monaghan:  I do a lot of spoken word, it’s actually my preferred medium for poetry delivery, so if you’re curious I recommend checking out some recordings or live performances. My social media has lots of videos of my own spoken poetry.
 
[Interviewer asks about the genesis of the title]
 
Murgatroyd Monaghan:  The title was something that came into place early on because ‘white spaces’ was never meant to be a book, it was always meant to be art. This is the title of an interactive exhibition that requires readers’ breath to be activated. It is possible to take in ‘white spaces’ passively, but I imagine it would be rather boring, and would miss the point (although to be fair I suppose this is how a lot of people living with privilege do experience life). The white spaces on the page mirror the spaces in colonized society that are designed with whiteness in mind. The text itself is an insertion, to say nothing of content, and as they unfold in tandem, taking up space, the reader is encouraged to be aware of their breath. The experience will be different for a white reader vs a BIPOC reader, and this is important. Breath is a tangible/audible/ physical barometer for markers like discomfort, anger, and fear. The CNS/body adjusts breath automatically, based on its past experiences and what it thinks might happen. So we bring our experiences of existing in white spaces to the consumption of the art. A prime example of this is the experience of existing in white literary spaces which are overwhelmingly colonized in terms of grammar, spelling, formatting, etc. A white reader may feel uncomfortable witnessing words or spellings they do not immediately understand, whereas those who first spoke Patois, pidgins or cants may feel immediately comfortable with a more phonetic spelling and may also be more familiar with the experience of struggling to perform illogical spellings with judgments on their intelligence and character at stake. In both cases, the breath will reflect this.
 
[Interviewer asks about composition methods]
 
Murgatroyd Monaghan:  About half of these poems were developed orally. I did not have a page placement for them, and I intentionally kept them in the book the way I would naturally scribble them down. Others I designed like art, and I wouldn’t think of it as writing. The words are just the medium. Rule-based writing is a colonial way to write. There are other ways to write. For example, emotion-based writing, where you write things the way they feel; sound-based writing, where you write things the way they sound; and some kind of story-based writing that I use a lot, which carries the story of the word or phrase inside its structure (i.e. breaking a word into two and sending the second half of it to a new line, to reflect an actual brokenness or dichotomy or distance within that word). Most of the writing is logical to the decolonized, although freetung I wrote as a hyperbole of this logic, sort of tongue-in-cheek, and island tongue has this progressive sort of unmasking and playful experimentation that happens throughout that gets reflected in the text.
 
The hardest parts of writing, the parts that didn’t “fall out”, were the poems I wrote to honour the lives of others. Those poems took years of research and connection. I wanted to really feel everything I could, know everything about that person that I could, that was available to me, and try to imagine the rest as honourably as I could. Then I used structures that honoured that person. For example, Donna George’s poem reflects her personal and religious views, but I also used a ballad form to really get that feeling of predictability and repetition, which is what I see when I look at CFS and their treatment of Indigenous mothers, and ballads also have a playfulness that honours the innocence of the children who were taken. Some of the poems, this one included, actually are songs that have music and/or were written for drum, so that the stories of folks like Darryl Night and Angela Cardinal could be passed on and remembered in my own family.
 
[Interviewer asks about the research process]
 
Murgatroyd Monaghan:  It’s important for me to mention that I did not contact the families of the deceased or affected to obtain more information about anyone in ‘white spaces’. I felt this would be disrespectful and also not necessary in order for me to make art that conveys the ways in which these folks’ lives touched me personally. I did, however, strive to be as factually correct as possible, and I conducted the majority of my research online. A lot of ‘white spaces’ was written during the worst years of the pandemic, and so while I didn’t travel a lot, I was very conscious of the concepts of breath and white spaces in society—something that was magnified as COVID came into the picture, both physically/medically (long COVID disproportionately affects Black communities, and the worst of the first waves disproportionately affected both remote and urban FN communities, for example) and symbolically.
 
[Interviewer asks what Monaghan wants to accomplish]
 
Murgatroyd Monaghan:  I actually don’t hope ‘white spaces’ achieves anything for me. Not that I don’t hope to achieve anything as a poet/writer, I do. But I hope to do that through other writing, teaching, and serving my community. ‘white spaces’ itself is really about the achievements—and sacrifices—of others who came before me. It doesn’t feel like writing. It feels like art. I want it to achieve something for the partakers. I also hope that ‘white spaces’ contributes to the normalization of dynamic and decolonized English writing. Maybe one day, when we finally abolish the CMOS and other inaccessible and racist language enforcement, ‘white spaces’ could do a little dance.
 
[Interviewer asks in which discipline the book should be taught]
 
Murgatroyd Monaghan:  100% English. I’ve seen online and brick-and-mortar book sellers categorize ‘white spaces’ into all kinds of things, and that’s fine for the average reader, but ultimately, if it were to be studied, I hope it gets studied through the lens of being critical of the English language and its inherently divisive nature.
 
[Interviewer asks about links between pieces and possible links to the poet's life]
 
Murgatroyd Monaghan:  I want to address this by talking again about the title, white spaces where we learn to breathe, because this ability to breathe is the central idea that links the collection. The source of this idea of being able vs unable to breathe comes from the final words of George Floyd, who was publicly executed by police while repeatedly telling us he could not breathe. The simplicity of this statement coupled with the brutality itself gave rise to more public discourse on the idea of “breathing while Black” than I had ever seen. I listened for years, while Black person after Black person raised signs that said, simply, “we can’t breathe.” I witnessed incident after incident in my community of Indigenous people unable to breathe under the metaphorical—and sometimes physical—weight of police and other systemic violence. I began to pay attention to myself and my own breathing: when I drove with my hair natural, I didn’t breathe. I would wear hats and hoods to drive, because my being pulled over overwhelmingly correlated with how I wore my hair. When I entered emergency rooms for my children’s care, I paid attention to my racial appearance and even practiced speaking in a “perfect” unaccented manner, afraid that I would be judged as a poor mother based on what the staff perceived my race to be. I spoke to white friends who confirmed that they breathed normally in many places I couldn’t imagine breathing well in. That sparked an uncomfortable realization for me: I benefitted from white privilege such that I could often simply rearrange myself and breathe better. Many community members, such as George Floyd, could not hide their Blackness. Our breath controls so many vital aspects of our health—our endocrine systems, our gut motility, our mental health, even our cardiovascular health—and I thought, what is the effect of existing in a system where you can never properly breathe? I lived in this liminal space and I wanted to create something that showed that space, but also allowed readers to interact and perform their own experiments based on breath and discomfort, to better understand their own experiences and the experiences of others in their communities.
 
[Interviewer asks how characteristic the book is of Monaghan's work]
 
Murgatroyd Monaghan:  I have never written anything like ‘white spaces’ before. Most of my poetry, if you listen to it, or read it, is totally different. ‘white spaces’ felt like something essential that I needed to address and get off my heart and through my body before I could continue writing other things that I had been working on.
 
[Interviewer asks which character/poem Monaghan would rescue from a fire]
 
Murgatroyd Monaghan:  This question is a Kobayashi Maru and I’m an Autistic person. Like, climate change burning? Political burning? Or someone just hates me? This is a funny question because our land is actually burning and the way to save it is to return to Indigenous ways of being and caring for the land, in other words, to live the way we should have when we came here, which is for white (and non-white) settlers to live gratefully as white guests in Indigenous spaces, and not force Indigenous people to survive as guests in white spaces. The problem since we’ve done the latter is that, well, everything is burning. And if that’s happening where my book is, listen, save people/communities, not books. And if this book is ever burned for political reasons, I feel like that’s strange; you’d have to be pretty overtly racist to burn ‘white spaces’, but if it happens it’s probably something to celebrate. And if the burning is personal, then I’m super glad my hater bought a copy first, money in my pocket.

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Murgatroyd Monaghan is an Autistic mother, writer, spoken word artist and poet of mixed descent. Her spoken word won first place at the Wordstock Sudbury Literary Festival and Myths and Mirrors. Her piece “Thumbs” won the Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize. She has been a finalist for dozens of national literary prizes, including the Room Poetry Contest and the CBC Nonfiction Prize. Other writing has been published in Chapter House Review, PRISM, and the Humber Literary Review, among many others.
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Murgatroyd has devoted her adult life to motherhood and is pursuing writing now that her children are older. She is working on several book-length projects. A former asylum-seeker, Monaghan was raised in Ontario.