Interview by David Ly
Alex Leslie’s latest poetry collection Vancouver for Beginners (Book*hug Press, 2019) is a ghost story, an elegy, and a love song for a city that is both indecipherable and a microcosm of a world on fire. What follows is an interview between David Ly and Alex about living surrealism, revisiting inspiration, and how to view Vancouver as a city.
David Ly: Thanks for sitting down to chat, Alex. Congratulations on Vancouver for Beginners. How did this book come about, and what made you decide to use our city as its setting?
Alex Leslie: I wrote this book over about six or seven years. I was born and grew up here in Vancouver and have lived in the Lower Mainland all my life. I found myself writing poems about Vancouver—particularly its contradictions as a very wealthy place and a place of profound poverty, and as a place known for “nature” and a place that has come to be through colonial force. At first, I was resistant to writing about Vancouver—I was wary of how “written” this city already is, and I was wary as a settler of writing “about” a place that I realistically have little claim to. Then, I was inspired by Italo Calvino’s book Invisible Cities. Calvino writes about many “cities” that are actually all Venice. He writes contradictory, grotesque, surreal and poetic microfictions about this one city and many-cities. Taken together, it’s like a kaleidoscope. It doesn’t settle, or resolve. Vancouver for Beginners is intended as a beginner’s guide—like a you-are-an-alien guide—to a place that is in itself full of paradoxes and irreconcilable contrasts. For example, the art installation under the Granville Bridge, where there is now a gigantic crystal chandelier, and people are living in tents underneath it. How bizarre. Think about it. We don’t even need to write surrealism—we are living it.
DL: Since this is your fourth book, how does this one feel different from your other three and how do you feel you have changed as a poet and writer over the course of your career?
AL: I’ve published a chapbook of microfictions, two books of short stories and two books of poetry, this being my second. I started out as a short fiction writer, and then got drawn into my love of language, and proceeded to publish a mix of prose poems, poetic short fiction, traditional short stories, some free verse. Vancouver for Beginners contains microfictions, prose poems, and poetry in different forms. It’s a hybrid work. It’s different from my short fiction collections in that it’s not a work that’s interested in realism. It’s a sustained exercise in different ways of writing about a space—as an emotional field we project onto, as an alien space we will never really know, and as a capitalist machine that’s bigger than us. I think that over the course of my four books, my writing has become more open and I’ve continued to try different forms, to push myself.
DL: If you could wish for readers to take away three points about the city of Vancouver after having read the poems in this book, what would they be?
AL: That’s a difficult question to answer, because the book is built to be quite unsettled and not boil-down-able. I think I’d like the reader to come away confused—a productive confusion that makes you look at things a little differently. I could offer three questions, though:
Is nostalgia an ethical thing to write out of?
Can a place ever be fully described?
Can a place ever be described as one’s home when it was stolen from other people, or what are the implications of this if so?
DL: I love the characters that are in the book, especially the aquarium collector. What made you bring back this person again in multiple poems? It creates a lovely reading experience, encountering a familiar character across poems.
AL: My first love is fiction and I’ll always come back to fiction because I love writing characters. The aquarium collector is a figure who roams through the book, stacking aquariums that are also glass condos, or homes. I started out with one poem about him—a kind of developer-as-god poem—and began folding him in, because development, housing and the relentless spread of Vancouver (does Vancouver have borders anymore?) are themes in the book, and I enjoyed him as an anchor. He is a magical character, who circulates above the daily activity of the city, and is also a vehicle for commentary on the surreal nature of the rapid transformation of the city—there is a literal deity out there, stacking glass containers for humans to occupy. There are recurring pieces through the book—for example, the series of absurdist Development Applications—because I am aware the book is dense and varied, and it’s helpful to the reader to have a scaffold.
DL: What are some things you’ve learned about poetry since writing this book?
AL: I had the absolute privilege of having Karen Solie as the editor of this book. I learned a lot about concision, the importance of not over-stating, and the importance of considering every detail from the process of working with her.
In putting the whole project together I was pushed to think about what’s a poem and what’s a story, and how to arrange and order the pieces so the reader felt they were reading one book, not three mushed together. I had to think carefully about cadence and the internal logic of the transitions from piece to piece through the book. I re-read Invisible Cities many times and was guided by Calvino’s absolute daring in how he put that book together. It is beautiful and deeply strange.
DL: Can we talk about the cover for a second? It’s very surreal! What was the impetus behind settling on this artwork?
AL: The cover is by Kate Hargreaves. You can see more of her work here. We went back and forth a lot about the cover. I wanted something that played with the idea of inversion. Kate made the image and I love the watery, intangible feel of it. The inside covers are also gorgeous, kind of watercolour-y.
I like the bold white imposing font for the title, as if this is a true guide book. It’s very convincing somehow —like POETRY FOR DUMMIES—and that makes me laugh.
DL: Lastly, are you working on anything else at the moment?
AL: I am writing my first novel. I worked on Vancouver for Beginners and my book of short stories that came out last year with Book*hug, We All Need to Eat, for so long, often at the same time, that having them both be out in the world is very freeing; it’s good to focus on one project. I’m such a short form writer, and have always been so preoccupied with experimenting with form, that having one project with one voice that will take several years to complete is a relief. That said, a novel is a whole new animal and it’s hard to wrap my brain around it, so I am working slowly and methodically. I just published a new short story on Catapult in the US called Eagle Son (thank you Nicole Chung for the amazing editing job). And I have a short story ‘Phoenix’ coming out soon on Cosmonauts Avenue, an online journal. I also co-curate a reading series called Koreh at Or Shalom synagogue and we’ll be having a couple more events in the Spring. Everyone is welcome.
Alex Leslie was born in Vancouver. She is the author of two short story collections, We All Need to Eat, a finalist for the 2019 Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and 2020 Kobzar Prize, and People Who Disappear, which was shortlisted for the 2013 Lambda Literary Award for Debut Fiction and a 2013 ReLit Award. She is also the author of the prose poetry collection, The things I heard about you (2014), which was shortlisted for the 2014 Robert Kroetsch Award for innovative poetry. Alex’s writing has been included in the Journey Prize Anthology, The Best of Canadian Poetry in English, and in a special issue of Granta spotlighting Canadian writing, co-edited by Madeleine Thien and Catherine Leroux. She has received a CBC Literary Award, a Gold National Magazine Award, and the 2015 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers.
David Ly is the author of Stubble Burn (Anstruther Press, 2018) and Mythical Man (Anstruther Books, 2020). His poetry has also appeared in publications such as PRISM international, carte blanche, Pulp Literature, The Maynard, and The /tƐmz/ Review. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and long- and short-listed for the Thomas Morton Memorial Prize in Poetry and the Magpie Award in Poetry, respectively. Twitter @dlylyly.