Photo by David Mandville
Get to know Carmella Gray-Cosgrove, whose story “The Dance of the Cygnets” appears in our SPRAWL issue (58.3). Symbiotic relationships are at the core of this piece of short fiction, in which the narrator transits across the city, dancers depend upon one another’s movements, and our social connections are analogous to the root systems of trees. Be sure to pick up a copy of the SPRAWL issue and check out Carmella’s work.
Why do you live where you live?
I ask myself this question often, especially at this time of year when the rest of the country is experiencing spring. I left my hometown of Vancouver ten years ago this May, a few months after the 2010 Olympics, and biked across the country to the farthest place still part of this continent. I’ve lived in St. John’s, Newfoundland on and off since then.
In retrospect, I think I originally came here to put as much distance as possible between myself and the city I grew up in, to get perspective on my past, but without any understanding of Newfoundland. I landed on this island with two paniers of camping gear and assembled a weird new life next to a very different ocean in a city with a diametrically different culture to Vancouver. Then I fell in love with this place and with a wonderful person and I stayed. Now I have a kid and a community, so I guess it’s home. But I pine for Vancouver. I think the book I’m writing is a love letter to the messiness of that city and the neighbourhood where I grew up.
Do you have any “vices”? What’s the relationship between your vices and your writing?
I think a lot about morality, which I guess lies at the heart of the idea of “vices.” I think about morality especially as it relates to substance use and I write a lot about addiction. I have struggled with substance use in my life, and much of my childhood was spent grappling with drugs and alcohol in the world around me. I have happily left that part of my life behind, but much of my writing tries to make sense of the ways we interact with so-called vices, the ways that our vices shape our lives, and also the ways in which our vices or lack thereof are not at all a measure of morality.
What’s the last thing you wrote that surprised you?
I recently started writing very short flash fiction, mostly as a warm up exercise at the beginning of my work day and often using imagery from my dreams. In a conversation with Lucas Crawford, who was my mentor at the Banff Centre last month, and who is an amazing poet and a very kind human, he suggested that these stories might in fact be poems, which is uncharted territory from me and was a very surprising notion.
In your wildest dreams, what does your life look like?
I live in a cozy house in a sprawling field next to the ocean with no other humans around except my family. I have full time, free childcare that doesn’t rely on family members, a really great garden, chickens and a couple goats, zero financial concerns, zero worries about global pandemics or climate events and I write all day. Honestly, if I just had the free childcare and writing parts of this dream life, I would be totally satisfied.
Is there a public space you’re fond of? Describe it.
In non-pandemic life, I spend a lot of time in the public spaces of our provincial art gallery, The Rooms. It is this kind of ugly building on the outside, but it’s up on a hill, above downtown, and it has this amazing view of the city and the harbour. It houses the provincial archives, where anyone can work, and the building is open to the public even though the gallery spaces are paid entry. I wrote most of my master’s thesis in the archives and spend a lot of time in both the free and paid parts of the building. The café has cheap, creamy fish chowder. There are huge windows and when the fog rolls in you can watch it coming over the ocean from miles away, this grey mass. Within minutes the whole city and the whole building are engulfed by mist. Where the bright houses, boats, cliffs and ocean were, there’s just a wall of grey. I also bring my kid to a playgroup there that kept me alive for the first year after he was born—being around other people who were as tired as I was and looking at the ocean when life seemed so small and often bleak.
What’s the first story or poem you remember writing, and how does it relate to your current work?
I remember writing this story when I was a kid that was about an orphan in nineteenth-century London who escaped his horrible life by stowing away on a ship to Ireland. I think I’ve always been drawn to writing about kids living in poverty and finding an escape. That was what my life was and those were the kids I was surrounded by. Though I think I have a much more nuanced understanding of intersectionality and class mobility now. Who can actually escape and why and how. And I no longer write pseudo-Victorian fiction where the characters speak in vastly inaccurate Cockney accents.
What’s one risk you’re glad you took?
After my maternity leave ended, I didn’t go back to my day job. I worked at this supportive and wonderful organization doing harm reduction outreach work with youth and adults. I loved that work and the people I worked with, but it also took all my creative energy and I was never able to write as much as I wanted. I asked my family if they could help with childcare so I could write full time, I applied for every grant available, and I’ve been hustling to make writing into my job since then. Having a kid and having really new and intense constraints on my time made me realize the urgency of making my life the way I want it and making the work I think is important. And I was really lucky to have so much support to start that process.
What creative objects or practices are you reading, watching, listening to, or feeling passionate about right now?
I’m currently loving this web series by Magda San Millan called “The Cock Painter,” which I came across on Miranda July’s Instagram, a great source of inspiring and weird art, mostly her own. The series is performance and visual art about Magda’s paintings of people being devoured by their own penises. She talks a lot about the dream world and mythology, classical painting, and sexuality. It is very bizarre and hilarious. She has this indomitable presence. The series is a balm in this terrible time. I also watch a lot of Columbo with my partner. It’s the perfect TV show.
Tell us about something that brought you joy or made you laugh recently.
My kid is a hilarious twenty-month-old with words coming fast and furious. There was this beautiful, funny, tragic moment last week when all the fog horns were blasting in the harbour as a thank you to our healthcare workers during this time, but which also felt like this melancholic acknowledgement of how shitty everything is and maybe of our collective strength or something cheesy like that.
Anyway, we were out on our deck in our parkas listening, and my kid was up in my arms. I started crying because the whole thing was really moving and between my sobs I was explaining that the boats were honking their fog horns. Then, over the noise, he started yelling fog horn over and over again, except he was so excited and maybe frantic yelling and yelling “fog horn,” that it changed to “fuck horn,” and then “dog horn,” and then “duck horn,” and then in an epic moment of creativity he yelled “garbage horn,” and we both broke into hysterical laughter. It was the sweetest. Since then, my partner and I have been riding with him on the back of my bike to the lighthouse at the mouth of the harbour on foggy days to listen to the fog horn.
Carmella Gray-Cosgrove grew up in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver and now lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland. Her writing explores geography, loneliness, race, class, trauma, and addiction. She holds a BA in English Literature from UBC and an MA in Geography from Memorial University of Newfoundland. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Riddle Fence, Broken Pencil online, Freefall, the Antigonish Review, and an anthology called Hard Ticket. She is the 2020 Writer in Residence for Riddle Fence. Her feature will appear in the upcoming summer issue (36), with writing celebrating the tenth anniversary of Lawnya Vawnya, a music festival held in St. John’s. She is currently working on a collection of short stories.