Photo by Emily Cooper
Interview by Tania De Rozario
I first met Ivan Coyote in 2018 while they were a writer-in-residence at Simon Fraser University’s English department. A seasoned performer and author of twelve books, Coyote’s latest collection, Rebent Sinner came out in October 2019.
Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule for this interview, Ivan. When I encounter your work, I read it as memoir, but spread across a variety of forms—prose, lyric, performance, music. I am wondering how these different elements of your practice inform (or don’t inform) each other. For example, is there something you learn on stage that gets translated into what you do on the page? Is there something about performing music that influences how you think about language?
This is a question that goes way back for me. I started off as a live storyteller, writing and then memorizing my work to be performed live, often in collaboration with a musician or musicians. My narrative style has been partnered with and influenced by music—the chord progressions, the pace, the key, the downbeat, all of it, since I first began publicly sharing my work. I often find myself seeking and finding the narrative equivalent of the suspension and resolution of a chord progression in how I craft a story. A song wants to resolve itself. Our ears want to hear the two-five-one in a story, in some way, anyway. It doesn’t mean that everything has to end on a perfect major chord, but I do often hear a song or lyric like skeleton to how a story unfolds itself to me.
I love the idea of a song wanting to resolve itself! For me, that is so much like a story. Speaking of, one element that anchors your art-making across genre, is storytelling being central to your work. I’m wondering, when a story surfaces for you, do you work it through a variety of creative forms or do you know right from the beginning what kind of creative container it is going to sit in?
The story often tells me how it is meant to be told, in some ways, and then in others, it is more malleable than that. I always start with the story as the backbone, and go from there. The music, or the visuals, or the video editing, these are tools that help, but they can be easily rendered ineffective or become superfluous if the narrative arc wavers or becomes weak or obscured in some way by adding other elements or effects. Finding that balance is part of the craft, for me.
You have a strong online presence—many readers outside of North America have told me that they first came to your work via YouTube videos of your performances. Has the evolution of social media and online space in general had an impact on how you tell stories, or think about storytelling?
I honestly just try to be as physically and emotionally present on stage as I can muster myself up to be. I try not to think about cameras or recording devices being a part of the process at all, I think in some ways it would shut me down or scare me away from the heart of the story. I just try to bring as much as I can to the live act of telling the story, and let the rest fall where it may.
That makes total sense. To add on, when I think about your work in relation to social media, I can’t help but think about Crying in the Truck—these are a series of video-ed moments, vignettes perhaps, that I find are very specific to the medium. Do you consider content like this to be part of your larger art-making or art-making process?
Crying in the Truck started off as an emotional pressure valve release for me, to be honest. I was doing a long stretch of high school gigs (think gymnasiums, crowds of 400-1100 teenagers, crappy sound systems and multiple gigs per day) and I meet a lot of struggling youth during these tours. The emotional toll is overwhelming, some days. On top of this, these are the times when I am most likely to also receive hate mail, death threats, etc. from more conservative folks in some of the places I visit. So I cry in my truck some days, and one day I just filmed a little 30-60 second rant in my truck and posted it on Facebook. People really liked it, and it helped me process some of the exhaustion and complicated emotions that work brings up for me, so I did it again. I don’t see it as part of my art making process, really, more like a by-product, or even a weird sort of remedy for some of the sadness and trauma and pain I have to sort through, on behalf of my own ghosts, and due to some of the youths’ stories that are shared with me as part of doing that work in schools.
You once said that when it comes to telling stories, the writer’s job is to “talk across boundaries that we put in between ourselves.” I’m wondering whether you still feel this way? In what ways are we responsible to our audiences?
I still feel that personal story and narrative is the most powerful tool that we have when it comes to learning from each other, yes. I do. I think I am responsible for my words, and my work. I am accountable for that. As to how we are responsible to our audiences, that is more of a thesis question, not an interview one.
Fair point! In many ways, your most recent work, Tomboy Survival Guide defies categorization, and is such a wonderfully encompassing example of what you do. The book contains short stories, lyrics, email exchanges and standalone paragraphs which you’ve termed “literary Doritos.” All these different pieces seem to bounce off each other very naturally. There is even a collaborative performance of the same name that lives outside the book. How does such a multifaceted project take shape? Did you know when you started that this is what you were writing?
I don’t write or create from my head or my intellect as much as this question points to. I wrote Tomboy Survival Guide while I was also writing and helping to score and create the live stage show that I toured with the band as part of the release and circulation of the book. I engaged in a similar process of manuscript and music/visuals collaboration with Rae Spoon and Clyde Petersen when we were working on the Gender Failure project. There are parts of both books that would not translate from the page to the stage, so they were not included in the live shows. There are stories and bits of both Gender Failure and Tomboy Survival Guide (the books) that are essential to the conversations on the page that do not belong or wouldn’t fit into a seventy-five to ninety-minute live show. The page and the stage both demand different things at times from the stories I want or need to tell, and the little crossover bit of those Venn diagrams guides me to the right decisions, hopefully, when working with multimedia projects. Then you factor in the other artists that you are collaborating with, and their visions and ideas for the work. I try not to see the end at the beginning, and make space for what happens as the work unravels itself, I suppose, and I try not to overthink the process too much in case my head gets in the way. Somewhere along the way I have shed the restrictions that are placed on much non-fiction in terms of form or length or style, and that has been a revelation for me, too.
Your new book, Rebent Sinner, came out in October. I’ve read one of the stories, Unbecoming, and it left me breathless. What can we expect from this new book that we can also find in your other works? What can we expect from this new book that we can’t?
Rebent Sinner will be my last non-fiction work for the next while, I can tell you that for certain. I feel like I grew up a lot between Tomboy and Rebent Sinner, and I took some hard knocks and learned some difficult lessons in my life. I don’t know what it will be like for a reader, but as the writer I can feel all of that folded into the pages of this book. I turned fifty years old while I was editing it, and I wrote it during a period of heavy self reflection and some hard emotional growth, and some challenging times with my family. My other grandmother died while I was writing this book. My father fell off the wagon, hard. I traveled hundreds of thousands of miles of road while I was writing it. It’s all in there, just beneath the words.
Ivan Coyote is a writer and storyteller. Born and raised in Whitehorse, Yukon, they are the author of twelve books, the creator of four films, six stage shows, and three albums that combine storytelling with music. Coyote’s books have won the ReLit Award, been named a Stonewall Honour Book, and been shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Prize for non-fiction. In 2017 Ivan was given an honorary Doctor of Laws from Simon Fraser University for their writing and activism. In 2019 Ivan will mark 25 years on the road as an international touring storyteller and musician, and release their new book, Rebent Sinner, with Arsenal Pulp Press.
Tania De Rozario is a writer and visual artist. She is the author of Tender Delirium, And The Walls Come Crumbling Down and Somewhere Else, Another You, all published by Math Paper Press. Her writing can also be found in journals including Prairie Schooner Online, the Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Midway Journal, carte blanche, Blue Lyra Review, and Margin – the Asian American Writers Workshop Journal.