This interview is a part of a carte blanche magazine blog and conversation series highlighting writers/creators whose practice is rooted in collaboration and interdisciplinarity. Please note that this interview has been edited down from a two-hour conversation between Jessica and Erin.

ERIN:
Why do you write? What is writing to you?

JESSICA:
The initial reason I write is because I have to. It’s like a release of pressure.

I also have a draw to share my work with others. It’s really, really important to me. It feeds my soul when people say: “Oh, I really connected with what you did there.” It just, yeah, it completely fills my cup. I want the creative side of my life to be like a conversation, right, so I’m being talked to and I want to talk back.

In terms of what writing is to me, I mean it took me a while to accept my interdisciplinarity as an artist. I still struggle with it to some degree, but now I try to actively celebrate and dig into it. I did an undergrad and a master’s degree in creative writing and there is, for the most part, this lyric poetry that is taught and that you’re expected to write. I was fortunate to have an undergraduate creative writing teacher who was also my thesis mentor and a poet, named David Goldstein. He encouraged us to try making chapbooks and taught us all about experimental writing. I don’t know if I would be the artist or person I am without that influence. It really set me off on a trajectory of realizing there is so much interesting experimental stuff to try out

and to play with. That has become a really important part of my writing.

ERIN:

The work you’re doing with bookmaking—making your own and collaborating on chapbooks at the Centre for Expanded Poetics at Concordia, along with your DIY ethos, feels connected to democratizing access to the arts and that is exciting.
Can you speak to this?

JESSICA:

It’s really important to me to do as much as I can, or make available as much of my work as I can, for free, but I still live in capitalism so I need to figure out how to live. I feel really fortunate that I’ve been able to access this amazing aspect of the University and funding. I graduated from my MA but I still work at the Centre for Expanded Poetics. My job there as a bookmaker and a programmer is that I get paid by the Centre to give others access to my knowledge and to the Risograph, which is what I print on. It’s this perfect niche where I’m getting paid, but they’re getting free access.

ERIN:

I’m very interested by what can be learned through collaboration. I think that writing can sometimes be seen as this singular, siloed, and very individualistic practice. In bookmaking and in working in the position that you do, what are you learning in collaboration with other artists and their projects, or through bookmaking in general?

JESSICA:

I’ve learned so much through collaborating with other writers. When I work with bookmakers I get to see their text in this very visual way. I love to look at their text and think, what is the best way that I could possibly represent this text in book form? A form that invites someone in and that communicates what the book is about. So that’s what really makes me excited about book design and bookmaking is creating a vessel for other people’s artwork.

ERIN:

The exterior book form…the invitation makes me think of the literal yarn that comes with kt2og. Did you get any responses back from readers? Photos of something they’d tried?

JESSICA:

Yeah! I have invited people to show me if they make the knit patterns. It’s cool to see them out in the world because, with that project, it is really important to me that people actually make it which is why I designed the book to have the twine attached to it. A knitting pattern is itself, of course, an invitation or a directive to make. It’s something you see with popular knitting magazines. They will often include the yarn used to make the project in the magazine. With the whole design of that book—the paper weight, the materials—I was inspired by vintage knitting magazines.

ERIN:

I love it!

JESSICA:

That project (k2tog) is a conversation. I am talking to these women who were talking to each other in the past, so say there are three poems in the series, then my pattern or my book is the fourth aspect of that conversation. Then there is the possibility of someone else knitting. That is another dimension and even though they’re following my pattern their piece will look different from mine. I would love to see like 50 different people’s iterations of one of those knitting patterns. They would all look different right?

ERIN:

Of course! I’ll be honest, I don’t knit haha but I feel that it could be similar to reading.

A personal, individual, and introverted meditation in a sense. Being a part of that meditative space with a stranger and the magic that happens there. To do that with something that’s embodied…something that a person can touch. It’s incredible. You’ve involved someone in a conversation and it’s a form of sacred space even.

JESSICA:

The activity of it, like you said, is so important. And I don’t know if you’ve seen—on my website, I have my knitting performances?

ERIN:

Yes! Yeah!

JESSICA:

So that time spent sitting with another person is exactly what I’m trying to communicate. An extended period of meditation. The time it takes. The labour, and especially the gendered labour, which is so often invisible. I love that you drew the connection between the act of reading and the act of following a knitting pattern because they are both kinds of communication across time and space. It’s truly magical to have communication that exists in marks on a page or sounds in the air.

ERIN:

And well, yeah, the notion of reading and knitting being a conversation, it’s a kind of psychic line in the sense that you get to share a psychic line with someone you’ve never met.

I’m pleased with my segue here haha. I feel this can really nicely move us into this idea of magic. I wanted to know about your own relationship to magic, to ritual, and to transformation when it comes to your creative practice

JESSICA:

It was probably about eight years ago that I thought that I was researching a writing project by looking up all of these old antique texts about witchcraft and the witch trials in the archives at the University of Toronto, back when I was still in Toronto. Then I moved to Montreal and it was everyone who I met that was like: “oh, you’re a witch.” I was like, “okay, yeah, I guess I am.” It’s funny how in a shift like that people can see things about you that you didn’t necessarily know. Like when I tried to come out as queer, everyone was like, “yeah, why are you trying to come out? We know!” It’s like, “well, I didn’t!”

ERIN:

There’s a huge theme in this conversation that we’re having around translation. I feel like some of the act of magic in writing, in poetry especially, is the ambiguity of what gets concealed. What gets translated, and what doesn’t? Of course that can be extended to identity and expression as well.

JESSICA:

Yes, in poetry…just the utter fallacy of attempting to accurately communicate one’s thoughts and feelings, right? Like it’s just a wall. You’re constantly coming up against that. You have to accept that that is the state of things and then move

forward from there, right? The reader is going to get what they get from it and you can’t control the response. You can’t try to make someone understand.

ERIN:

Absolutely. I think it’s kind of like—if the kite flies in those very few moments where there’s full translation, then that’s an honour. But it’s obviously not something that happens all the time.

JESSICA:

Often in my poetry, I tend to focus more on images. People have said that my writing can be cinematic or very visual and I think that’s because I’m just not drawn to trying to explain myself to people. To say I’m sad doesn’t actually describe what it is to be sad. So to describe the components of an emotion, to create a scene which evokes an emotion, I think that is much more evocative to me than writing that is more intellectual, or heady. That’s what I personally connect to. There are so many vastly different forms that we call poetry.

ERIN:

That’s so true. I also wanted to also talk to you about some of your recurring subjects and interests in writing. Is there something right now that you are working on that has your head circling around a subject, or a cluster of subjects? A question?

JESSICA:

A big question I’m always circling around and trying to figure out is: Why, when people have been hurt, do they go on to hurt others? It’s a question of empathy or lack of empathy. I don’t pretend to understand it, but it’s something that I’m always circling around. So I’ve just finished up a collection of poetry that is now being sent out to publishers, so that’s very exciting, and after having put a lot of pressure on myself in editing to, you know, to try make it quote-unquote perfect or done, which of course, again—fallacy—I’ve been having a lot of fun writing more experimental things and really playing. I’ve come back to a grouping that I guess will hopefully be a book one day of pieces around shame and sex as a woman and my experiences of that. It’s very heavy subject matter, so I think it’s become playful because it has to be in order for me to even engage with it.

ERIN:

I think that that is such an important subject. Sex and shame in connection to womanhood is so crucial. Looking at this in an empathetic, compassionate and self-compassionate capacity…it’s needed. That is a challenging place to go to. You have to protect yourself. Take breaks. I think about that in writing. A lot of the times you are translating something from within the depths of yourself and self-care becomes so important. For writers and for collaborators. I think of trauma-informed processes. I’m going back to something I had seen in your work. This notion of radicalized empathy as a political tool. That was something that really stuck with me is seeing empathy and sensitivity as these tools to hone and be accountable to oneself and in the world. That they aren’t these like, um, secondary instincts, you know?

JESSICA:

Oh yeah, no. I think they need to be a baseline. Really. I think we need to build them up in ourselves and in each other as a really strong foundation before we can go out into the world as our best selves. Well, no. I was just disagreeing with myself in my head, because what I was going to say is, and I do this all the time, where I say my work isn’t political, and people are like, “have you read your work?” But I come at it in different ways, you know? I am very interested in power dynamics, right? So I am a chronically ill and mentally ill person and I just can’t be someone who goes to protests and things like that, as much as I want to be, so I try to find other ways to do my part to try and make the world better. I think engaging with deeply felt art is one way we can better ourselves. By that I mean become more empathetic and more compassionate, both to ourselves, firstly to ourselves, and then to others.

You brought up the word radical. I would like to challenge people to see if you can be compassionate or empathetic towards someone you see as your enemy. That’s always a challenge I give to myself and I often fail. That’s what I was talking about with the question of—if someone hurts me and I go on to hurt them or someone else or myself as a result of being hurt…it’s not…it’s not doing anyone any good. I think our responsibility as people, and it’s so much easier said than done, is to stop cycles of abuse in our lives, systemically and personally. That could be family abuse cycles or systemic abuses that happen. These are huge tasks that I’m setting for myself and other people but I think—I think reducing harm is the work of living.

ERIN:

That is very…sensitive and noble are the words that come to mind. Essential is another word that comes up when I think of reducing harm as the work of living. There’s something magical in that...in the healing of that. Love for someone who hates you. Love amidst hate. Love as crucial to alchemizing and processing and understanding anger too.

JESSICA:

Yeah, and being very present rather than avoidant of anger, so that healing can occur in a way that is still self-preservational or self-loving.

ERIN:

I often you know, speaking of women and labour, I think that there’s so much labour unfairly put on women to caretake in self-effacing ways, and I think that perpetuates cycles of abuse, so it’s interesting to think of caring, but from a very whole or healed or towards healing place. I don’t know.

JESSICA:

One of my first tattoos is a picture of my grandmother—a portrait of my grandmother after her graduation from nursing school. I have alternately loved and regretted (and now love) having gotten that tattoo. This connects to the ways my understanding of care has shifted. She was someone who was the caretaker of the family and I remember her telling me that she spent more time in nursing school than she did working as a nurse because she got married. She quit her job and became a wife and mother. I guess, as I became more explicitly feminist or strong in myself I thought, like—“fuck this, I’m not going to take care of people,” but I realize it is completely essential, and completely essential to care for oneself. Of course that can look like saying no.

ERIN:
It is important and witchy to say no, and being a storyteller or weaver like yourself is political, you know?

JESSICA:

Everything of who I am is in the art that I make, right? Being a witch, being a woman, being anti-capitalist, being queer, all those things are all the foundation from which my writing and my art comes, whether or not I’m explicitly talking about it.

ERIN:

That’s another place where magic lies in writing, and in the relationship of form to content…it’s this idea of being able to have a conversation that is generous but still a critical exploration of narratives we come to accept as truth. Specifically, I love the design and the form poetry takes in your Waste Land project. This idea of a coded language in T.S. Eliot’s initial poem—a coded language intended for men—that is transformed into a knitting pattern—a coded language associated with women. This also connects to the distinction you’ve made between fine arts and crafts too. The idea of, you know, who gets to decide what is high or low art? Often it is white men that decide what narratives or practices have the most merit.

JESSICA:

I’ve gone into a lot of projects, like when I was younger, in this explicitly feminist way of like, I’m gonna flip the gender hierarchy here or I’m going to…it’s going to be a complete reversal, but actually, when I get into projects, into the nitty gritty of it, what ends up happening is not a reversal but the binary breaking down which I actually find is so much more interesting and true. Right, so when I was making The Wasteland. I was reading a lot of T.S. Eliot’s writing—especially his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” I thought he was going to be saying that tradition is important, that this is the main thing, but really what he is arguing is much more nuanced. It’s more about an innovative work of art as being something that builds on but does not fully fit into tradition. That was a funny moment. It was a moment that opens up rather than closes off. My initial intention was almost like revenge, like: “You excluded me, now I’m going to exclude you.” Instead it opened up more of a conversation which is so much more interesting than what I had set out to do.

ERIN:

I am learning so much from that. Complexity and nuance just enrich things so much more than binaries. I mean this circles all the way back to knowledge—types of knowledge. I think that we can be an overly reason- and certainty-obsessed society.

JESSICA:

We want to be able to put things and people in boxes. Especially with how busy we are. We don’t have time to deal with a nuanced email or have to think about what if this or that social media post—what if this person has more nuanced opinions than the two lines they just said, and I’m extrapolating who they are based on that, you know?

ERIN:

All these unhelpful but still human mental shortcuts. I do feel that poetry as a discipline rusts the hinges off a lot of that. I think sometimes that the practice of creative writing is trying to transcend language by using it in a weird or illogical way.

JESSICA:

Yeah, I’ve been reading this amazing issue of the Capilano Review Translingual Poetry and Translation, and it is so eye-opening. The struggle of language. The multiplicity of all language, and this idea of even if you only speak one language there’s still multiple, almost infinite possibilities and forms. Ask ten people to define a word you’re going to come up with ten different definitions.

ERIN:

I think of words in a textured capacity. Words as colours. Words beyond their initial literal meaning. It connects me back to something you’d mentioned around materiality and poetics. I know that is a huge part of your practice. So my question for you here is, specifically in The Waste Land, what did you learn at the intersection of performance, knitting and poetry? How did these disciplines interact?

JESSICA:

The word “collage” is coming up for me. I’ll talk about that. The project first showed up for me when I was in my undergrad and I was reading a lot of poetry, but I was also knitting. I was knitting as a way to keep my hands busy and then I realized that in scanning poetry you come up with this binary system, just like in knitting. So I realized these overlaps and how words themselves are a kind of material that can be pulled apart and put back together in the way you can unravel a sweater and make it into something new. Really seeing words themselves as building blocks. Then, through the performances of The Waste Land, the project ends up taking so many forms and translating in so many ways. We have the words on the page and then when you are scanning the poem and you’re figuring out the stressed and unstressed syllables, you’re actually listening to the sound of the word, right, not the word on the page, and so you have to actually reckon with the sound of it, and everyone’s scans are going to be different. In that way, the project we end up with is very much my interpretation of The Waste Land, not objectively The Waste Land. You do kind of have to come up with your own internal logic.

ERIN:

That process is so brilliant and exciting. I was thinking of your durational performance and the sound that accompanies the actual knitting too.

JESSICA:

While I knit, I play recordings of the author—the original author—reading. So for The Waste Land, I play a recording of T.S. Eliot reading, and now I am doing this third project which is knitting all of Ezra Pound’s Cantos. 114 of them.

ERIN:

It’s interesting to consider…again going back to all things, witchy and you know, magic and ritual. There’s something very interesting at play to that kind of haunt. Of having someone…that dialogue between you and someone who has passed away.

JESSICA:

The haunting is a kind of past becoming present, and I think there’s a gesturing forward. A future haunting or a projection or something with this invitation that is present in the project. A projection into the future is necessarily something which we can imagine in the present, right? And any kind of writing is going to necessarily be in communication with everything the writer has read before. Imagine if you had to do a works cited for creative works. Say you really love a book and then you’ve got to know like everything that the author was inspired by in writing. I think that is more true or more explicit about the reality of what it’s like to create.

ERIN:

When you’re handling subject matter like working on the piece about sex and shame, what are some strategies you have to care for yourself?

JESSICA:

Hmm, definitely taking breaks, and that could mean not working on it for weeks, you know. Not forcing myself to work on it, or only working when I’m excited. I don’t have like great hunger cues so making sure I eat every few hours so that I don’t get overwhelmed or upset. Making sure I stick to my witchcraft practice. Things like sitting at my altar meditating, doing rituals, doing yoga. Often I’ll get messages and clarity around things when I do that. But when I sit at my altar, it’s not about productivity. It’s a happy accident. Not an accident, a happy occurrence. I get these sort of downloads, you know.

ERIN:

There was actually a question I was going to ask in terms of downloads. Do you find when you’re writing and making that your dream space is a bit more activated?

JESSICA:

I mean, always. I’m a big dreamer. I always remember my dreams. So it’s hard really to say, like, they’re more or less activated. In my waking life, I notice that when I am creating, there are these different states of being that I can be in. I love…I love being in that liminal observational space. Actually the prompt that I wrote for this is very much about how to be in that space. Scheduling in play, right. Not the editing time, but moments where you can just, like, roll around on the floor and be in your body or do whatever it is you want to do. And if you don’t create something, that’s fine too. But you just give yourself the opportunity to find inspiration.

ERIN:

I think it’s a wonderful thing that your practice is so embodied and informed by performance—that your work exists off the page and in materials as well.

JESSICA:

Well, performance has always been extremely important to me as a poet. I’ve really missed it. I feel very isolated without going to readings and performing. I have come to realize that I’m in the minority here, but I feel like my ideal way for someone to encounter my poems is for me to read them to the person, whereas I think a lot of poets want to be read on the page and giving readings is a necessary evil.

ERIN:

Speaking of multi-disciplines, is there another discipline you would want to collaborate with in the future?

JESSICA:

I would absolutely love to see The Waste Land, um, have multiple iterations. I would love to see what a coder would do with the work. I have a dream of curating a show of people who make different interpretations of the code.

I was also working on this project around selfies a little while ago. It’s a series of poems thinking about self-representation. Especially feminized forms of self-representation. I am actually developing an installation. I want to use the Risograph to make prints of my own face scanned over each other in all these different ways and with different colours. I might also print the poems onto them and then cover an entire room with these prints. So literally all the walls, and the floors, and then let people mark them up with Sharpies, their footprints, whatever.

ERIN:

I love that there’s an immersive and participatory part. That’s great.

JESSICA:

I’m thinking about the comment section and how people make assumptions about other people. How people label others and how those labels stick and become a part of the actual person or image of the person. I want to take down all of those prints and make a book of the poems.

ERIN:

Oh, I’m excited to come! I love this idea of the comments as footprints. The mark that online interactions leave, and how it isn’t benign. Your work is so considerate of form and content. The content is the poem too. There is an almost exclusionary reverence around the written word. It’s interesting and important to be playful as you said. Respectful but somewhat irreverent.

JESSICA:
I love to mix high and low, so, I mean even in my poems I like to say something serious and then make a joke. I just finished a manuscript all around grieving and caring for my grandfather in palliative care. There were lots of very painful and difficult experiences but, also, sometimes things are funny, right? Or like fucked up, or gross. I think it’s important to be able to name those things. It’s not all solemn, all the time. And then, in terms of interdisciplinarity around that, as an interdisciplinary artist, I have ideas constantly. And it’s a question of knowing—what form would best serve this idea? I think a lot about how to disseminate my art too. How to survive as an artist living in capitalism.

ERIN:

I mean, it’s interesting, working in theatre, something doesn’t really exist until you’re sharing it. I do feel like something comes alive when there’s the possibility, especially in liveness—not always—but when there’s the possibility of exchange or sharing.

JESSICA:
I share very personal vulnerable stuff because I find it freeing to take away the taboo of talking about things like death or the dying body. The collection is not about elegy. It’s not about the person who my grandfather was. It’s about like the shitting and pissing and the actual reality of the body that dies. And on things like this collection I’m writing right now on sex and shame…of course, lots of things around sexual abuse come up. So the reason I want to share those things is that, first of all, it’s healing for me to write it. But it’s also healing for me to share it because every single time I read really vulnerable works out loud at a reading someone comes up to me and wants to have a private conversation and say “that happened to me too” or “what you just said is so helpful for me to hear…that it’s not just me that feels that way.” So that’s why sharing my art and also being a teacher are two things that are incredibly important to me. I have been so supported by the teachers in my life, and I have been so supported by the writers and artists I have encountered. I want to give back.

A WRITING PROMPT!

Inspiration Sources

Music: God Is Alive, Magic is Afoot, Buffy Saint Marie

Book: Something From Nothing, Phoebe Gilman

Book: Hedge Witch, Rae Beth

Instagram: @TheNapMinistry

Sit Around, Laze Around, Dream Around

Set aside a day to do nothing but explore & play. No emails, no social media, no money-making, no self-commodification.

This day might start out slowly with writing down your dreams from the night before, reading & writing exploratorily, without concern for what the outcome of that writing is. Try playing with collage in whatever mediums you find generative—paper, string, paint, found objects, food, etc. What connections will you find now that you are giving yourself time?

Go for a walk & don’t go anywhere. Keep your eyes up and down, but never any specific direction. Gather a little collection of found objects as you walk, whatever lights you up when you see it—rocks, plants, garbage on the street. Spend time ruminating… what are the many past lives & future lives of these objects?

Get into your body—dance around, sing, stretch in ways you’re unaccustomed to. Laugh or cry as the tightness comes out of you. Sit in non-sitting spots in your home like in a corner or on a table. Marvel at all the perspectives you’ve never seen in your home. Take notes.

Create an altar to place the treasures from your walk. Spend time here in whatever meditation you enjoy—silence, manta repetition, listening to music, collaborating with psychedelic plant medicines. Offer whatever you’ve created that day to whoever you worship & dedicate your future creations in their name. You might also take a bath with your found objects & let them seep into you.

Remember that your creativity, your bringing-forth-into-the-world, is a sacred act, at turns terrifying & joyful. The more you give creation a place of honour in your life, the more it will flow from you & direct the flow of your life.

ABOUT THE CREATOR

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