Six Questions interview #4 : Dessa Bayrock

Dessa Bayrock lives in Ottawa with two cats and a variety of succulents, one of which occasionally blooms. She used to fold and unfold paper for a living at Library and Archives Canada, and is currently a PhD student in English, where she continues to fold and unfold paper. Her work has appeared in Funicular, PRISM, and Poetry Is Dead, among others, and her work was recently shortlisted for the Metatron Prize for Rising Authors. She is the editor of post ghost press. You can find her, or at least more about her, at dessabayrock.com, or on Twitter at @yodessa.

Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?

I first moved to Ottawa (from beautiful British Columbia) in the summer of 2015 to start an MA in English at Carleton. The plan was to finish the program in a year and immediately move home again — but instead I fell in love with this salty, brick-laden city. So I stayed. And because I also fell in love with grad school and ended up starting a PhD, I’m staying for at least a while. 

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?

There’s so much to love in the Ottawa writing community. My first taste was an In/Words poetry reading around Halloween in 2015, which wasn’t really my style, but it led me to the Sawdust Reading Series, which very much WAS my style (and sadly now defunct), which led me to bywords.ca, which published one of my very first poems when I started getting serious about writing and submitting later in 2016. After finding a box full of pocket-sized zines in Shelf Life Books in Calgary, and then roaming around a few seasons’ worth of the ottawa small press fair, I decided to start my own zine / pocket poetry press in 2018, and post ghost press was born. 

I’ve struggled, in the last few years, with being an introvert, with having limited energy for social interaction, and with finding myself swimming through what is sometimes wild social anxiety — I’m that person hitting “oh yeah maybe!!” on Ottawa poetry events on Facebook and never actually showing up. Augur magazine publisher Kerrie Byrne phrased this struggle really well on Twitter last month in talking about their autism, saying “Sometimes I feel like the autistic ghost of indie Canlit / You know / Just starting a mag one day / Gradually making it pay a whole bunch / But then being too anxious/overstimulated to ever go to real person events and meet actual humans live / Autistic ghost of indie Canlit / That’s me”. Big, big same. I struggle with how to be involved with community even as my own body and brain keep me from going out into the wild and talking to actual people about it.

So I didn’t really know what was going to happen when I started post ghost press. I felt like an interloper. A voice in my head kept screaming that I had no right to do it, and that Ottawa was going to reject both me and the press, pushing us out like a piece of shrapnel. Instead, I was shocked and hugely humbled by the immediate and generous outpouring of support from so many local writers and editors and presses I’d admired for long who were genuinely excited to see another press pop up in the city. My own imposter syndrome told me I was inexperienced and I only deserved to sit at the kid’s table, but instead I was invited into this beautiful community of mutual uplifting and support and joy. I spent a couple of days just weeping at my computer as I watched 2600 people follow the press on Twitter.

Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?

It honestly just confirmed things I’ve been thinking for years: that writing and creating shouldn’t be competitive. If we share resources and space and joy with each other, everyone’s work just gets better and better. Here’s the result of being part of this community, even as the introverted ghost that I am: I share my work more. I ask for others to share their work more, too. I encourage the writers I know and love to ignore their imposter syndrome and submit their poems to things, even if it’s to magazines or prizes where I’m also submitting work. I don’t see it as a competition. I never want to see it as a competition ever again. It’s so easy to get in your own head when you’re writing, and even easier to stay there; on the other hand, there’s just so much more joy and freedom in writing something and not worrying about it being “good” but instead thinking, “man, I can’t wait to share this and see what happens next.” Maybe my writer pals will like it. Maybe we’ll tear it apart together. Maybe they’ll write something riffing on it. The process is infinite and collaborative and just so, so joyful. 

Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?

Ottawa has some amazing folks at the forefront of the literary scene who are absolutely committed to making it a good space to be — making sure events are accessible and inclusive and kind, encouraging both new and old writers to keep writing and to try new things, bringing together people who are creating and seeing what happens. There are poets and facilitators in every city, but what Ottawa has in rob mclennan and Amanda Earl and Pearl Pirie is truly, truly special.  

Q: Have any of your projects responded directly to your engagements here? How have the city and its community, if at all, changed the way you approached your work?

When I first moved to Ottawa, I was terribly, horribly homesick, and almost all my poems were about it in some way — ghosts, apocalypses, displacements, unrelenting winters, anxieties, bad omens. For this first year, Ottawa was this ominous figure in the background of all my poems — this alien cityscape where I wasn’t sure I could belong or wanted to belong.

Now Ottawa feels like wrapping myself in a patchwork quilt: it’s cosy. It’s comfortable. It doesn’t mind if you spill tea on it, or if the cat sleeps on it. It’s big enough to share if someone wants to sit on the couch beside you.

Ottawa is less present in my poems now, or at least less present as an ominous figure. It feels a little like gaining another parent: I rebelled against it, and it nurtured me anyway, and we’re both aware that one day we might leave each other for good. But we’re always going to have each other in our hearts. We made each other into what we are, into how we think of ourselves and how we think of one another, and a little bit of that will be in everything I do until the day I die. 

Q: What are you working on now?

The number one thing I’m excited to be working on is an ongoing poetry collaboration with my pal Katie Stobbart—basically a google doc where we write poems back and forth periodically in response to all the previous poems. It’s a cool process; it feels like a conversation, but also like going into a bookshop and slipping copies of your own poems in among the pages of poetry books you love. This is our second time working through this process together, and it feels practiced and comfortable, but at the same time it still feels exciting and surprising and sometimes shocking—at what we can produce for each other, at the ways our poems leak into one another, at how we can know the other person so well and still find new things to think about together. (On that note, if anyone is looking to publish a tiny 14-page chapbook manuscript of poems struggling with what it means to feel at home, rife with plants and gardens and things that grow ominously and joyfully by turns, with a dash of both good and bad omens— you’re in luck! Our first collaborative manuscript is looking for a home and you should email me about it!). 

Otherwise I’m pouring most of my energy into post ghost press—it’s a one-person show, and I try to make at least one zine a month and usually end up overcommitting and trying to make two or three—plus poetry stickers and other poetry objects (socks? matchboxes? coasters? teabags? put poems everywhere!). It’s a lot of work, but I love it. I don’t think I’ll do it forever, so I’m trying to pour as much of myself into it while I can.

And finally, slowly, furtively, I’m collecting my own poems into a full-length collection and hoping to start sending it to presses by the end of the year. There are still a lot of ghosts in my work, and homesicknesses, and anxieties. But there’s joy, too: Ottawa gave me salt and snow and crumbling brick, but also light and beauty and warmth and community. The two sides are beginning to balance, and it’s a homecoming of the most unexpected and treasured kind.