Q: How long were you in Ottawa, and what first brought you here? What took you away?
21 tears!!! And then I had to leave cuz the cops in this town are crazy and will arrest you over every tiny stupid little thing. You know what my problem is? I'm too honest, too trusting! Naw, just kidding, I was hung up on a girl and chased her to Montreal. I knew we were long through by then but I was using the power of the 21 year old heart, the kind of passion that will make you chase someone across the country from New Orleans to New York to Skull Mountain Ohio just cuz you felt an intoxicating connection and you want it all the time and your just chaos, you haven't had the time to have your heart properly broken yet you autosadiatic fool! Also I bought a house and retired at age 45 in SANDWICHTOWN SOUTH ONTARIO. I live between a battery factory and some whirlpool rapids ! I was about to say YOU CAN'T GET THAT IN OTTAWA but then i remembered there's plenty rapids in the river. Did you ever profile that guy who makes art on LUMPY DOOMEE ISLAND? That's my 2030 dystopia plan, GET BOATS, its Pirate time! The Ottawa canal rule; if Ottawa would quit wasting time and money on all those transitway terminals and replace them with canals instead I'd move back in a heartbeat.
Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?
FULL DISCLOSURE: I never intended to be a writer. I WANTED TO DO COMIX! except creating comics takes easily 100 times as long as writing. Tehn during the brief apex of society in the late 90s Livejournal got really popular and I'd blog my art shuffled up with crazy punk rock adventures and I'd sometimes write little stories to go with the pictures. Then in 2014 I was touring 36 cities around north amerika with Casey Plett for TopSidePress and in every town I kept correcting people anytime they called me a writer, "No I'm just an illustrator who wrote a 350 page fsn-fic of myself and Casey and Tom Leger took me aside and had a talk with me, breaking it to me that I had and ISBN now and was on a book tour so it was ok to call myself a writer at that point. I think there is an interview with me on YOUTUBE somewhere where I admit that THE GIRL WHO WAS CONVINCED BEYOND ALL REASON THAT SHE COULD FLY {ArsenalPulp Press} had some unsettling pacing and a narrative made of vignets cuz I was actually just making up a store about all these flying girl drawings i was doing. That book is actually my most lucrative endeavor ever: Writing YA books gets you that Canadian library PublicLendingRight $$$. Remember CAFE WIM? that place trained me to be a brooding goth in the back corner of the cafe swilling coffee and futzing in a sketchbook. Too bad its a wine bar now? My mom used to go to happenings with beatniks there in the 1960s
Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all? Have there been subsequent shifts due to where you have lived since?
back in the 80s my 8th grade english teacher shut down my creative writing about a kind of decayed retro future world and he would watch tv without moving for days and crap himself, I'd gone 4 times the length of the assignment in to this crazy world building elaborate back stories for every minor thing grand odyssey, like this thing was really a 13 year olds retelling of THE 5th ELEMENT but on even more psychedelic and Ms J___ shut down my reading at the crap part. I flew into a rage at the greatest betrayal so far in my life and destroyed the whole thing and stormed off scream cry in a fire exit. I am just now realising she was just tryna teach me to distro my own stuff, and make backup copies, and accept criticism so THANKS FOR MAKING ME A WRITER MS J! Windsor has a great BOOK community, I think half my friends are writers and the other half are enjoyable D-gens.
Q: What did you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What did Ottawa provide, or allow?
ZAPHOD BEEBLEBROX nevermind Berlin or New Orleans , Ottawa Goths are the real fraky deeky!! And ARTGUISE / underworld lounge / HOUSE OF TARG we are forever bound and marked by one another <3 Ottawa 35 years ago was, like, half its size and it had that whole punk and a raver and a skater and goth and prep and a nerd and a jock all just hanging out in the market together cuz there was only 4-5 or every subculture so we just all wound up uniting in to this dynamic scene. Ottawas always been big enuff to be very self contained and also a couple hundred km away from the "real world" so it was like a tim hortons sub-cultural think tank/
Q: Have any of your projects responded directly to your engagements here? How had the city and its community, if at all, changed the way you approached your work?
I did an ONTARIO ARTS GRANT series of paintings, TRANSONTARIO I did 4x6 foot oil paintings of of all my spicey lady friends across ontario but 500 feet tall and destroying their home towns and Kim demolished the upper rideau center bus stop. (ATTACH ART). One of the biggest foundational influences on all my work is THE OTTAWA ONTARIO SCIENCE CENTER Do you remember the SOUP COMPUTER? it was a room size animatronic puppet show about how a computer works. Crooked kitchen? THE TRAINS; I spent a zillion hours sitting at the (inoperable) controls of the two retired Northwest territories super long haul locomotives pretending I was driving a train! I went there for the first time in decades a couple years ago and I caught nasty cooties from all the little children they have running all over the place touching all the science with their filthy children fingies.
Q: What are you working on now?
CRIME CUBE // MOLLY & PYXXY DO CRIMES ! It's
about what if BONNIE & CLYDE WAS TWO TRANS GIRLS IN THE YEAR 2027? AND GET
THIS it takes the trope of WHAT IF A DARK STORMY GOTH AND A QUIRKY PERKY
RAVER WERE PARTNERS IN CRIME and turns that up to 11. Its about being told
you're a bad person and deciding to lean into it. It's about
WANTING TO BE A Monster because if you're the monster you have nothing to
be afraid of. It's about what if you did every stupid idea that
popped into your head and got away with it. Its about a dozen 'friends'
exploring butch femme top bottom master slave gender
dynamic, loyalty betrayal ,lust and love, and Its peppered with all
kinds of dirty fighting and improvised explosives and cop hacks misremembered
from the Anarchist Cookbook and the CIA MAnual For Trickery and Deception.
I'm also very inspired by the MAGAS campaign to define trans as terrorists and
I'm like Oh yeah? Go say that in a mirror three times cuz I am gonna
demonically invoke that and hurl it down upon all of you, ok? Just Kidding,
this isn't a call to arms, its a guidebook on how to survive an
impoverished violin rogue police and how two people with totally different
PTSD can Love so hard its Anitauthoritarian! I've been writing this book for 5+
years, Technically I took 2024 to go get MECHATRONIX Certified at
UWIN (industrial electro mechanics competence) and then
instead of getting a job in factory automation I used the machine logic,
karnaugh mapping and linear matrix algebra I learned to apply that
to things like WHAT ARE THE MECHANICAL OPERATIONS AND SUCCESSFUL FEEDBACK OF
BEING 26 years old and head over heels in love, whats stages and actions will
that relationship perform to arrive at a define condition? A big inspo for me
was taking the very GEN-X FUCK THE WORLD ME AND YOU AGAINST EVERYONE kind of
problematicly self centered mid 1990s Natural born Killers, True Romance, Wild
at Heart Fantasy and FORCE it to take place in 2027 when everything has a
camera on it and a super computer is watching it and the MAN is exponentially
worse but the Ruling Class are crumbling appart. I don't have
time to do this interview right now: Cat Fitpatric from Little Puss has
me re writing the LAST 66 pages of it over and over so it grips and
hits harder. I'm sure your readers know all about LITTLEPUSS who published the
meoirs od a 1967 outback australian Tgirl hooker and That girl who enlisted her
evil doppelganger to walk to hell with her to HELL and Argentinian Cecilia's
memoir about the time she had sex w jesus but then found out everyone had. What
WE are trying to do (I could talk about the super genius collaborative
editing process and multilayer character motivativational matric we
just drafted. The Most important thing I think WE're trying to do is I aM
STONING FOR ALL THE MEAN BULLIES ON GOODREADS calling I've Got A Time Bomb
emotionally devastating and GIRL FLY sweetly sad. I don't wanna alienate
people who like that stuff (most of my fans) but In my head I think I'm like a
fun dieselpunk Scifi geek? After a decade of the trope of the SAD INTROSPECTIVE
TRANS GIRL NOVEL that I am partially responsybil for , and
In line with the LittlePuss Mission of Pussin' excellence in literature, this
is a book where {SPOILERS} the two girls messy neurodivergent felony crime
filled love is what saves them in the end! even your enemies are your friends,
no matter how they are torn apart they come back together, their
love survives every trial by ice and fire, every dumb messed up thing you did
will one day be redeemed and over and over again COMMITTING TO LOVE saves your
life and takes you higher, and the sex is great every time and we are more in
love every day and all our friends shall rule over this entire planet and as
for us, WHAT IF WE STOLE XMAS TOGETHER ?
