CanDid Chat #1
Patrick O'Reilly, Archives and Smol Books
I cannot convey how long Patrick and I chatted for this interview, how wide the conversation roamed, or what a pleasure it was to speak with him, other than to admit this is the one that convinced me to finally pay for assisted transcription, to even begin to manage the tremendous amount of text and ideas on the go here.
The gritty:
•Patrick’s first publications were 1 of 1 poems written by hand and stuffed into the winter coats at Frenchys on Restigouche road, in New Brunswick.
•Patrick’s first chapbook, A Collapsible Newfoundland (Frog Hollow, 2020) is sold out, and was a run of 100 copies. Patrick received 10-15 copies, and a sizable author rate (40 percent) to acquire more for consignment. The book was pseudo-solicited, serendipitously interacting with with the press’s editor after having been rejected in the contest in the main.
•Patrick’s second chapbook, Demographics Report, November 2023 (Cactus Press, 2024), is out December 1st, and is a run of 25 copies. No details as of yet as to compensation or copies. The book was accepted for publication by Patrick simply contacting the press and offering it to them.
•Patrick’s day job is as an archivist, which informs his new work, and the scale and scope of the poetry he writes: “I end up taking the long view of history every day where I'm looking through documents from 1981 and then I can jump to 82, 83, 84 and span them all and I'm seeing them all in a single glance.”
And without Further Ado
CL: I'm not capable of being formal. Patrick, you know this, but it's great to see you.
PO: It's great to see you too.
CL: It has been a minute I think, like, I don't think I seen you since I dropped you off at your dad's house in New Brunswick after poetry weekend.
PO: Which is like 2017.
CL: I think 2018 I didn't go to poetry weekend, and then 2019 I took Clay Everest. With the ferry it was a 24 hour trip each way. Then some people were bragging about how they drove seven or eight hours. And I'm like, you assholes.
So what were we here to do today? Patrick, do you want to tell me just like a little bit about your bit about yourself as a poet, or, like, as a writer or as an artist, or just like, what something you like about yourself? Something you can simply abide about yourself?
PO: I think of late especially, as a writer I’ve been really preoccupied with not telling my own story so much, or telling my own stories in a very slant-wise way. I'm a bad writer, both in the terms of I don't think that my writing is good, and also I don't think I'm good at completing projects, but what I have gotten into, and what I do feel good about, and I feel like might be my process and my practice is developing these large, interrelated, kind of cosmic fractal projects where, you know, just a chapbook length thing that also links and feeds on another chapbook length thing and maybe a book-length thing, and they're all sort of feeding back into each other in a kind of a feedback loop.
I think if I were to consider myself as a poet at all, it's more in creating a body of work than any individual poem at the one time. I really want to do something big and vast and cinematic that way, and that's that's kind of the goal right now anyway.
CL: Like a sustained thought, I guess?
PO: If a poem is a is a tree, you know, I don't even want to do the forest. I want to do, like, the weird fungus that grows underneath it all, and is actually the size of three states, but you just don't really know it’s there.
CL: Yeah, or, like, one of those zombie permafrost fires.
PO: Ooh, yeah.
CL: I really, really like that thought and something I have (probably unkindly) said about books sometimes is sometimes it feels like poets will slap together, like, five unrelated chapbooks and grin and say, Oh, look at my full length debut. It's like, this isn't a new thought, or this isn't a sustained thought, or sometimes it feels like a question of, is this just your greatest hits, or is this just what you just had lying around?
Sometimes the answer is yes, and maybe a book is fine to be yes [in that case], but I find it's easier to engage with the poetic project if the duration of it, even if the poetry’s duration isn't crazy, but if you can sense the duration of the composition, how it's traveled, you know, even just from the beginning of the project to the end of project, I think you can tell sometimes. And so, yeah, I really like to hear about a shared universe of poetry.
PO: I like a single. Those are cool. And I probably listen to those more than anything else, but, but I always been really fascinated by the concept album, you know? And they're proggy and they're pretentious and they're nerd shit. But also I'm proggy and pretentious and nerd shit. So, you know, why not?
CL: I like the idea of, oh, you're doing something ambitious, or not even ambitious, but something thematically cogent. And the whole I like that kinda stuff, so why wouldn't I, you know? You know, that un-self-consciousness that's sometimes hard to come by as a writer, because writing is embarrassing.
PO: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think it's very hard for me to judge when I've written a good poem. I have a lot of qualms about like careerism and publishing, and what definitions of good mean, or how subjective the idea of a good poem versus a bad poem, or an awardable poem versus rejected poem, or all these things. And so I figured the only thing you can really do to combat that is just write shit you think would be cool if you can pull it off. You know, I haven't been able to pull it off yet. When I, when I pull it off, it's going to be fantastic, but I don't know if I'll ever be able to pull it off.
CL: Well if and when you do, your haters will never recover, right?
PO: Yeah, yeah. They will be five minutes of wow. You worked 15 years on this, on this book about islands, and it's still shit like why?
CL: You worked 15 years on this book about islands under 48 pages, and then you spent another 40 years to turn it into a full trade.
PO: It was like, yes, yes, but I like it. It was for me, they're mine.
CL: Maybe I'm mischaracterizing you, but like, since I've known you, you've always, I think you're more generous with other poets than you are with yourself, um, in a lot of ways, but I think that also shows in your in your work, right? Like it, like you don't have a ton of duds, or maybe you, you're publishing them, and you just don't share those. But like, I even like, I guess we met. I mean, yeah, we met in a, what a creative writing group through Andrew Titus,
”poetry's my bread and bananas.”
PO: Shout out Titus.
CL: Saint Thomas University, Jock poet, Jock poet, hey, and now I guess he teaches grade school. Even during workshop your edits are pretty light, like you told me maybe instead of like this, you could say you collared her like a dog, I still remember your your verb choice there. You took other people's feedback really, really seriously, like, with your own work. And I thought this is an interesting guy, he's not telling you how he would write your poem. He's giving you offers. But then he's also so grave about about his own work. It's like, can I tell this guy? He might think about it for 100 years, I don't know.
PO: There are certain things that I regret about who I was in that period. I think I was maybe a bit too strict and stern. I do think that actually might have hindered some of my development more than helped. But I also have always wanted to, stay very humble in terms of what I offer people in the way of criticism and in what I accept in the way of critique. Maybe it all stems from low self esteem or self doubt. I don't think I know what's best for you but I'm going to believe everything you tell me about what's best for me. And if I can find a way to make that work cool, and if not, well, maybe I'll just abandon the whole thing.
PO: I always hated in my academic workshops where, okay, “you are put in the cone of silence, they're going to read your poem, you're going to read your poem aloud. You're going to sit there and you're going to hear all the critique, and you're not going to say words.”
And it's like, no, but I want to, like, ask questions or explain why I did things. I want people to ask me questions and be able to tell them why I did things and maybe see where those discussions go. And any time that I've been fortunate enough to be a teacher or workshop leader, that's always my first rule I say to the facilitators. If I'm going to do this, everyone gets to talk. I'll be good about time. I'll keep things in check. But the writer needs to be allowed to ask specific questions and needs to be allowed to respond to the feedback in a way that is fruitful.
CL: I've seen the worst version of that, when a writer is really not listening to the feedback, and they're interrupting. How I've always done it because I feel like I'm that problem critique-ee, I just look at my notebook, and I write down things, and if it doesn't make sense, either like sense-sense, or I'm like, “What the fuck did you read” then I don't write it down. And anything even remotely think think about, I write it down, and then maybe, like, an hour after workshop, I go and I read them back, and I do edits right then, and if I like the new version with the edits that I thought were reasonable, I take that version. And if I don't, then I just go back to where I was. If somebody's feedback really sunk in to my skull, then it'll be there when I do my next pass anyway. And if it wasn't that good, then whatever. But the idea of silently sitting there getting speared, like you’re Joan of Arc getting tenderized for the spit is like a little bit—
PO: Or even praised while they ignore the thing that you had questions about it, and hope that they would clarify for you.
CL: That's like when I run like reading groups the first thing is always before we start like “is there anything you don't want us to talk about, is there anything you do want us to talk about? Do you want us to send you copy edits do you want a scan of the thing if we did it by hand or whatever?
Because sometimes somebody's like, “oh, I really need the feedback to be like pretty distanced right now because I'm still figuring out this little island of prose or whatever. So what I want is like your impression of like, was it scary?”
And then that's also helpful as an editor or a peer giving feedback, you know, because as soon as you have to share your work, even if it's just in a workshop, it's ‘publishing’ because you're making it public. And then as soon as as soon as you send it off to a magazine, or you're talking to somebody, you're self conscious about it in a way that you never have been before and you never will be again. And you know, not in your mania at three in the morning, you know, typing on your iPhone or whatever. The best feedback is either feedback that's like surprising or like feedback that is tuned to what you're asking for.
CL: Jim Johnstone talks about small press and micro press. But small press for him is like Gordon Hill or like anybody that's not like a Anansi or McClellan and Stewart or whatever. But micropress rather is like pamphlets, zines, ephemera, broadsides, you know, writing your name in the snow, like whatever you'd consider small or micro.
PO: I don't have like a wealth of experience in the publishing world. I've got a chapbook out now and one forthcoming, on Frog Hollow Press and Cactus Press respectively. They're two small presses, one now defunct, that I loved dearly, have published some really great stuff over the years and I'm happy to be part of them.
As far as what the ins and outs of creating those projects on the publishing end are, the economics or the logistics of it, I've got only the slightest inkling of an idea. This chapbook, the one coming out with Cactus Press now, is coming out on December 1st. It'll be kind of my first one really where I'm able to promote and read and sell it to people because the last one came out literally like just as COVID was breaking. So the chapbook comes out, COVID happens, so I can't do a launch, I can't bring it to Toronto or Ottawa, or back to Poetry Weekend to try and sell people copies or anything like that.
It did sell out eventually, but it was slow going. I think I have two or three copies here that no one ended up with. So yeah, the mechanics of it, I think I'm about to find out, you know, how to go about consignment or, you know, what maybe even some of the logistics of receiving the book look like in that context.
I think my first experiences with publishing, growing up in like a kind of like a military town, I was living on like an army base when I first started writing poetry, and not the safest or most encouraging environment for a skinny weirdo who liked poems. Teachers were encouraging. I had a few friends who were like, oh, this is really cool. I like this. You're pretty good at this.
I was just so desperate to like, have them out in the world and no idea how to do that. No idea if anyone even was still doing that, you know, writing poetry at all. So I would go to this uh this cafe called the Sour Grape. At the time it was called the Classic Cup, they rebranded to the Sour Grape and became a wine bar. So I'd go to the Classic Cup and I would be very [uptentious?*] in my thrift store suit, drinking espressos, and I would scribble all my poems down on loose leaf.
Just sit there and write and write and write. And anything I wrote that day, I would stop on my way back home from the cafe into the Value Village on Restigouche Road—the Frenchys, it was the Frenchys on Restigouche Road. And I would put my poems in the pockets of the winter jackets.
I don't know if anyone ever saw them. I'm sure a lot of people bought those coats and were like “fucking trash in these coats” and threw them out. They're lost to the ages and to the dust. But those were my first publications,” I guess.
CL: That is very guerrilla, guerrilla poetry-ing.
I once found, when I bought a pair of really nice wool pants that fit me, and thrifting as, you know, a bit of a fat person, a happily fat person, I'll say, I found somebody's nitro in their pants. This guy may have died. And it was recent, it wasn't expired. And I was like, holy shit. And maybe that's a poem in its own way, you know, finding nitro in a pair of wool pants. This is what you get for being fat while thrifting. It's you, you get somebody's nitro. And what people got for being cold in Newfoundland—
PO: New Brunswick. Oromocto.
CL: Oromocto, okay. You know Oromocto has a Starbucks now?
PO: I saw that, yeah. Where Andrew Titus went to school, the aforementioned Andrew Titus.
CL: Wow.
PO: Also, Shane Nielson has family there, so.
CL: Yes.
PO: It turns out I'm kind of part of a long, proud tradition of poetry iconoclasts from Oromocto.
PO: This might be a good segue into some stuff that I do have a degree of familiarity with, because this whole, you know, this environmental colonialism thing is so fucking real and so pronounced. I go to Kuujjuaq fairly often for work. I was up there last summer. You know, it's in the Arctic Circle or it's like right on the Arctic Circle, just sort of like just over the line. You know, it's right at the treeline. And there were forest fires and they had to close down the offices a couple of days because it hit like 35 and they don't have the infrastructure for, you know, having people work—they don't have air conditioners, they don't have, you know, fans out there because it's the fucking arctic circle.
I wouldn't say I'm a deeply political person in terms of how I write, but my work has sort of delved into that territory. And the job I had is starting to have particular impacts in the things I write and how I write, and how those look when and if they get published.
The new chapbook, in fact this was really cool about like, you know, thinking with me about things like typefaces and presentation and stuff like that.
The new chapbook is kind of like an observational report, a field report from here in Montreal. I'm looking at things like climate change or just this weird kind of anger and exhaustion that we're all living with now.
CL: I read that... Cryptozoologist... I don't remember what the title...
PO: Oh yeah, the full manuscript. The working title was Cryptids.
CL: It wasn't the Regent Mall, was it? It was a mall.
PO: Oh, the village.
CL: Oh, it was the Village Mall.
Okay, wow, I love the village mall. I guess malls are kind of this pseudo-apocalyptic space sometimes. Like I love to think about the mall, because I think the mall is kind of utopia. It's like one of the last great public spaces. Like you actually hear people on their phone, and a lot of the time they're not on their phone in English, and you actually see disabled people, because bus routes go to the mall, and the mall is actually built to accessible code.
PO: It's like two groups of people who gather at the mall and it's a very old, or it was teenagers, and this is the only middle ground they have between them.
CL: But it's a space where, yeah, people who would never otherwise mingle mingle. And even though the premise is you're there to spend money, you can just fucking hang out, right? The mall rat scurries wherever the mall rat wants.
But yeah, I think there is something, whether or not it's political, even in your Frog Hollow book, you have Renews20XX [a sequence of poems imagining Renews, NL into the future]. You do have these ecological kind of considerations going on. And whether or not you're writing them in like a didactic way or you're transmitting them in a really activist-y way, you're writing about like, things that aren't like, they're not just like, speculative problems, like they're actual problems, right?
When I went to the Village Mall to get vaccinated, it was because there were stores that were empty, right? Like that's where I got my first two vaccines during COVID, the beginning of COVID.
It was this place where it's like, well, this was a mall and there's nothing happening in the mall. And this store wasn't even part of the mall really anymore, because it was just empty.
PO: It's a dead space.
CL: And then here we all are lining up awkwardly, trying to get out of our uni sweaters to get our arm free for somebody to jab us. But it felt—I mean it was quote unquote dystopic, but I think that's because it was, you know, the usual guts and arteries of life weren't moving at that time, not the way we've expected them to.
The mall, it makes sense to be writing about it in that way, because it's not even much of a “oh, what if?” It's kind of like a, “well, right now.” Whether or not like we're ‘writing politically’—
PO: I feel like now especially there is nowhere you can exist that isn’t politicized, that can’t be part of a discourse, that can’t be threatened as far as your rights or liberties or legal status. There is nowhere you can put yourself outside of that.
Maybe that was true before as well before for queer people, racialized people, Indigenous people, but it’s true for everyone now.
And I, again, am probably the last person in the world to be speaking on subjects of, you know, race, because I'm not insightful or delicate, but white people don't know what to do with this new dynamic or this new information, you know, straight, cis-het white people don't know how to handle also being part of, or understanding that they are part of the oppressed class as well.
CL: I think the thresholds of repression have like been crossed.And the outer limit of what we can ignore has become eroded. I know people always characterize it as certain groups live through apocalypses earlier than others, right?1
PO: I think some part of my work is finding a way to put myself outside of that, or, you know, not escapism, really, but my day job, I'm an archivist, right? I spend a lot of time in a basement, I chose archives over library work, because because it gives more time to be alone and to sort through things. And librarianship is a very service-forward-facing thing.
Archivists are kind of like spooky rats lurking in the background. I work with a team of other archivists, and we're all neurodivergent weirdos who don’t necessarily interact socially very well or very enthusiastically. They're all like goth kids. And I think a lot of what I'm doing now is sort of putting myself in a more observational, separate space.
I end up taking the long view of history every day where I'm looking through documents from 1981 and then I can jump to 82, 83, 84 and span them all and I'm seeing them all in a single glance. That's one impact the working life has had on my poetry. I've noticed things getting very, like the lines have gotten longer and more prosaic and veering towards the kind of archival descriptions that I have to write.
And an idea that I was toying with even while I was doing my MFA seven or eight years ago, was I'm not someone who's very attuned with their emotions. I'm not someone who's very interested in being part of broad social movements or clubs. I'm not someone who's interested in writing about personal or relationship dynamics. What I am really interested in is gathering a lot of random information and data and stacking that stuff one on top of the other and hoping that maybe in some sort of weird pointillist way it eventually reaches a kind of a meaning or collides together to form an idea. An infogramic thing, you know, which I guess the modernists were doing, which I guess, you know, probably isn't new, but also feels kind of where someone like me can go with poetry.
CL: It is an interesting approach, I think, to write not from a place of reaction. Ray Bradbury would say “let your prejudice strike the page like a lightning bolt.” And I think Ray Bradbury had some actual prejudices that were that were pretty transparently bad, but they were transparent, right?
But I tell people to like, write from their knee-jerk reaction, not their reasoned feeling or like their calmed down space or their better self, but to write from “well, this is happening,” right? And obviously, sometimes that makes for really, really bad poetry, the middle-schooler poetry. And Ginsberg is all first thought, best thought or whatever
But it it is interesting to hear about, when writers are writing from a data set, more conceptual works, or when when you're somebody who doesn't write full-time. You are looking at a ton of a ton of ephemera or a ton of collected stuff, and you're kind of a dis-aggregated specter or something. Like there really is, like you're getting slivers of a billion different things that have to form a whole, because like how else do you even process what you do for work?
I think it is like refreshing to hear about, “I don't want to be a part of a club.” That self-knowledge is enviable.
PO: Obviously, you know, I have social causes that I care about really deeply. I think I would be very surprised if most people of our generation in our field of interest, in our spheres of interest, don't feel very strongly about issues like racism or homophobia or transphobia, and don't hold what would be considered fairly left-wing views on that. speak when I can and when I feel is appropriate for me to speak. I’m just not the guy, you know?
CL: I don’t want to loop too hard back into your job, but your job is looking at an incalculable amount of things to be sorted and organized right? It's more of a listening position, right?
PO: And I think that's a good place for me because I'm not a good leader. I do believe very strongly in the power of being there just to listen and hear people's voices when they're telling you: “these are my struggles, these are my concerns, these are the things that I want to fix and achieve.” And then going back and facilitating. I'm my boss's assistant, a damn good assistant. She calls me Alfred.
I can kind of anticipate the things she needs moment to moment. I think I'm like that as a friend. I think I'm like that as a romantic partner. I think I'm also like that as a poet. I’m just there to facilitate someone else doing more obvious, obvious isn't a fair word, more public facing, more direct, more overt action.
CL: To pivot back to micro press, like I think a lot of the arguments about pamphleting or whatever is you can disseminate information in reaction to something that is happening right now. It does have a velocity that like the bourgeois kind of—
PO: Can’t materialize quick enough to yeah.
CL: My trade book took, oh, it was accepted during COVID. And then it came out in 2023, I think. It was maybe like 2021, when I wrote it. And, and it was like this thing I had written in maybe 14 or 15 hours. Like I'd had notes or whatever, but like it happened so fast. I sent it off on a lark. And they took it less than a day later. It was not common. And then two years later it existed. And I'm thinking, well I'm not even that person anymore, right?
And so I think there's this like field of writing that can happen, you know with a printer and a photocopier, and at great velocity; like the velocity of how fast South Park gets their jokes out or whatever. Trade publishing is like how fast The Simpsons gets their jokes out, and, you know, micro-publishing is the South Park turnaround, I guess, to establish an unnecessary framework.
What benefit is there to an activist or to somebody trying to get a message across in characterizing the work as poetry? Does “poetry” lend authority to that work? That's not a question for me, I guess, because like you, I think part of my hesitancy and maybe some of your hesitancy with those forms of communication are that the grifters are not often easy to identify, and really terrible people who are great at using language and the language of justification and language of immediacy like “this is important, you must look at this, you must take this seriously.”
And when I complain about careerists or whatever, you can see people who don't disclose their class and who have blind spots but there is a narcissistic angle to it. And I guess that's my fear of writing ‘directly political’ work. My trade book is about cum, and an aristocratic undercover boss, and a [real] book that was destroyed, and then vampires.
To me it is political. There's this place where poets come together and then certain poets shouldn’t be there. Certain poets who are there because they’ll die if they’re not there leave. Because they can't abide everything but the poetry or everything, you know, the community that's there.
PO: I think you've really hit at one of the things that makes me reluctant to work that way. Because the temptation to do things like zines is always there for me. You know I love little pamphlets. I love being able to work in different forms of media. I have to like work with visuals and stuff. I think that immediacy though, the ability to just write it and turn it out and put it in someone's head right away, scares me a little. I'm conservative in a certain kind of way and nervous in a certain kind of way that I'm not necessarily proud of, but I am very...I'm a very slow and cautious person in a lot of ways.
I don't know what it is I'm afraid of. I don't know... because I've published a lot of stuff that I fucking hate. I'm going to publish a lot of stuff that I fucking hate. But there's a part of me that's like: do I want to speak now and have to look back and think I was really fucking wrong about that, or that was really bad and I didn't need to do that. I think to me it all goes back to just not having a lot of faith in myself.
CL: Like making public makes real the stupid thing you thought or like the value you held. And to you that feels permanent or damning.
PO: Yeah, yeah. I'm afraid of humanity. Because we're all flawed and wrong, maybe even most of the time. We all say things we wish we hadn't or that we'll regret later or that we're embarrassed by down the road, even if they are, you know, morally or politically, socially, the correct, right, you know, done for righteous reasons, and are righteous. I always want to be sure, and that kind of certainty isn't isn't human
CL: I have kind of a Kanye-adjacent inability to feel certain forms of shame.
PO: Well, it's one thing that I've always really admired about you as a person and you as an looked to you for is you always seemed to me as someone who's just got so many brilliant ideas and such a unique outlook and have never seemed once to me the least bit reticent or ashamed or doubtful; I don't know what goes on like you know late at night when you're lying in bed and trying to figure things out for yourself. But you've always projected to me a person of confidence, and whose confidence has always paid off. Everything I wish I could be!
CL: Well, you're a lot of what I should be, and and know I should be, and and yet I'm just simply too lazy to be.
PO: Please use me as a cautionary tale whatever this is a story about a person who spent all their time learning trying to learn how to write poetry by reading over and over again textbooks in the library instead of
CL: Going out and having a life, yeah.
PO: Yeah, this is what happens. You get turned into a narrow, knotted old man who needs to wear sunglasses indoors.
CL: Hey, it's bright. You're [literally] in a sunbeam. It's not not bright.
PO: Well, this is the thing. People enjoy sunbeams. It's nice to be in sunbeams. It's warm and cozy and relaxing. I'm putting on sunglasses.
CL: Yeah.
PO: That's the metaphor. And it's probably why I can't do a lot of micro stuff myself. Or haven't yet. I'd like to.
CL: I think also, the micro, like, for better or worse, it relies a lot upon socialization. A lot of the micro doesn't travel, it doesn't have distribution, or if it does, it costs more to ship. And a lot of it just becomes gifts or favors, and it doesn't have a meaningful economy.
But like, if you look at above/ground, they don't really have a submissions process, right? If you ask Rob, he'll say, “well, I mean, I can look at something.”
And that's it. And like 140% of what Rob publishes is people he meets and knows and likes, right? Which is like nepo or it's whatever it is. But I think there is something about like, you even have to play the game a little bit to be part of like a subsystem or like a counterculture of publishing.
PO: Yeah, I think nepo is such an interesting term there because like, if I was in that position, if I was someone who ran, you know, I guess what you'd say, a noticeable micro press or something, something like above/ground, I would want to—I would probably meet people at functions and be like, I think this person is really interesting. I think they have interesting things to say. I don't know if I like their poetry, per se, but I would like them to have an audience. I think they deserve that.
And is that then nepotism to put something out there that you don't like yourself, and that you know isn't being done for capitalist reasons, like you're not making money on it, you just think, here's something that I think is an interesting person, they should have something? Is that then like nepotism or favoritism? I think some of those ideas erode a little.
CL: Rob, the volume that he does, I don't even know how he reads everything he publishes. So it can't, it can't just be “favour.”
CL: The inner hag is finally becoming the outer hag. And I'm so excited.
PO: That's the dream though.
CL: It's really important to me.
CL: There's a lot of people who are like, yes, I wanna talk about this [micropress]. So I'm surprised by the amount of work so far. There'll be longevity because there's so many small press people to talk to. Some of them are going to fold, some of the new ones are going to appear. Unlike oil, it is an infinitely renewable resource.
PO: Do you think like, Rob [McClennan] will be your white whale for all this? That will be the big finale episode as we finally guessed Rob McClennan on the horn.
CL: The idea of me being Ishmael instead of Ahab is very real. “Well, I guess I'm here. I'm not that interested in the whale, but, uh, I'm aware of its presence.”
PO: Well, yeah, I always liked the interstitial chapters where he's going into the etymology of the whale for 10 pages.
CL: I think that is the best parts of the book, unfortunately. It's a tough read.
PO: Yeah, and that's a very micropress thing, to have that flexibility to go into different styles of writing or different types of information dissemination, that kind of ephemera, that appeals to me a lot. I would love to be able to do more that way.
CL: You're talking about the way you work and your poetry being this shared universe, like you want a chapbook here and like maybe a pamphlet there and whatever, and they all connect, building out like a book that is not necessarily like a bound book, or it's rhizomatic.
PO: Well this is this is the ironic thing is for for the sort of work that I want to do micro-pressing seems like the logical solution.
CL: That's what I'm trying to say: why aren't you?
PO: Because I'm cowardly. I think it takes a lot of courage, it takes a lot of hustle, it takes a lot of confidence in oneself. One thing that you mentioned just now is things will crop up and things will fold, and there's a temporality to everything there. In archives, we have these ideas, they're kind of like, not necessarily competing ideas, but they're interrelated ideas of historical value, and informational value.
Informational value will tell you stuff about how a corporation is constructed, or who certain people are, and this is why you keep it. Historical value is because it's interesting and unusual historically, and that's why you keep it.
Everything that doesn't have one of those two things, historical informational value or institutional informational value, you throw out.
I think people are really surprised by the idea that most of what an archivist does is getting rid of shit. And quite often that is things like little pamphlets or brochures or posters or postcards, those are the sort of things that would come out of a very creative, very hard-working, very brave person with a Xerox or a lithograph machine.
CL: A mimeograph, a spirit duplicator. Even that is bourgeois now. It's impossible to [affordably] get the ink or the templates.
PO: There's kind of a pipeline from loving something enough to like really devote and learn about it to becoming a gatekeeper or a taste-maker or a controller of things. How do we get out of that? Unless it's just making more and more guerrilla radical shit that says, fuck all that, I'm just going to make the thing I want to make.
CL: I mean, I don't know. I really don't know.
PO: Are we all like destined to eventually become the the thing that someone like us will fight against?
CL: I guess we used to be in a different world where you could run off 100 flyers and there weren't five billion poets. And maybe the world felt smaller or maybe it was smaller in a way where it was easy to locally do these different things.
To return to [above/ground], I don’t think Rob’s costs are insignificant. I think the amount of publications you get, if he's selling these books for five bucks, and some of them are not small, and a subscription, when I was subscribed to Rob (I don't anymore because it's too much; I buy singles and maybe spend the same money, I don't need more stuff), but like, I can't imagine. I wonder if he is operating at a loss, like how does he offset that loss? And maybe he's not, but I also see when poets get a stack of books from him, they get a a banker's box of copies. And he has copies of almost everything he's ever made still. I think he has a really good organization. I don't know.
I guess I'll have to, I'll talk to him one day.
PO: I think that's where the two worlds meet, is the organization of a thing, the creation of a thing, you need to like, be compelled to do it. Like everyone in archives is.
I have another friend who works with me. All their cousins got toys for Christmas one year. And because their grandmother was spiteful, she gave them a jar of buttons. And they were thrilled with it. “Oh, I can sort these by weight and color. There's so many ways to organize these.” No one flagged that. That was maybe sweet talk to a specialist kind of thing. You couldn't go into any other line of work. And now they work in textile stuff as well. They're a textile artist. And an archivist.
And I think the opportunity for those two worlds to like contribute to each other, the creative world and the world where you're organizing and reassessing and reconstructing, they're pretty much the same thing, just in different guises.
CL: I want to pick up on a word you used: compelled. Compulsion. At WordFest this year, I saw Jeff Vandermeer and Stephen Graham Jones. Somebody asked Stephen “what were your inspirations” and he said “I'm not inspired, but I am compelled, lI experience compulsion.”
I think the [aforementioned] grifters are ‘inspired’ and I think the the poets are compelled.
That's the language, “we have to be talking about this,” like, “why is nobody talking about this?” We talk about it as if it's compulsion, but sometimes it is a fancy or like a whim. Other times it is “I might die, I might simply die if I don't do this, because it's my special interest or because I'm mad like like I'm mad in a few senses.”
I've talked to some micropress publishers and they're like “I'm not comfortable telling people what my day job is in an interview.”
I'm like okay let's not talk about it, let's not talk at all. “I don't want people to know I make $200,000 a year,” and it's like “why not?” Why aren't you publishing more tiny books for people?
[Back to the jar of buttons]---Foucault has this anecdote about aphasiacs trying to sort wool on a table, and you don't tell them what the undergirding principle of the wool sorting system is, and it's like not possible for them. He says, “well, in the study,” but it's Foucault making something up. The guidelines for how to sort this thing, it could be like coarseness or it could be fibers, or it could be whatever, but they're arbitrary.
And like for some people, the arbitrariness of that is evidence and they cannot buy into the apparatus that does have rules for filtering, whether or not that's helpful or necessary. It's a thing that's has always stuck with me: sometimes you see the table, and sometimes you see the yarn, right?
PO: There's a writer I really love, Alice Fulton, who's been kind of a model for me. And she's got this, this idea of fractal poetics that was really influential for me. One of the things she says is, when we write poetry, and I think you can extend this to all art forms, they're all forms of organization or realignment of information or data, basically, creation.
You know, we're doing things in an arbitrary way. We're making arbitrary choices, to put things into a form. And those forms are arbitrary. And our decisions to do that are also arbitrary. But that arbitrariness is a kind of innate human behavior and maybe an unavoidable one.
It's not arbitrary in a sense that it's frivolous. You know it's not arbitrary in the sense that it's like pointless or unnecessary. It's arbitrary because you can't exist in a way that allows you not to be arbitrary about some things. Eventually you gotta sort the wool.
CL: Yeah. OR, or you could just die. You could die buried in wool.
PO: It's sort or die for a lot of us. And it's, you know, it's the old publish or perish.
CL: Sort or die, publish or perish.
CL: Okay, the couple things I did want to hit on. So with Frog Hollow, did you submit your work or was it solicited?
PO: I submitted, but again, it’s one of those kind of ways that is like, is it nepotistic or not?
I was talking to Shane for an interview, for an essay that I was writing, I sort of reached out to him. We talked a little bit, and he had seen me at Poetry Weekend. “Have you ever thought about doing a chapbook?”
I'm like, I did. I submitted a chapbook to the Frog Hollow Chapbook Contest, and it was cut in the first round right away. I didn't even make the long list.
So, he's like, well, “we might be interested in publishing it anyway.”
I'm like, okay, but if it didn't make the contest, I kind of have an inkling it's not good.
“We'll work on it, we'll look at it.” We didn't do very many edits. I restructured a few things myself. He definitely had feedback, and they ran with it.
I look back at it now, and I like a lot of it. I wish Frog Hollow hadn’t gone under. Both for the selfless reason of the fact it was a great little press, and also because now, there are no more copies of this chapbook, and I still want it to exist in the world, and I still want it to be a thing.
CL: I don’t have a copy of my first chapbook, because somebody asked [for my last copy], and I was like “you can have it.”
CL: [Frog Hollow] had I think over 20 years, quite the run. I never met Carol.
PO: Yeah. Only talked to her via email. Lovely person, you know, thoughtful, helpful, really wanted to see things do well.
CL: They published poetry, prose, criticism. I think they kind of bullied Travis Lane criticism into existence by being like, oh, “we're not publishing a full trade book.” Well, it's a monograph [on Lane].
CL: So your book, A Collapsible Newfoundland, was sort of pseudo-solicited having, you know, failed out but gotten teacher's pet treatment a little, snuck in. Yeah, yeah. Shane's edits were light
PO: Which in its way is kind of nice. It's nice to know that somebody's got your back and is going to let you just do your thing. He was definitely responsive. I think at that stage, I didn't even know the questions to ask, you know?
CL: What was your reimbursement? Were you paid?
I was given ten or fifteen copies to sell on consignment, and I could buy any more than that that I wanted. I had a pretty good discount. I think it was like a 60% discount. I don't quite recall the exact figure, but yeah, it was a good markup. It definitely allowed me to have more copies for myself on the cheap to give to friends or family or send out, you know.
CL: Stocking stuffers.
PO: I had no illusions. I know what poetry is like in this country. I didn't publish it to make money. I didn't expect to make money. I didn't expect to sell very many actually. I sent a couple of copies to “The Word” here in Montreal, and just seeing it in “The Word” meant a ton to me.
I gave a copy to the library I was volunteering at after I had like taken the book and corrected all the typos and things that I didn't like in the book, I gave it to the library.
CL: No. no…
PO: I'm friends with one of the people who runs things there now, and they called me up: “so I was looking at your chapbook, someone has written all through it.” I’m like, “yeah, I'm sorry about that. There were a lot of typos. There were some changes I wanted to make. You've got a very special copy of that book at the Atwater Library.”
CL: That's so funny. The director's cut.
I think getting to see your work, like that somebody else took the time to print it on a piece of paper is nice.
It makes “the job” feel real.
PO: Seeing the book out of the context of like on your laptop or in a stack in your own in your own room just like encountering it out in the wild me walking by and it's like “oh that's that fucking thing I made, that's that's fucking cool.”
CL: What about the cover, the green foggy cover. is that just you and Newfoundland?
PO: Me and Lisa and Rebecca Salazar went to Newfoundland for the Writing East conference in 2014. And, you know, being from there, I just toured them around St. John's and Southern Shore for a weekend. We went up Signal Hill and it was like super dense and super foggy, as it always is. You couldn't see two or three feet in front of you and I snapped a couple pictures2 and and so there's like a pair of like ghostly legs on the cover, and that's actually Rebecca.
CL: That's Rebecca, okay.
PO: Yeah.
CL: Well it's hard to tell when you're all wearing like, you know, wartime trench-coats.
PO: Everything's been glossed green and very saturated and very color contrasted, which honestly I just made in Microsoft Word.
CL: In Word? Wow. See, that is extremely, that is extremely DIY/micropress of you.
PO: I don't have Photoshop. I don't know how to work it. I don't know. I'm not, I'm not good enough with a mouse to do things in MS Paint even. But like, I know how to color correct and stuff.
CL: Okay, Cactus Press, what was the submissions process like? Do you get copies? I mean, are you going to do a launch now that it's not COVID? What does that look like for you?
PO: Yeah, I'm really excited for this to be sort of my opportunity to actually put something out and be a part of seeing something put out. The chapbook is really weird. Not like textually weird. I think it's actually probably pretty conventional. I'm not great at self-promotion either, but this is my chance to do it. “It's going to be a conventional, pretty uninteresting book, frankly.”
CL: “It's weird, but it's conventional. It's not weird in an exciting way. Don't worry. You won't like it.” Like, yeah, you’re doing a great job.
PO: Yeah. Basically, it was an experiment for me. It's an experimental piece in the sense that I experimented with something. And basically I said, look, I really struggle to reign in ideas. I really struggle to draw a straight, hard line through things. I said, I'm going to go, I'm going to write a whole chapbook in an afternoon, whatever it is, whatever it looks like.
I'm going to send it to the people at Cactus Press who are here in the city. They're pretty small. They've been pretty small, but they've done some, like, really cool work. I think they're growing. I think they're going to, you know, put out some pretty great stuff moving forward as well. But at the time, that it seemed to be the process, you write to Devin Gallant and James Dunnigan, and Willow Loveday Little there, and be like, “hey guys, it's me, Patty, you've seen me around. We've gone to the same parties, we're pals. I just wrote this thing this afternoon. If you don't want it, I'm just gonna throw it in the trash. So if you want it, it's yours whatever.”
CL: It's extremely male toxic behavior. If you don't like it I'm going to destroy it.
PO: You're going to take my gifts and if not I'm going to punch a hole in your wall. Yeah it was very much a chance to be the exact opposite of the person that I normally am. And I don't know if it's because they're just like super chill. I don't know if it's because they like me as a person. I don't know if, I won't know if it was because the work was actually good until like maybe a couple of months after it comes out and somebody says, I really liked that, or I really fucking hated that and that was trash. Why did you do that? I won't know that.
I trust them. I think they would have told me a lot more about it or given me a lot more suggestions or edits on it if they wanted it to be something different than it was. But yeah, they pretty much just said, “yeah, we'll run it. We'll have some ideas for you in a bit. We'll take our time with it, you know, if you want to make some edits”—but I kinda just want it done to say I submitted it. You know not even published just submitted it, put it off my desk that quick, that carelessly.
CL: That's that's I mean that that it is hard to hear this, knowing you. I'm glad to hear it, but wow.
PO: It was a Yeah, kind of a New Year's resolution, a challenge to myself. So I took a bunch of coffee and rhodiola and just like sent it. And now it's coming out. Cactus, also runs or sponsors a kind of a poetry open mic reading series here in the city every two weeks. Yeah, so it's going to be launched officially as part of that. And that's because of the volume they put things out at, too. They seem to put out a chapbook every month or so.
CL: So, what's the print run like?
PO: I think it's going to be small. I think it's something like 100 copies.3
CL: 100's a not small run, Patrick.
PO: Oh, is it not?
CL: I mean, relative, a hundred might be small. But like folding zines the this past couple of days, like folding 40 of each zine, folding 80 zines that I have to trim and slice and are, you know, either 50 cents a piece or a dollar a piece if they're double-faced—I'm not built to work, I'm built to lounge in the sun like a lizard, a sparkling glittering lizard, I'm not supposed to be made to work, and here I am.
I mean a hundred, I mean like who has a hundred readers of poetry in the country? I think poets read poetry and really that's it. And then friends and family.
PO: Well, this is a great thing is I'm Irish, so I have a lot of family. I will find homes for all 100. My mom will take four on her own, you know, just to have them and be like, oh, Patrick made this.
CL: So what is the title of this forthcoming work? Because you won't say it out loud if I don't ask.
PO: It's just called Demographic Reports: Patrick O'Reilly Recorder.4 I don't know what it was supposed to be, but looking at it and through the revision process, I think my thinking, a little bit of what we talked about earlier, is like, it's kind of like if you sent an angel or someone who was under the delusion that they're an angel into the city to be like, okay, tell me what's happening. Send me these quick little missives. And so there's like three or four little, a lot of black squirrels here this season. That's interesting. Woman at the Metro was, I thought, pushing a baby carriage, but she came around the wall and it turns out it was one of those like floor buffers. Weird. I saw two sets of twins today. Maybe it was two and a half sets of twins. I'll have to look into that. Just like stupid little things like that, piecing them together and seeing if there's a narrative that comes out or if there's a full picture or any sort of meaning, just yeah, a pointillism, or ‘lack of point’-illism
CL: I can think of a few poetry of observation contests off the top of my head, right? Like, it's not it's like, it's not a dead mode. Your elevator pitch here is intriguing, right? An angel goes and observes for a day. And I think the formal structure, the bent of it, sounds great.
Do you remember how many copies Frog Hollow published of A Collapsible Newfoundland?
PO: I think we'll look because I have a copy just right here I think actually. For A Collapsible Newfoundland it was a hundred.
CL: A hundred, and they went through it, like you got your last couple or whatever.
PO: Yeah, I think with the exception of maybe like the three or four copies that I still have, they're all gone. One of the things I think is really interesting is that like, just because something is a micro-press, it doesn't necessarily not have like a big reach, especially now with the internet and stuff. Carol got back to me one day: “someone in Belgium is reading your chapbook?” I was like, I don't know anybody in Belgium. Who the fuck in Belgium is knows or cares about Patrick O’Reilly?
A few Americans had it. Obviously mostly it was centered around like pockets of Canada where I know people, especially I'm sure probably eight or nine relatives in Newfoundland and that's where the bulk of them went.
CL: What about your relationship to, is it called Poetry Matters? What orgs are you involved in? What do you do as a poetry citizen, that like you like to do or you hate to do or whatever?
PO: I've really started sort of reinvesting in this. Like I was out of the circuit for a long time simply because like work was so busy. I had some like family personal stuff that needed attending to, I moved apartments. I'm getting back into things now.
Sometimes I'll do some work with Poetry Matters and meet up with people there. Mostly I'm just there in kind of like advisory, bouncing ideas [capacity]. I wouldn't say I'm like any kind of active official member. Sometimes Dr. Miranda Hickman and Dr. Sarah Wolfson, who run those things will reach out, be like, “hey, the season's coming up, want to talk about maybe some directions we could go, you want to come along and offer some ideas or feedback or ways that you can help facilitate?”
Yeah, count me in, love to. And so through them, I've helped people to give readings or advise on thematic directions for the year, help adjudicate contests, stuff like that. Pretty minor, pretty low stakes, but really cool stuff. And they're doing some really amazing things every year in terms of running workshops and bringing in interesting readers and helping run the Montreal Poetry Prize, I think is under their aegis now.
CL: Oh really? That's huge. That would be a lot to administrate, for sure.
PO: I'm trying to make a more concerted effort to publish in journals to both poetry and reviews. It's not something I do very often. I don't know if it'll get published or not, but I'm on like CV2's list of people to reach out to.
[In response to CL remarks on the unspoken “no bad reviews” blanket policy adopted at-large by literary magazines in Canada]
PO: Where do we get our negative criticism then? How do we know what doesn’t work, or how do we talk about things that are problematic or not beneficial or not successful from a creative standpoint? If tomorrow somebody like, I don't know, Don McKay or Anne Simpson or one of these like bigger people who, you know, for whom a book coming out is kind of an important event and everybody's going to want to know and, you know, maybe they'll be like, get a feature at ARC, what if that book sucks? You’re gonna tell me everyone in Canada is not gonna review the Anne Simpson book, or the Dionne Book, because it’s bad? And because no one can find a way to not say it's bad?
CL: The header of the sub stack and like the big gif in the original post is a video somebody in Toronto sent me of. It's one of Dion Brand's poems in like a public installation. And it's covered in like fast food garbage and pigeons are just eating shit all over the place. And it's just this beautiful tale of like, you know, like, I guess some people are important enough to be public infrastructure, but they can still get shit on.
PO: Yes, yeah, that's a great way to put it. I think once we establish, it's not like you're not going to leave people out by only being positive.
CL: And people who are less affirmative of the apparatus or however you want to call it, people who are more angry and are perhaps even better justified in their frustration or their anger are not going to be reviewed because positive reviewing entails positive happy shiny literature, right, and that's why people will have like a four volume jargon blurb about Dionne Brand because they can't talk about the material at hand because it's too abstract, that it's too baggy. That's Shane's word for Dionne Brand, is her work is “baggy.” I've read a lot of Dionne Brand, but I have no interes. I can't tell the difference between the books at this point.
And if I'm going to read jargon I’m gonna read insane sci-fi spec-fic crazy language nightmare jargon…Mochu has this book out called Bezoar Delinqxenz, (Sternberg Press 2023). Very much that kind of Nick Land, insane sci-fi, whatever. If I'm going to read jargon stuff that means nothing, I want to read that where it's actually interrogating the language and it's figuring out something about that apparatus that is a problem.
I don't think Dionne Brand is capable of [that]. I don't think Dionne Brand thinks of herself as somebody who makes well over $100,000 a year.
PO: When you say “no negative reviews,” that means no negative reviews on any front. That means even, you know, everything that's published does in some way reflect the culture that it's for. And if you're only praising things to come out of your culture, you know, you're not developing a culture, you're not building a culture.
If it's: “okay, we're running reviews on four graduates from U of T this year, they've got books coming out on M&S and Anansi, and they're going to get glowing fucking reviews.” You're going to miss a lot of good shit.
Some of those books are probably going to be terrible. Some of those books are going to sell a bunch because they're already on M&S and Anansi. How they got there, you know, we won't speculate. You know, how the shitty ones got published, you know, probably places just needed someone to publish this year. There's going to be a mix of good and bad shit everywhere but if you're only praising what comes out of our shitty culture, you're going to propagate shitty culture.
CL: I think it does take poetry further away from a “real field,” like a “real survey of experience” when it's so decided in advance. There's no surprise. I'm not saying like big poets are bad, or that a tenured prof can't write good poetry. I think a lot of writers that write fairly well and fairly consistently, like they do that because they don't have a real job. They have time because they work nine hours a week as a tenured prof. And that sounds really unkind, but there are people who work nine hours a week. They teach three courses and they don't show up for their office hours. And they harass the girls and they get away with it.
PO: We both went to university. We both worked as TAs or whatever. We we know full well there are tenured profs who are like teaching three sections and their TAs are doing all of their grading. And they are coasting on the same, you know, PowerPoint slides that they did six years ago. And like, how much labor are they actually doing instead of, you know, just going to conferences or whatever? I have qualms about academia.
CL: I think we all do and should. Yeah, I mean, that's a huge part of when I started writing. I was like, oh, a big part of what I need to write about is like, I haven't even begun to think of how I would express my disdain for an MFA program. Maybe I'll have you back on to talk about your MFA. And it's not where you went, but it's Guelph.
PO: I've heard some things about Guelph. Yeah, but that's it. Maybe I would even just, if I could find somebody who went there, like, or I could have a round table, like where I have a couple people talk to, like in a group.
CL: There are people like Sara Sutterlin in Montreal who are like “if you had to go to school to learn how to write, you're a fucking idiot.” Sarah's like, “you can either write or you can't. And school isn't going to fix that.”
And Sarah also reads intellectual labor from the ages. So it's not like she is divorced from things. She's pretty hard-line.
I do wonder about that. Donald Barthelme, 60 Stories guy, there’s Paris Review interview where he's like, “we can't teach people how to write, but we can teach people a consensus of what bad writing looks and feels like so they can avoid bad writing. I like teaching and I like talking to people about what's making bad writing.” And it's like, it's like that guy was kind of pro MFA workshop. I'm like, what? Nobody writes like him.
I guess you've done two master's programs. You've really gone through the ringer.
PO: Yeah, I think, I would think they're very similar in the sense that while I enjoyed them both and they both served their purpose, I don't realistically think I would have needed either of them.
The things I learned in library school are probably better taught through on-the-job training. I'm still learning, and I'm basically learning how to do the job that I trained two years in school to learn a bunch of theory about, and didn't get a chance to do a lot of the hands-on stuff of preserving materials or digitizing, stuff like this is really important.
By the same token, doing two years of an MFA in writing afforded me lots of time to sit and do nothing but think about writing, maybe work a part-time job, but generally have funding to do an MFA.
Did I get better as a writer? I don't think I did while I was there. Did I get more disciplined as a writer? I definitely didn't. It's not to say that it wouldn't work for everybody, but I know that, like, to this day, I’m not disciplined, so I couldn't have gotten that from an MFA.
Did I enjoy my time there? Yeah. Did I meet some people I care about? Yeah. Did I meet some people I think are really great writers? Yeah. There was nothing I accomplished there that I might not have been better served by going and doing an MA and, working on a thesis, and spending my own spare time really throwing myself at poetry and crashing that against the concepts I'm learning in like an English MA or you know in library school or whatever. Yeah.
CL: Do you do you feel like you're getting more from your work as a latent writing influence than you got from your time in university as a latent writing influence?
PO: Yeah definitely. I have to write as part of my job. I write reports, I write little object descriptions, stuff like this. It is kind of a poetic process, and it does feed back into my own creativity. You've got to be very concise, you've got to be very observational.
And against that, out of the restraints of a university system, and out of the restraints of trying to be in a community, and trying to be someone who is cool and liked and popular and seen as part of the scene, and all of these things, now that I'm completely on my own, I feel myself getting weirder and more myself.
I've started. I've been diagnosed as having ADHD. I strongly suspect that might be an AuDHD thing, but I can't confirm.
But yeah, so I've sort of stopped masking a little bit, because I'm just not out very much now. I'm just in my little office all day sorting through boxes and I can be as weird and make my own [indescribable mouth noises] stuff.
That's been very freeing to just make whatever the fuck I want. It's a nice feeling. I'm not getting any more published than I was. I'm doing probably fewer readings now than I was before. I'm not trying very hard. I'm having fun.
CL: When I publish, like, little zines, usually I haven't heard from this person in a while. And I just ask…in publishing a two-sided, like, reversible zine, I'm almost doubling [anonymous’] publication count. It's great though.
CL: Okay, I will go. Much love. [one of the heart symbols people do with their hands] Um, you know, this, this.
PO: Whatever the, uh, whatever the one that Gen Z kids do now, they have a different one.
PO: There's a new heart. There's a new heart.
CL: Oh, well, this is the one I've been doing, which is like the Korean one—
—***[Fourth 40 minute Zoom Meeting runs out of time]***—
For more from Patrick, find him on Instagram @lunar_maria_rilke
There’s a lot of people who’ve talked about this, and thus there’s lots of places to look for more thoughts on it, but here’s somewhere to start (that isn’t behind an academic paywall or anything), which situates the concept with Indigenous Futurisms early on in the piece. By Andrea Carlson & Rozalinda Borcilǎ.
This turns out to be apocryphal. It was in fact Lisa Banks who took the photo that ended up the cover of A Collapsible Newfoundland. Patrick’s apologies.
Patrick later corrected this figure, letting me know it’s something closer to 25. He asks to convey: “I have no sense of scale.
The title is actually Demographics Report, November 2023.