Jade Wallace (they/them) [photo credit: Mark
Laliberte] is the author of a poetry collection Love Is A Place But You Cannot Live
There (Guernica Editions 2023), a novel Anomia
(Palimpsest Press 2024), and the co-author of ZZOO (Palimpsest Press
2025), as well as several chapbooks, most recently Expression Follows Grim Harmony (JackPine Press 2023). Wallace is also
the book reviews editor for CAROUSEL and co-founder of the collaborative writing entity MA|DE. Keep in touch: jadewallace.ca
1 - How did
your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work
compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Now is when I
realize that I actually can’t remember my first chapbook specifically. It was
thirteen years ago, and a few of them came out in quick succession. I’m not
sure anymore which was first.
My first book,
however, just came out in April: Love Is A Place But You Cannot Live
There (Guernica Editions). Mostly I feel
relief. Yes, I am a person capable of writing a book other people will want to
publish and read. Whatever doubts I still have (and there are many), I can’t
have that one anymore.
From my first
chapbook to my debut poetry collection to what I’m working on now, I would say
the general trajectory is toward the stranger, the more complicated, and the
more plural.
2 - How did
you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Absolutely
poetry was first for me. Poetry is still first for me. I have no idea why, I
just accept the inevitability of it. If my prose doesn’t sound a bit like
poetry, I invariably think it’s no good. I have a novel coming out next year, Anomia,
with Palimpsest Press, and a lot of the “chapters” probably read more like
prose poems than fiction. Some may see that as a fault, but even the prose I
prefer to read is the kind that’s preoccupied with imagery, and the sound of
words, and enigma at the heart of language, and whatever else poetry is about.
3 - How long
does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing
initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking
close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I do everything
quite slowly. I thought about my novel for years before I started it. Then it
took still more years to write. Poems are not quite so bad, but I often think
about a poem for weeks or months before I sit down to it. For any genre of
writing, there is usually one atrocious draft, sometimes short and sometimes
long but always a mess, and then there is a draft that looks like a story or
poem, and then usually there is a third version that is readable and needs only
a little more prodding to be done. No one, not even the people I trust most,
sees anything until it’s at least at the second draft stage.
4 - Where
does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end
up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book"
from the very beginning?
A poem always
begins with a problem I cannot solve. At any given time in my life, I tend to
be preoccupied with a certain problem or set of related problems, and all the
poems I write orbit around that fixation. Sometimes I realize what’s happening
in advance, and the book concept precedes the poems, but even when I don’t it’s
usually apparent pretty early on.
Like with what
I hope will be my second full-length poetry collection, The Work Is Done
When We Are Dead, I was thinking a lot about the problems of labour. I
thought about it while I was at my day job, I thought about it when I was
volunteering, I thought about it when I was trying to manage my personal
relationships, I thought about it when even making art had begun to feel like
work. It was easy to write a big set of poems about the same subject; it was
hard to make that particular subject fun. I think I succeeded, but then again I
have very dowdy notions of what’s fun. Crossword puzzles are deeply exciting to
me, for example.
5 - Are
public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort
of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I love doing
readings. In every book, I feel it’s essential to have at least a few poems or
stories or excerpts that will be thrilling (for me at least) to read aloud.
Usually they are pieces where the voice is very distinct, or the rhythm is
quite pronounced, or the language is slippery and playful. If I feel a piece
will lend itself well to being read, I will turn up the volume on those
qualities during editing.
I love doing
readings but I loathe being away from home, so it can be a struggle. When I
came back from my first tiny book tour in August, which was only a week long,
by the way, I was about ready for a nervous breakdown.
6 - Do you
have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are
you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current
questions are?
Always, but
they vary from project to project. I started reading philosophy as a teenager
because I was very interested in the questions it attempts to answer, but I
found the way it answered them to be desperately unfulfilling. The philosophers
I ended up enjoying most were the very literary ones, like Camus, and I
eventually realized I wanted the promises of philosophy in the package of
fiction or poetry. So that’s what I try to write.
I guess if you
wanted the very simple version, there are two basic questions at the crux of my
work: “Why do we bother?” and “What shall we bother with?” Each project answers
those questions differently.
7 – What do
you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even
have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
For me,
literature and sunlight are about the only consistent things that make me want
to go on with life day to day. There seem to be some writers who don’t feel a
great need to read, and maybe they would be happy being the only scribes on
earth, but I experience reading and writing as a kind of ongoing conversation
with the world around me. As in any social situation, I prefer to listen more
than I speak.
If writing has
any purpose other than this, I don’t know about it.
8 - Do you
find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or
both)?
Certainly both.
Unless you’re keeping a diary, writing is a communal practice. I want to know
how other people will respond to my work, and to control for their reactions to
some extent, while also being aware that the extent of my control is extremely
limited, which is both exciting and horrifying.
9 - What is
the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Keep at it.
10 - How
easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to collaboration)? What
do you see as the appeal?
In my work,
poetry and collaboration are overlapping genres. Strangely, I find
collaboration easier to dig into sometimes. Maybe because you can’t have an ego
about the kind of writing I do as MA|DE with my partner Mark Laliberte. “My”
voice and “his” voice dissolve, and MA|DE has a single, unified “third” voice
that I am a part of but that doesn’t belong to me, so I can’t feel particularly
self-conscious about anything I contribute. It’s easier to sing in a choir than
sing solo I guess. That is very freeing, at least at the drafting stage. Later
we go back in together and edit everything so it’s harmonious and precise,
which is not freeing but it is as easy as editing ever is.
11 - What
kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does
a typical day (for you) begin?
Not to be too
bohemian about it, but for me art and routine are antithetical. If my writing
process is too prescribed, I start to resent it. Instead I try to have several
writing projects, and a never-ending list of related administrative tasks,
bouncing around at any given time, and I’ll tackle at least one of them almost
every day. How much time I spend and which one I do depend on my mood.
It’s like how
someone who loves reading tends to have stacks of books all over their house
and will on most days probably pick up one or two books and read a bit from
them, without a need for scheduling the books they’ll read or how many pages
they’ll read each day.
12 - When
your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a
better word) inspiration?
If I feel like
I lack ideas, I pick a book off my shelf that interests me and read. I don’t
think too hard about which one. It usually ends up being relevant. If I feel
restless or uninterested in the project, I’ll go for a walk or play guitar or
do literally anything else. Life is too short to spend trying to force myself
to be interested in things that are not urgent. If it’s a good project, my
interest will return soon enough anyways.
13 - What
fragrance reminds you of home?
My parents
built a log house and that’s where I lived for the first twenty years of my
life, so pine always smells like home. My mom hung pomanders whenever citrus
was in season, so oranges and cloves smell like home. My dad did automotive
work in our basement and driveway so gasoline and engine grease smell like
home. I spent all the spare hours of my childhood and adolescence in a horse
stable, so hay smells like home, too.
14 - David
W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms
that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
It’s only books
that make me want to write books, but it’s the other things in my life that
give me things to write books about. I spend an awful lot of time thinking
about our home garden, and how it’s a way of interacting with the local flora
and fauna. Just before I started this interview, I was reading this great thread by writer Leah Bobet on practical
things we can all do for the environment—and no it’s not a list of things you
can give up, it’s about constructively beneficial actions we can take, like
making pollinator gardens in any space, no matter how small.
I also spend a
lot of time with “true crime” media, which might seem odd because I am a
die-hard pacifist who hates causing or experiencing harm (I get genuinely upset
when bugs die), and who has enormous qualms about judicial and prison systems,
but my interest in “true crime” goes back to my preoccupation with problems we
can’t solve. Murder is a rather fascinating example of a problem that can’t be
solved, per se, and yet there are so many ways to lessen the likelihood of it
happening and to deal with the aftermath when it does, if we can understand how
and why it occurs in the first place and what the far-flung effects of it are.
15 - What
other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life
outside of your work?
Unexpectedly,
Tennessee Williams has remained a long-time love of mine ever since I read The
Glass Menagerie in high school. I hardly read plays, and there are few
things from high school I still enjoy, but I’m well on my way to collecting
every work of his that was ever published. To me he’s a great example of
someone who’s not writing poetry but always has poetry in his writing.
Otherwise I’m a
bit of a goldfish—whatever I’m reading at the time is probably what’s most
important to me. Right now I’m absolutely delighted by The Ants by
Sawako Nakyasu (Les Figues Press), a charming and unnerving collection of prose
poem type pieces that “takes the human to the level of the ant, and the ant to
the level of the human.”
16 - What
would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Relax.
17 - If you
could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately,
what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
Well, like most
writers, I have no choice but to do other jobs as well. Most of that work, for
me, has been in legal clinics, but I’ve also spent a lot of time being a grad
student, and some amount of time being an editor, and in previous lives I’ve
worked in a horse stable and a Chinese restaurant. I suppose if I weren’t
frittering away my time with poetry I’d be trying harder to become a lawyer or
professor. All of my other hobbies—growing plants, baking cakes, playing
instruments—are not things I would want to do full-time.
18 - What
made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
There was
nothing else.
19 - What
was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
For this I’ll
need to consult my records.
According to my
booklist, some of my favourite reads of 2023 included poetry collections like
Cecily Nicholson’s Harrowings (Talon Books), Anahita Jamali Rad’s still
(Talon Books), natalie hanna’s lisan al’asfour (ARP Books), and
Hollay Ghadery’s Rebellion Box (Radiant Press); short story collections
like Corinna Chong’s The Whole Animal (Arsenal Pulp Press) and Jean
Toomer’s Cane (Mint Editions); and graphic novels like Joe Kessler’s The
Gull Yettin (New York Review Comics).
According to my
Letterboxd account, my favourite recently watched films are George Kane’s Crashing
(2016), which is only debatably a film, but I enjoy everything Phoebe Waller-Bridge writes, Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz (2011), though that
might only be because it too closely mirrors my twenties, Donna Deitch’s Desert
Hearts (1985), which is a queer classic and hard not to like, and Park
Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave (2022), which was generally brilliant
though I confess I was disappointed by the ending.
20 - What
are you currently working on?
I think my
aforementioned, hopefully sophomore poetry collection, The Work Is Done When
We Are Dead, is basically complete, less a few nitpicking edits I will
continue to make until a publisher takes it out of my hands, so I am planning
to spend more time with a couple of MA|DE’s many projects:
I’m also
grudgingly contemplating what I need to do to finish and fix up my first
manuscript of short fiction—the most significant challenge is trying to
resist the urge to turn all the pieces into poems.
12 or 20(second series) questions;