Diaspora Dialogues

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author of the month

Author of the Month: David Layton

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Tell us about yourself.

This is the sort of alarming question that inevitably leads towards the false accounting of a resume. I’ll let others try to describe me, preferably when I’m out of earshot.

When did you realize you had a passion for writing?

I’m not sure I ever had one. When it comes to writing I follow Thomas Mann’s assertion that, “a writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”

What pieces of writing/authors have had the greatest impact on you?

Two authors who had a huge impact on me were Henry Miller and Ferdinand Céline. It was my mother who gave me Tropic of Cancer, a book I recommend, and should be read by every fifteen-year-old boy. Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night and Death on the Installment Plan are astonishing pieces of writing.

How and when do you find time to write?

The trick is not to try and find the time, as if it’s something you need to go looking for, but rather to make time so that you are its master and creator.

What has been some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced as a writer?

Believing in the words I just wrote in the above question.

How have you changed as a writer over the years?

For a young writer the linked attributes of arrogance and inexperience are absolutely imperative. The only thing age takes care of is the arrogance.

Big

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I like elephants. Or I should say I love elephants.
I like that they chew their food slowly the way my little brother does.
I like the way they lumber, not lope.
I like the simplicity of their thick bodies.
I like how each foot has the girth of a tree.
I like how their ears seem almost razorsharp at the edges.
I like that their bodies can produce a substance as rare as ivory.
I like that they take revenge against poachers and murderers.
I like the strength hidden under the folds of skin like steel springs.
I like the harsh reality of how dangerous they really are.

I regret being born in this thin, useless body.
I regret these legs which may as well have been toothpicks.
I regret this big nose which was never big or long enough.
I regret this disproportionate brain which knew too much empathy.
I regret not being born an elephant
or I could have wrapped my trunk tightly around you
and taken you away from this place of violence and hate.
I could have moved one thick leg after the other
through the garbage and the stab wounds and the broken bones.

But you are here with your arms wrapped around me.
You are here with your back absorbing the blows.
You are here dying to take revenge.
Maybe you are an elephant and
That is why I love you.

Emerging Author of the Month: Irfan Ali

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Tell us about yourself.

I’m a Pakistani-Canadian(-ish) Muslim(-ish) guy(-ish) human who has had the pleasure of being on this Earth for 26 years thus far. I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to occupy many different roles in both my personal and professional lives in a handful of different places around the world. Beyond this perpetual need for change, the only other constants in my life have been confusion about my identity (hence the—ish’s above) and an unflinching desire to observe and document the world around me, and especially the people who populate it. It was the latter that ultimately led me to write. While I have spent most of my life writing in various forms, it’s only been within the last two years that I actually built up the confidence to start taking my craft seriously and share it with others.

Tell us about the piece you’ve decided to share.

The piece, Big, started out as a celebration of elephants, my favourite animal. As it grew, it organically became a vehicle for me to explore the inherent beauty of ‘bigness’ (that is so often excluded from social norms of beauty), the power of love expressed through violence, and the subversion of traditional masculinity. Like a lot of my work, it also gave me an opportunity to explore some very personal issues, though I tried to do it in a way that did not alienate anyone. While I’m not sure I was entirely successful in its execution, I really enjoyed the process of creating and editing this piece. At the time I wrote Big, I was reading Geoffrey Brown’s Notice, so stylistically it is definitely inspired by the deliberate repetition of Brown’s poetry.

When and why did you realize you had a passion for writing?

At a very young age. My first serious writing project began at age ten with ‘adventures’—Dungeons and Dragons-like quests without all of the complex math and character sheets of the real game. I would spend hours writing these adventures before allowing my brothers to play the game. Unfortunately, while I was growing up, I was unable to see myself as a writer because of a combination of low self-confidence, having no one in my family who had gone down that path, and a lack of representation both in authors and characters within the majority of the literature I was exposed to throughout my life. I owe a lot to the Toronto Street Writers, a local youth writing group, for helping me overcome a lot of these issues.

What pieces of writing/authors have had the greatest impact on you?

There are a lot of authors that have really influenced my writing including Nizar Qabbani, Leonard Cohen, Anne Wilkinson, Robert Priest, and Pablo Neruda. The two most important poems in my life have been Frank O’Hara’s Having a Coke with You and Faiz Ahmed Faiz’ Bol. The former really opened my eyes to the power of the stream of consciousness and free verse and the beauty of everyday observation, while the latter to me represents a perfect fusion of activism, sexuality, and art through words. I make a habit of reading both of these poems when I feel discouraged to remind myself of why I started writing poetry.

What kind of writer do you aspire to be?

I aspire to be the kind of writer that causes pause when someone is asked to describe my writing [in the future], and finally responds, “Well, I guess his writing is something like a cross between [WRITER A]’s and [WRITER B]’s, but not really.” Also, although I’m not at this level of skill or knowledge yet, I would love my writing to act as a form of social and political activism without being either too diluted or too heavy-handed, which in my mind is what has really set some of the most important artistic works in history apart from their contemporaries and has allowed them to affect lasting social change. Both of these are extremely lofty goals, but a guy can dream can’t he?

How and when do you find time to write?

Wherever and whenever I can. I currently work two jobs and also spend a lot of time DJ-ing so I am generally always short on time. To try to help this, I started using an agenda this year to plan out my days and try to work in some writing time whenever I can. In practice though, the only writing time I get is at night so I often sacrifice sleep to write. Fortunately (or unfortunately depending on how you look at it), writing is enough of a compulsion that I have to do it even if it means only sleeping for three hours. Thankfully, even when I’m disillusioned or too busy to write, I’m surrounded by a group of really amazing fellow writers, friends, and family who support and challenge me to come back to it.

Emerging Author of the Month: Aisha Sasha John

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Tell us about yourself.

I’m a poet and a dancer. Both my writing and my dance practices are spiritual practices. As a dancer, my work has recently been exclusively improvised, both without accompaniment and with improvising musicians. I consider my dance a prayer, a sort of exaltation through movement. My first poetry collection, The Shining Material, was published last year by BookThug. In it, I consider what grace is through the use of the self-portrait. The prosody of that book is intended to be a feast and is also trance-inducing. For me, that which induces trance or some sort of quiet space is a feast. Currently, I’m working on a manuscript calledThe Book of You. I’m not entirely sure what it’s about yet (or else I wouldn’t be writing it) but it might be a portrait via a series of letters. I know that in this work I will be asking about what honesty is, and I’m wondering if it might have something to do with desire and one’s comfort with/acknowledgement of various desires. There is a continuing investigation of grace in The Book of You too. Recently, a selection of it was published as a chapbook called Gimme yr little quiet.

Tell us about the piece you’ve decided to share.

This is a poem I wrote while reading some Sappho.

When and why did you realize you had a passion for writing?

I don’t know if I’ve ever “realized I had a passion for writing” much as I realized I had a passion for reading. And that was very early. I think maybe when I first learned to read—and I remember the exact moment—was probably the definitive point. Understanding that the groups of letters on the page corresponded to the words my mother was saying, and thus cumulatively to the meaning of the sentence, of the story, was astounding to me. It still is. It was so good, this reading business, that I wanted to be a part of it too. I wanted to do for others what had been done for me as a reader. And so I did. At this point, I need to write. I can’t not write. But that is because I made it a part of my living. I made it like that by doing it, writing regularly when I wanted to and also when I didn’t want to. The passion, then, is a product of a love for reading and a little bit of discipline.

What pieces of writing/authors have had the greatest impact on you?

This is too big of a question to answer precisely. So I will talk about the first poetry that made me not just want to write but to be a poet specifically—that is the poetry of Mr. Amiri Baraka. That decision was, and is, continually reinforced by the work of great and even good poets, but it was with Baraka that I got that first giddy giddy giddy feeling that manifested itself as ambition. Right now I am having that feeling with response to the work of Edmond Jabès, Aimé Césaire, and Jack Spicer.

What kind of writer do you aspire to be?

I aspire to be the kind of writer who goes and does what she needs to do.

How and when do you find time to write?

I don’t find time to write; I make time to write.

Author of the Month: Kerri Sakamoto

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Tell us about yourself.

I am a writer living in Toronto with my family that includes a busy husband, Danito, a 17-year-old stepson, Eric, and a very busy 5-year-old son, Teo. I have written two novels: The Electrical Field and One Hundred Million Hearts, and am just finishing a third, as yet untitled. I call myself a late bloomer because that’s what I have been in all aspects of my life—but I also think of myself as a tortoise, who will slowly and finally and happily reach the finish line.

When did you realize you had a passion for writing?

It was in grade 3 when my teacher read one of my stories aloud on Parent/Teacher Night. My mom was very proud. It was about how we had made a sock doll together.

What pieces of writing/authors have had the greatest impact on you?

That would be Another Country by James Baldwin, which I read in high school. It was the first thing I’d ever read that articulated my amorphous thoughts and feelings about race and sexuality. I felt I’d found a special sheltering place from the racism that had been part of my life.

How and when do you find time to write?

I write during the day while my son is in school. I am very fortunate that I’m now able to stay at home and write. I try to write something “good” each day. I write until I feel I’ve achieved that, whether it’s a paragraph or two pages. Of course, the next day, it may not seem acceptable. But that keeps me going from one day to the next.

What has been some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced as a writer?

Self-criticism. Writing requires a leap of faith. There aren’t the usual validations as in conventional jobs, so you have to find ways to buoy yourself up. But the joy of writing keeps me going, and the faith in words to give form to feelings and ideas, to inspire compassion and empathy among readers.

How have you changed as a writer over the years?

Having a family changed me a lot. In the past, I could retreat into seclusion to write and my writing was very introspective. My globe-trotting husband and 5-year-old son pull me out to a wider, fuller world. The worlds I create have grown wider and fuller too.

Author of the Month: Evan Munday

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Tell us about yourself.

I am the publicist for Toronto-based publisher Coach House Books. I’m also the author of The Dead Kid Detective Agency, the first book in a juvenile fiction series published by ECW Press. I also make comic books, one of my ongoing projects is about a post-apocalyptic Toronto called Quarter-Life Crisis. And when I have some spare time, I watch only the finest terrible movies.

When did you realize you had a passion for writing?

I think I figured it out around seventh grade. In English class, we’d have to write sentences to demonstrate our understanding of vocabulary words. My sentences grew more elaborate and deranged (frankly) by the week. Eventually, they became full short stories, several pages long that incorporated the vocabulary words somewhere along the line. In retrospect, I wonder if my English teacher disliked me.

What pieces of writing/authors have had the greatest impact on you?

My comic book series Quarter-Life Crisis was hugely influenced by Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim series. I often describe the book as Scott Pilgrim meets Mad Max: succinct and accurate. And The Dead Kid Detective Agency has its roots in the children’s mystery novels of John Bellairs, James Robinson and Paul Smith’s short-lived comic series Leave it to Chance, and the television show Veronica Mars.

That said, I can’t figure out how some of my favourite authors and comic artists have influenced my work. Not in any discernible way anyway. I love Stephen Crane, Michael Chabon, Joe Meno, Kate Beaton—but can I see their work in my own? Not as clearly.

How and when do you find time to write?

I don’t know. If you have any suggestions, I’d love to hear them! I work full-time and as a book publicist, spend many evenings at book launches and readings, so when I write and draw, it’s usually very late at night or on the weekends. Occasionally, I can take a few days off in the winter or summer when the pace of book publicity slows down a bit. Evenings is usually when I write, though. I’m much more of a night person than a morning person, and I’ll sometimes pull all-nighters to finish work. I thought I’d be done with all-nighters after university, but I was very mistaken.

What have been some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced as a writer?

Time is one of the biggest challenges. Writing (or writing well) can take a long time; making comics, even more so. Finding the time to actually write and draw can be difficult, especially when, say, sleeping is so much more enjoyable. I’ve also found that whatever I do, I try to skirt the line between writing for children and writing for adults. My comic books are for adults, but there’s no real reason why kids wouldn’t enjoy them too (I hope). And my children’s novels are also written with adult readers in mind. But making novels or comics that are satisfying to both age groups can be a weird challenge, as you attempt to see how far you can push things without censoring yourself.

How have you changed as a writer over the years?

I used to write and make comics with a definite point or goal or theme in mind. The theme came first and everything I wrote was to help define and augment that point. Almost like writing an essay in the form of fiction. Gradually, that’s changed, so that I now just try to write a good story. After a couple drafts, I then figure out what themes I’ve been grappling with (subconsciously) and work to pull them out a bit. With the second book of Quarter-Life Crisis (which I’m currently working on), there was about a year between first writing the script and me figuring out what idea the story was engaging in.

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