“I want a way out, I want to build a new world, I want a roadmap”: An Interview with Sina Queyras

I first encountered Sina Queyras some years ago, through their brilliant poetry collections Lemon Hound and My Ariel, and their equally praised blog, Lemon Hound—which featured contemporary conversations and insightful literary criticism that is still referred to today. My admiration for them continued with their notable reading series Writers Read, part of Concordia University’s Creative Writing program, which has carried on strong for over ten years. A focal point of Montréal’s writing community, WR features readings by and conversations with some of the literary scene’s most current and admired writers.

I have continuously been struck by Queyras’ bold takes, sharp wit, and assuredness. My admiration for them keeps on growing as their work continues to astound and influence me. When I learned about the publication of Rooms: Women, Writing, Woolf, a provocative and personal blend of memoir and essay collection grounded in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, I knew I had to read it immediately. While this book meaningfully interacts with Woolf’s work, what I find most moving is Queyras’ vulnerable reflections on their life in writing, academia, and on the pursuit of selfhood. Queyras approaches their early years as a student of literature and writing with a quiet unassumingness, deep curiosity, and poignant self-reflection. This powerful book fearlessly explores queerness, gender identity, expression, survival, mentorship, power imbalances, and the search for belonging in an ever-evolving relationship to the room.

I had the pleasure and privilege of speaking with Sina via Zoom just weeks after the book’s Montréal launch. In this stimulating conversation, edited for length and clarity, they shared their thoughts on things such as craft, process, and what made this distinctive book possible.

Poonam Dhir: Thank you for joining me today for this conversation. I noted several lines from your book. I would like to start with one from the prologue: “What good is a world that isn’t an answer to the one we are inhabiting, I wondered.” Would you say it is the writer’s responsibility to write or build a world that is an answer to the one we are inhabiting?

Sina Queyras: You’re referring to the line in Rooms about The Handmaid’s Tale, which I throw across the room and then tear up. That was the first time I read that book. I read it again in a women’s studies class, in the context of the history of utopian and dystopian writing. I appreciated it more then. But my final paper for that class was a text that created a bridge between Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Marge Piercy’s classic, Woman on the Edge of Time. In my text, one of the survivors from The Handmaid's Tale becomes the creator of a pre-Mattapoisett (the world that is featured in Piercy’s novel) utopian world where there are gender-neutral pronouns and childcare is communal and relationships are not limited to binaries. That’s where I was coming from. I was so frustrated by The Handmaid’s Tale. I thought, we are already out on the lines marching against antiabortionists and religious zealots who want to kill gay people—what good is this book? Thirty years later, one might ask that question again. Particularly when we consider Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ M: Archive. Is Atwood’s book a motivator? A warning? Sure … but oh, I really disliked it initially. 

I was thinking about this question again while reading Surface Tension, Derek Beaulieu’s latest book of poetry. One takeaway is that poetry is not useful, should not be useful, and one should not ask anything of poetry. Similarly, Lisa Robertson has a beautiful (and well deserved) review of her last three books in the London Review of Books, and the headline can be read alternatively as “don’t be useful.” I understand, from an agitational, outsider point of view, that we don’t want to be made useful to the project of the Corporation, we want to be provocative. But I suppose I’m also an idealist. Maybe naïve. In that I do want to be made useful and I do want to create work that is useful, work that prods, work that provides a blueprint—or nudges toward one. I am not saying mine has done this, but it’s a goal! I want to encounter (and create) work that is telling us how to move through where we are, showing us, provoking us in a way that takes us somewhere new—somewhere more productive, more inhabitable. And as you can see, I move fluidly from poetry to prose to poetry …

In any case, I was, and am, really interested in creating another world. So yes: I wanted a way out, I wanted to build a new world, I wanted a roadmap. 

I want to encounter (and create) work that is telling us how to move through where we are, showing us, provoking us in a way that takes us somewhere new—somewhere more productive, more inhabitable.

Poonam Dhir: I would argue that your work does exactly that. Although I can understand the choice some artists make not to be “useful,” I am personally drawn to your work in large part because it is thought provoking.

Sina Queyras: Thanks for saying that, Poonam—it’s a goal and as such always worth working toward. And I guess, yes, not necessarily prescriptive, but provocative and opening up new ways of thinking. Lisa [Robertson’s] work does that. I’m not saying her work doesn’t; I just don’t think she would demand that her work be useful in the way that I am asking.

PD: The line in your book “Surely, there is someone better suited to the project?” will likely find resonance with most women and gender diverse folks—at one point or another in our lives, we echo that thought. Can you speak of the connection between that sentiment (which ranges from humility to imposter syndrome) and the absence of a room? 

SQ:  I was trained to defer to male power ... I have been interviewing writers about their relationship to the room, and it’s been interesting hearing the different trajectories (entitlement and struggle) and their ideas of what is essential. So, one of the things I conclude at the end of Rooms is that the room has to be inside of us. In that sense, yes, the room is about confidence and having a stable sense of self. But it isn’t about the individual alone. There are systemic barriers we need to confront: who is invited in? Who can afford the room—because what good is any of this, really, if we’re not thinking about the systems that create these situations or anticipating the systems we take part in, the systems we give power to, where some dominant white male sitting at the table is always asked to speak for the group? We earned the room. We earned our tenure. My generation fought hard to come out of a world in which women’s voices were chronically passed over for a seemingly confident man, or a man whose confidence was built by consistently being told they can (and should) speak for the group—not that they had anything of value to offer other than a kind of aggressive ability to top others. You see that sort of dynamic in the academy all the time. You say something and a colleague sitting next to you, a male colleague, reframes it or just repeats it verbatim and, all of a sudden, everybody agrees, oh yes, that’s a good point.  

PD: Yes, I have noticed this pattern of folks reframing statements and being given more recognition. 

SQ: It is the systems that we are in, but also we all play a part and we need to become more conscious of our role in upholding and sustaining this dynamic.

PD: In the prologue, you ask a big question: “Who am I?” Then you ask it again differently (“Who am I even now?”). How are the two questions different from one another? Have you found the answer? 

SQ: I did find out who I was, and I have periodically, because, yes, it is a cycle. We don’t find out who we are and then coast forever after. No, no, you think oh, yes, that’s who I am, and you feel confident moving forward, but then life hits, it turns, and another side of you is revealed, or a wound is re-opened, and you find you’ve taken three steps back. I am really angry at the last wave that hit me—it was in relation to the reckoning in the literary and academic communities. While I was very happy that things were confronted, I wasn’t happy about how it went down, and the timing for me personally was extremely difficult. It sent me into a tailspin. I am grateful in the long run, yes, or I should say “so far,” because of course it isn’t over, right?

Personally, I have a series of checks and balances to maintain my values, my level of consciousness. And, when I fail (in my calculation), I think to myself that I should have gotten further, I should have made more changes … I have privilege. I am in this institution where, as a student, I used to sit in a pool of anger and meditate on how I would change things. Now I have at least some power to do something and I do try where I can. But also, now I am a part of the system. So, I ask myself how am I fairing? Have I done enough? Have I been effective? And also, yes, who am I as a person entangled in all of these systems—very often toxic and dysfunctional. 

PD: Do you feel like there’s a conscious check-in with yourself about that?

SQ: Yes, probably too often.

So, I ask myself how am I fairing? Have I done enough? Have I been effective?

PD: How does one reconcile that kind of distance?

SQ: Many of the survival skills that I built to climb out of my traumatic childhood became less useful as my life changed (improved) and it was difficult acquiring newer, healthier skills better suited to my situation. One of the things I have learned is that I need to be able to ask for help. It’s really hard for me to even say the word help. I know one does an honour when one asks for help and then finds a gracious way to receive it, and that growth is a reciprocal thing, but I find it very difficult. More and more I understand this as mutual aid, but, for me, help has historically been more of a one-way situation: I like to give, I don’t like (or don’t know how) to receive (or receive very well). One of the things I have learned from your generation, Poonam, and the generation coming up behind you, is that we can’t make the necessary changes—either for ourselves or for our communities—alone. All my life I have wanted this collaborative way of living, but I have not been altogether successful in creating it. I didn’t know how to create it and keep myself safe. I’m an introvert. This is why Lemon Hound worked for me: I could suck up the labour. I didn’t need to ask for permission. Or for help. Of course, help has come. And I have achieved collaborative working relationships. Perhaps in pockets. In moments. One must really have a clear sense of who one is in order for that to happen, and, while I have a clear sense of myself, as I said, that understanding will grow and change. I also needed to have a clear sense of myself in relation to the institution, and literary worlds, and that has been far more difficult than I imagined.

PD: There is wisdom in recognizing that you need to ask for help.

SQ: There is. Then again, in defence of my younger self, you have to have the right people around to ask in the first place. 

PD: Exactly, it’s not just about asking for help, but asking people who are equipped.

SQ: People who are equipped, yes, and people who are not intimidated by you, people who can say the difficult thing you might need to hear. Lately, for me, that has been my students …

PD: Definitely. On a different note, I love that you reference Michaela Coel, creator and star of I May Destroy You. I have watched it a few times now. I think Coel is just incredible. I read somewhere that she wrote 191 drafts of that series, that number blew me away.

SQ: She arrived somewhere really interesting. I did not know about that number, thanks for bringing in the precision. What was really moving to me, and what made me respect her even more, was the way she describes following a YouTube tutorial on how to write a script and doing that every time she started a new one because she had to learn it again. I get that deeply. I don’t have the kind of education where things are just stacked upon stacks, and, while I can feel confident at particular junctures, I do feel similarly every time I sit down to write; it’s like oh my God, I have to learn it all again. There’s something exhausting in that. On the other hand, you get somewhere original when you can’t take anything for granted. So, I really respect the level of risk and work she undertook. I love her character and how she presented her character physically in the series. She always seemed completely surprised by what was going on around her … I don’t know how she did that, as an actor, but it was like she was experiencing the present moment in a way I understood viscerally—what it might have felt like in her body. I am not a Black woman in the UK, but in terms of the sexual traumas and (the experience) as an outsider, I felt very (connected) … she’s brilliant. I would love to see her do some kind of revision of Orlando or see her interact with a Woolf classic.

On the other hand, you get somewhere original when you can’t take anything for granted.

PD: I am curious, what are your thoughts and experiences with the rewriting process?

SQ: I have a bit of a tortured process because, again, I lack that bedrock of confidence. I have confidence in my creative ability to find something, but writing a sentence is very hard for me. I have a long list of typos, mistakes I make repeatedly; grammatical stuff I just cannot learn, and I realized lately that it’s likely I’m dyslexic. 

In the classroom, I do push my students to think about writing as a series of stages or states. One of my basic philosophies is that the initial creative production is like gathering the clay. From there, we can think about how we want to shape it or what form it wants to take. One of the examples I always use is my first book, Slip. I wrote them all as prose poems then I put them all into iambic pentameter sonnets. And then I pulled them, and the book ended up being a sort of collection of prose poems, ghazals with the ghost echo of the metre. I did not leave them in iambic pentameter fully; I like work that has gone through various stages. And I don’t love work that’s overly polished. I think my own first book is too polished. I didn’t want Rooms to be as polished as Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. I wanted it to have a bit of ruggedness. 

PD: I am astonished by the amount of rigour necessary to shape one’s work. I am also fascinated when I read work that seems effortless, but that has been revised a million times over.

SQ: Absolutely. I feel that way about Lisa Robertson’s work and Anne Carson’s work. I can feel the layers, the reading in the background. Erín Moure is another person. I like it, too, in painting. I am trying to teach myself to paint right now, so I think a lot about painting and visual arts. And I appreciate it when I can see the layers, the struggle, the conversations (between other arts and artists) that are happening on the canvas, especially with abstract art.

PD: It is great that you are painting. There is such a connection between visual art and writing and poetry. Did that feel like a natural kind of transition?

SQ: I started to paint after My Ariel because that book was so intense. I wrote it in a closet, tucked under a staircase with no windows. After I finished that book, I just couldn’t go back in that space. I thought I might not be able to write at all—everything felt dark and difficult. I had always wanted to paint, but I never had any training in visual art, so I went and purchased a couple of canvases, and bright, bright colours, and I began painting. At the same time, I started studying the women of The New York School. I discovered the de Kooning husband-and-wife team. I began reading artists—Agnes Martin, Amy Sillman—and I truly felt joyful. Painting itself was, and remains, a struggle, but the struggle has a kind of beauty and lightness, and it isn’t about me in the way writing can be. It is about finding the lines and the colour combinations. But, similarly, it’s about the feeling more than the narrative. I love it and recommend it for writers.

PD: We don’t always experience that kind of awe or wonder.

SQ: It’s very important to have that.

PD: You have this great line, “What makes a sentence live,” and I am curious to know your thoughts on this. What does make a sentence live?

SQ: I think it’s different for different writers. Again, I come back to the line. It took me eight or nine paintings before I actually felt a line come alive. And by that I mean that I finally surprised myself. The line I began ended up somewhere I hadn’t anticipated. I felt so liberated. It was such a great moment. Writing that first Woolf essay (three decades ago), I felt similar. That was the first time I surprised myself, I think. It blew me away. I had no idea how to replicate the experience and I kept chasing it. For me, it had to do with rhythm and flow. I finally found this rhythm, my rhythm, in 2003 when I was at The Vermont Centre. I was surrounded by artists and by discussions about art. I was reading Robertson, Carson, Stein, and Woolf—lots of Woolf—and I had a studio of my own. There, I had a similar experience; the rhythm came, and I could hear Woolf in my mind—and I thought, she’s right, I can’t make a wrong move. As with the initial Woolf essay, the poems just exploded out of me. Page after page … but then the self-doubt that is always adjacent to creation arrived and I thought: what is this? Is it poetry? Is it prose? Is it just an exercise? I felt I might be getting away with something. I didn’t know what, but it felt spectacular. Each line was like another brushstroke. Those sentences were alive. I spent the next three years reworking the pieces that would become Lemond Hound, which came out as a book in 2006—thanks to Alana Wilcox and Coach House. So yes, re-writing is a lengthy, involved process. One of transforming that clay into a fully realized exploration of prose and modernism. It was kind of something borrowed, something blue, something old, something new. 

The line I began ended up somewhere I hadn’t anticipated. I felt so liberated. It was such a great moment.

Recently, I heard David Bowie talking about song writing in a similar way. You have to move outside your comfort zone, you have to have that moment of wonder, the knife-edge between self-doubt and creation, the big, what is this? That’s when you know it’s alive.

PD: That’s a great way to put into focus the notion of exploration.

SQ: I often use the analogy of the fire: you have to have the pieces pointing up, so that you can’t snuff out the core of your project; you have to give the flame a place to go, to reach for something. Nothing kills writing quicker for me than sensing smug (over) confidence. That’s dead in the water to me. 

PD: The subject of mentorship comes up in your book several times. I pulled the following quotes: “How often I would experience the beginnings of mentorship only to have it turn, too quickly, to competition.” A couple of others: “Now, I thought, following myself in through the doors, why does no one clamour to get me down this path?” and “I am always afraid of disappointing the people I admire.” And finally: “What does it mean to be welcomed? I think this may be a symptom of the problem of mentorship my generation seems to have had. Or my own unease at being mentored. And the difficulty of being a mentor myself.” Taking these quotes into consideration, what are your thoughts on mentorship now?

SQ: I know that first generation university students don’t know to ask for mentorship, so I make it a point to tell them early on, you need to ask for this, you need to connect with your professors, they're the ones who are going to write your letters, you need to look around for fellowships and scholarships. As the Coordinator of Concordia’s Creative Writing Program, I can tell you that, in contrast, the parents of privileged kids are calling months in advance of them being accepted, advocating (demanding) on their behalf. They want the best for their children. And so those people get a lot of attention because they are on the professor’s radar right away, but they also expect to be. They expect to ask and, to some extent, be served. But, for the other people, like the other multitudes, that’s not happening. Nobody ever told me about university. I was weeded out of the academic stream in high school pretty quickly. Whereas people at Malaspina College (it was called that at the time I attended in the late 1980s), my women’s studies’ professor, my first creative writing instructor, did try to welcome and prepare me. They did a lot of things for me, gave me a lot of information. I never did feel welcomed into a community that was reciprocal—but that year was life-changing—and I am forever grateful. 

PD: I recently was in a meeting with an established writer, and he said something that really stuck out to me as an emerging writer: Whatever you want, you just have to ask.

SQ: I think that’s changing a lot now. In my day, and in earlier years, if what I glimpse from my colleagues is indicative, it was like if they don’t ask, they obviously don’t want it. Well, no, that’s not how it is. They don’t even know that they can have it. So, I guess, active, equal mentorship is what’s necessary: active and intuitive mentorship. That’s happening a lot more at present.

PD: Do you have more students now who are vocal, who are asking for things or seeking to connect—outside of the privileged students you described earlier (whose parents would advocate for them).

SQ:  There is more of an understanding about what’s available and how to access it, yes. Systems are becoming increasingly transparent. But, for a long time, you couldn’t mention money, you couldn’t mention privilege, or access. People became really upset. It was this big thing that we couldn’t talk about. That whole they who mention the problem become the problem situation that Sarah Ahmed writes about so clearly.

So, I guess, active, equal mentorship is what’s necessary: active and intuitive mentorship.

PD: You wrote “Anger may not snatch my pen but it guides it daily. It raises my heart rate and the speed of my fingers on the keyboard.” Can you expand on the role of anger in your writing? And in other areas, if you’d like.

SQ: There’s that great Stevie Smith line about anger’s freeing power. She also famously wrote: “I was much too far out all my life / And not waving but drowning.” I always keep those lines side-by-side. Anger is still frowned upon, yes, we don’t like it too directly, we don’t like it at dinner parties, we don’t like it in the classroom, we definitely don’t love it in art. People often describe angry art as immature art. Undeveloped art. So, as an artist, you have to manage it, the challenge is to harness one’s anger; to ride it, not tamp it down too much, but also to express it in a way that doesn’t cost the person expressing it—me in my case—or the reader receiving it, too much. I don’t think I have been consistent at this; it is something I learned with Lemon Hound (both the book and blog). How to manage anger, how to make it, if not beautiful, at least something that I could enjoy. And I think that’s why satire is so compelling. I am not a great satirist. I wish I were a better one because it is empowering to be able to laugh at the things you are angry about. I do find that I get motivated by anger more than by beauty. And I don’t love that about myself. On the other hand, I love that I will respond when I’m angry, rather than shutting down, or being silent. I’m glad that I take those risks. I would rather take the risk of offending than not saying anything at all. 

PD: We need people to respond.

SQ: We do indeed need it. I think it can also be pleasurable. Hopefully, in the future, I’ll be able to make anger more pleasurable for myself if not for others, but in the institution, yes, you need to be angry, and, if possible, angry in a very funny way.

On the other hand, I love that I will respond when I’m angry, rather than shutting down, or being silent.

PD: I am glad you brought up humour. I believe it is necessary, not just to diffuse, but also as a way to articulate anger.

SQ: It absolutely is and, when it’s done well, humour is an undeniable fact. I also need to say that, for a long time, I thought that humour was something I didn’t deserve … I thought that humour was for the unscathed. I envy comedians and wish I had more humour in my work. But I also think it’s just not the tempo that I crave in my own relationship to what I need to express, in my own practice. It’s not that I don’t have humour or don’t nurture it. Maybe I just don’t have that talent. 

PD: So, another quote here: “But in all three genres what I was interested in was abstraction, a desire I could not yet articulate.” Could you speak to that, your interest in abstraction?

SQ: I took a painting course for the first time recently, as I said, and one evening there was a naked model. This beautiful older woman who was incredibly striking got up on a small stage and struck these poses and held them for long periods of time for us to paint. I did want to respond—but I didn’t want to have to respond with a representational drawing. I was so upset by the tension between how I felt I wanted to react and how the instructor wanted me to react that I nearly threw up. That’s how deeply uncomfortable I am with representation. 

So, writing this book was hard because it is more of a straightforward narrative than I would normally engage in and therefore an uncomfortable place for me. I would rather find the emotional note of the scene and try to replicate that in an abstract way, that is way more interesting to me. To find a surprising way to communicate that feeling or understanding or insight. I understand people do this with representational art—it’s just not for me.

PD: Then what motivated you to write this book in this particular manner?

SQ: Because I love essays and I love memoirs and I wanted to reach the common reader. I am trying to find my own way to move forward. This book took me to the doorstep (I hope). My sister (she’s passed away now), she has always been the person I think about: would this speak to her, would she be able to find the thing inside of this essay that I want her to experience? Like my mother, she didn’t have an education, but she was a thinking person, an original, vivacious, thinking person whom I wanted to write toward. That’s another thing Woolf models that I keep coming back to: she reaches different audiences, very distinct ones. She attempts to reach the common reader. Accessibility. I think that’s a skill worth having.

PD: I feel like sometimes accessibility can be lost in academia.

SQ: It is often lost in academia and in experimental writing, generally. The kind of writing that I love most myself teaches the reader how to read it. So, if it’s wildly experimental, I think that there’s also a space in the writing to give the reader the tools to read it, rather than, if you can’t read this text, it’s not for you.

That’s another thing Woolf models that I keep coming back to: she reaches different audiences, very distinct ones.

PD: Heroine by Gail Scott was like that for me. The book contains keys that helped me read it. I appreciated that.

SQ: Good example. Also, everybody’s reading Annie Ernaux at the moment, which is great. I have been reading her since like 1991 and she is very singular, very special. There is a particular thing she does over and over again, structurally, totally, in terms of her point of view, the spare style and the unflinching accountability—it is remarkable. She has built this body of work, and you can come inside, she shows you how. It’s extremely inhabitable.

PD: It’s intriguing. Moving back to the academy, you wrote: “I had begun to realize, was dense as the concrete it was housed in. The academy was resistant. The academy was barricades. The academy was about protecting individual freedoms at all costs, but the freedoms being protected were always those of the professor’s right of refusal.” Have you received any reactions from the academy about this book? How do you reconcile these feelings with your own work within the academy?

SQ: It’s ironic to me that the first review Rooms received was from a professor, though not one I know. I have received intimate responses from colleagues. Positive ones. But I have also been met with silence by colleagues. I assume that there will be quite a lot of that—the silence. And that’s fine; I’ve had the silence before. Among the positive responses, I had a colleague tell me the book had inspired multiple conversations. I was very happy with that.

PD: That’s good. I know this can be a difficult question to answer, I appreciate your response. Writing about one’s personal life is a subject of contention. You reference the writer Evelyn Lau not being taken seriously as a literary writer: “Literary writers made metaphor, they used literary tools to create art; they did not succumb to the personal.” There was a concern that “she would never be able to write herself out from under that shadow.” In this book, you get fairly personal yourself. What made you decide to open up in this manner at this time?

SQ: I have nothing to lose. I’m older now. But, yes, it felt like writing about the personal was beaten out of us all. I just wanted to clarify that the fear was not that Lau wouldn’t be taken seriously as a writer, it’s that she wouldn’t be taken seriously as a literary writer. I don’t know, I will let her speak to whether or not that’s the case, but I did read her memoir while I was writing this book and it made me think that some of the things I was bringing up were close enough to what it may have felt like for her. But I don’t know, I’ve never had a conversation with her. As for myself, what’s to lose? Yes, it’s uncomfortable. Yes, my children might read it at some point, but we’ve already had conversations about many of the issues brought up in that text and they are ongoing. 

PD: I can understand the discomfort and being at a place in your life where this feels like the right time. Out of curiosity, did you share the book or any drafts with folks who are mentioned in the book—with L. for example?

SQ: I didn’t share it with L. I have not really shared anything with L. since we split up in the early ’90s, and L. has not shown any interest. It didn’t feel necessary or productive. I did talk about the book with some of the other people who are in it. I’ve been having an ongoing interview with Daphne Marlatt, who was my professor then. That part has been spectacular. I feel extremely lucky that she has been there throughout my entire life. That’s been a beautiful outcome of the book, having conversations with former professors who have had an ongoing positive impact in my life. I feel blessed. And even more blessed than I thought before writing the book. 

But, about L., part of it is that I hadn’t anticipated writing about that relationship at all. I might have proceeded differently had I thought all along that I would write about it, about her. I might have contacted L. But, in terms of my writing process, it was the same thing with My Ariel and almost every book I’ve published: right when I think it’s done, I go in very quickly and kind of throw it up in the air and add a whole new strand or layer. With this book, it was L. I realized I was leaving out this whole vital strand: I wasn’t single in university at all! I was in a relationship. And I had been for a number of years. And this relationship was extremely important in my life. Positive in many ways, but also crucial and difficult in terms of my gender and sexuality and my coming to writing. Particularly at the moment I am narrating. I had not thought of L. as being part of my writing, so I worked around her and other people that were important at the time. I don’t think I would have written about it if I had thought about it too much, because of the long, complicated story involved. In any case, that’s how that came about.

PD: It seems like it had to happen that way. There’s a line in your book about Woolf: “Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words.” Woolf makes it sound almost easy. You also mention finding your rhythm was a key to unlocking your writing: “I was beginning to understand one important strand of what liberatory writing meant for me, though, and that was rhythm.” Can you talk a little about what that process was like for you and how an emerging writer can find rhythm? 

SQ: That’s a hard question because this bit about finding rhythm is also about finding your voice. 

And I do think rhythm means voice. Or a relationship between the way a sentence can be composed and the thoughts happening in your mind that illustrates a depth of feeling. When I was writing Rooms, for example, one of the things that was irritating me was that I didn’t feel like all that was roiling under the surface of the text was resonating in the prose. And it made me unhappy, but again, I was trying to find this new rhythm, this new way of writing, and so I thought maybe there was a different kind of texture. Maybe I can’t bring everything (all the strands and feeling) into the prose. Or maybe I don’t want it to be too dense?

Privileging rhythm over plot allows me to have a through line that can handle the swings, the ups and downs of living. I can go into other modes of thinking, I can bring in research, I can bring in the daily, the desire, the regret, etc. It’s like the sentence rhythm that holds the attention and the way that the mind works, which is to say: I’m aware of the brick, I’m aware of the sky, I’m aware of you, I’m aware of my partner, I’m aware of the past, of Woolf, of my mother, of climate … I’m aware of all these things simultaneously. And, so, when I think of the rhythm, what I’m looking for is an ideal sensory vehicle that can do all this while connecting to the reader (creating space for the reader to inhabit) and honouring the full spectrum of my living.

Privileging rhythm over plot allows me to have a through line that can handle the swings, the ups and downs of living.

PD: I like this quite a bit. You are giving me a lot to think about.

SQ: You’ll know it when you feel it. Because you’ll feel all those things being activated at once and in an (un)comfortable (enough!) way. I feel like everybody has their own rhythm.

PD: How did you experience rhythm while writing the book?

SQ: I felt it in the beginning, for sure. And throughout the book in general, but some sections were more difficult; sections where I’m trying to go back, like the sections about my father. I don’t feel as satisfied with those. I had fun with the introduction, sort of like harkening, kind of pulling Woolf’s intros—each of the chapters pulled Woolf’s intros into mine—and with the last chapter. Some parts felt like they were getting close to what I’m trying to go for. Others didn’t. I had to decide that was okay.

PD: Probably not an easy reconciliation, though.

SQ: No, not so easy, but writing a book shouldn’t be easy.

PD:  I’d love to know some names of books and writers that inspire you, that speak to the “otherness” you refer to in your book. Anyone you would like to mention?

SQ: I think everybody should read Dionne Brand. She has Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems coming out this fall that I’m really, really anxious to get my hands on. I also think that everybody needs to read her book A Map to the Door of No Return. And Liz Howard’s Letters in a Bruised Cosmos. I just read Imogen Binnie’s Nevada, an early trans novel, that I would recommend. It’s very good, very interesting, a bit irritating, too. I’ve got all of Annie Ernaux with me (A Woman’s Story, A Man’s Place, Exteriors, The Happening … a few others). I am re-reading all of her stuff because I’m compelled to try to achieve something similar to what she’s done. I have a book by Jane Goldman called Sekxphrastiks; CAConrad recommended it to me. It’s wonderful. If I were going to suggest a book to read alongside my book, I would say read it next to Jane Goldman’s Sekxphrastiks. She’s doing a lot of similar moves in that book, but they’re executed in a wildly different way. It’s poetry and drama, and in-your-facenesss, it’s great, really fun. I don’t currently have access to my library because I am travelling, but these are a few of the books that come to mind. Also: Lisa Robertson’s Boat.

PD: Is there anything you are working on now that you’d like to share?

SQ: I am working on prose. I’m trying not to write poetry. It’s very hard, but I want to take a break from poetry. 

Sina Queyras (they/them) is the author, most recently of Rooms: Women, Writing, Woolf, and of the poetry collections, My Ariel, MxT, Expressway, and Lemon Hound all from Coach House. Their work has been nominated for a Governor General’s Award, and won The Friends of Poetry Award from Poetry Magazine, a Lambda Award, two Pat Lowther Awards, the ReLit, a Pushcart Prize, and Gold in the National Magazine Award; they have twice won the AM Klein Award for Poetry, and twice won the Pat Lowther Award. Their first novel, Autobiography of Childhood was nominated for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award. In 2005 they edited Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets, for Persea Books, and with Erin Wunker and Genevieve Robichaud they edited Nicole Brossard: A Reader. Queyras is founding editor of Lemon Hound. They have taught creative writing at Rutgers, Haverford, and currently curate Writers Read at Concordia University where they teach Creative Writing.