Vancouver author Q&A: A Terminal City for yesterday, today and tomorrow
Credit to Author: Stephen Snelgrove| Date: Fri, 04 Oct 2019 18:00:28 +0000
‘My hope is for readers to encounter the many Vancouvers in the book and generate their own reactions and projections — their own Vancouvers,’ says Alex Leslie, author of Vancouver for Beginners.
Alex Leslie | Book*hug Press
$18, 99 pages
“Vancouver is the best (place) going,” Douglas Coupland wrote nearly two decades ago in City of Glass. The cover of Alex Leslie’s Vancouver for Beginners inverts Coupland’s celebration of glittering high-rising spires and washes a murky green over it. Inside, Leslie joins writers like Chalene Knight and Sam Wiebe in mapping out a metropolis with deep-seated flaws and contradictions; it has become, in the words of one of her poems, “a horror story.”
Postmedia asked Leslie about key facets of her sophomore poetry collection.
Q: Vancouver for Beginners strikes me as a sly title, in that it implies a quick survey (which never really happens). Why did you choose it?
A: Several years ago I told the poet Rachel Rose about the title Vancouver for Beginners and she responded, “Beginners at what?” Her response has kind of haunted me. Beginners at forgetting; beginners at climate disaster. Poems in the book dig into the colonial history — Vancouver in its beginning was a centre for the occupation of the coast, the lumber trade, colonization. Many of the pieces are futuristic, reaching forward — who are the next beginners? Which beginners does Vancouver belong to now? There is a slyness in the title, it’s true, because the book is clearly not written by a beginner — I’m from here. But much of the book relies on surrealistic techniques, and there is a feeling of beginning, or newness, in strangeness, coming to thing slant (i.e., a slanted angle). I’ve also joked that this book is like a Lonely Planet climate collapse guide to Vancouver for millennials. Apocalypse tourism!
Q: From “Forest Fire Season” to “Pickton,” your book’s pieces often convey alienation and not a little anxiety. What are your hopes for readers encountering your poems?
A: Reading is a dialogue. My hope is for readers to encounter the many Vancouvers in the book and generate their own reactions and projections — their own Vancouvers. I expect some readers will react to the darkness in the book, especially those of us who grew up here and may feel protective. I expect others will embrace those aspects of the book, and recognize their own struggles with this strange, embattled city. My only hope is for there to be an encounter.
Q: You’ve become known for your short story collections. As a way to meditate on Vancouver, what can poetry offer you that prose does not?
A: Poetry can be free of chronology in a way prose can’t, because prose is built on sequences of sentences. Poetry can be intentionally kaleidoscopic, prismatic in a radical way — to represent a space stretched over time, poetry can be more effective. But I feel that the poetry/fiction divide pushed to its limit is always a false binary. Prose is another kind of poetry. The publishing world tends to value fiction that is more stripped-down stylistically, and so for writers who love language, sometimes poetry is where they feel they can be more free and inventive.
Q: Do you think “dystopian” is an adequate descriptor for the poems in your book?
A: I think that climate change, overdevelopment and the overdose crisis aren’t dystopian. They’re sadly aspects of reality. If this can be read as dystopia, perhaps the texture of reality has changed, and this is just a mirror.
Q: I’ve heard dystopian writers called closet optimists. Do you relate to that?
A: For me, writing is a fundamentally optimistic act, because it belongs to a future reader who hasn’t happened yet. To say I’m going to write this dark, layered portrait of a city plagued by all these social issues, I’m acting on the thought that someone is there to read, interpret and receive. Writing has always had a “message in a bottle” feeling for me. You send it out, and what happens next is out of your hands.
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