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- [00:01]
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The world moves fast. Your workday even faster Pitching products, drafting reports, analyzing data Microsoft 365 Copilot is your AI assistant for work built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other Microsoft 365 apps you use, helping you quickly write, analyze, create and summarize so you can cut through clutter and clear a path to your best work. Learn more@Microsoft.com M365 copilot How do you make chicken nuggets like 7,000% better short? You let Taco Bell make them long. Start with all white meat chicken nuggets, bread them in crunchy tortilla chips, and serve them with Hidden Valley Diablo Ranch. Yup, that's Hidden Valley Ranch mixed with Taco Bell Diablo Sauce. It's exactly what it sounds like and somehow even better. Simple math Spicy results Crispy chicken nuggets from Taco Bell, a brand new classic at participating US Taco Bell locations for a limited time only while supplies last. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Holly Gattery
Hello everyone and welcome to mbn. I'm your host, Holly Gattery, and I am delighted to be joined today by one of my favorite writers on the planet. I am not kidding. I'm not exaggerating. There's not a hint of hyperbole when I say this. Margot lapierre, I am so happy to have you here today. Margot, welcome.
- [01:59]
Margot Lapierre
Thank you, Holly. The feeling is completely mutual and I'm really excited to be here on the New Books Network today.
- [02:05]
Holly Gattery
Well, thank you. So everyone, if you want to, like, avoid, you know, hearing Margot being Love bomb by me, just go now. But if you're here for some incredibly beautiful poetry and to hear about Margo's sensational new book, Ajar, please stay. You will not regret it. So Adar by Margot Pierre was recently published by the wonderful Guernica Editions. The Poems in a Jar navigate the physical and psychological dangers of womanhood through the flattening lens of mood disorder. Psychosis isn't the opposite of reality. It's another perceptual realm. If neurotypical thought measures the world in centimeters, this collection measures it in inches gallons. Adar celebrates radical recovery from gendered violence and psychotic paradigm shifts. Approaching madness through prismatic and queer as time converges with us, we find new ways to heal and grow. From the emergency room to the pharmacy to the fertility clinic to the discomfort of home and memory, this collection humanizes bipolar psychosis. These poems do depict sociality and violence. So please, if you're feeling sensitive today, listeners, just take a bit of a time out and pause or come back to this when you're feeling up to it. Margot Lepierre is a writer and freelance literary editor with multi genre work published in the Ex Puritan, CD2, Room, Prism, and Arc, among others. She has won national awards for her poetry, fiction and editing. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from ubc. Ajar is her second poetry collection. Margo My first question for you is where did this collection start for you?
- [03:49]
Margot Lapierre
I think it started where my last collection ended off. So I actually published my debut poetry collection in 2017 and at the time I wasn't publicly open about my bipolar disorder. I had been diagnosed in 2008 and I had kept it under wraps even though I was medicated and treated for a very long time, just keeping that close to me due to the stigma and wanting to still be able to find a job and sort of move through society without that kind of judgment that I had experienced. But then when it came time to share a book that I had written, really at the time of going through the most difficult times of my, of my diagnosis and my disorder, which was in my early 20s, and I figured the text would speak for itself. Everyone would just get that this was about a disorder and no one saw that in the poetry. And and so it was labeled as a very transgressive book. But it wasn't until after it was published that I started embracing being someone who could speak out publicly and kind of be a de stigmatizing advocate for this and to try and show with my own life that you, you know, you can be present in society and you, you can be successful and I'm and have your own business and be a person in the literary world while still having a disor disorder like this or other disorders. And we're here and so many of us are quiet about it. And I just chose not to be quiet about it. And so this is the book that came out of that, that said, I'm going to address this directly this time.
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Holly Gattery
If anyone out there has spoken to me in the last two years. I kept on saying that this book by Margos is a book of poetry. I Recommend, and it wasn't even out. So I thank you for this. I was like, oh, you've got. Anyway, at the time, I think it was called Moon Ajar the first time I encountered it, and I wanted to talk about that. The title so went from Moon ajar to ajar, and I found the title perfect. I found both of them perfect. But ajar I love as well. So I'd love for you to talk about that. Why ajar in the poem?
- [06:04]
Margot Lapierre
The title poem, which is one year again, one year later, an evening in June. And it discusses my second situation suicide attempt, which happened almost exactly one year after the first one. The moon is the Persona. I have this sort of dual Persona going on in the poem. And to me, the idea of being a jar was both being open, like open to a different reality, open and porous to something beyond. Just sort of. We're regularly experiencing day to day, but also tilted. And actually the word comes from the Celtic, the Gaelic for turn or tilt. And so I thought, what a great word, a jar for a mental illness. Because we hear like tilted or twisted, but we don't often hear a jar. And I do like to think of psychosis as a door opening or a porousness letting something in. But one of the things that I was dealing with was, is moon a cliche? Can I put that in my title? Is this too cliche to have in the title? And then the other thing, thinking just about the sound. And so when I'm working on a poem, I'm not just thinking about the semantics, but also how does it sound if we're not even looking at the words? Moon ajar sounds so much like manager. And I just thought, ugh, I really don't want that in my title. Why don't we simplify it? Even though I still have Moon Ajar in the poem itself, I don't know.
- [07:37]
Holly Gattery
I guess I'm too much of a poet. I can never get sick of moon. But they do have to be talked about in new ways, right? Like it, you know, it can't just be complete. Selena Philia. I think that's it. And just, you know, it has to be surprising and new. And your. Your work is always surprising and new. So I want to ask a question about style next. And I'm actually really curious about this because it's something I think about constantly whenever I read anything you write. And I've been lucky enough to even read some of your prose, your. Your novel in process, if it is still in process, we can come back to that. But I hope it's still in process. But one thing that I. I really love about your work is that it's. The language is so pristine and clear, and there's that, like, razor edge to it, but it also is equally lush. And I was wondering if you could talk about your style. I mean, it's. I know that as a poet myself, like, it can be difficult to talk about it. You know, to an extent, this is just the way our brains think, right? It's the way that we process the world. And how do you. How do you explain that? But I think it might help poets listening because, you know, there's this. Whenever I do poetry workshops with emerging poets, there's coffee. The poems are often. There's. There's such potential in them, but they can be very wordy, which is rich coming from me because I'm wordy all the time. But I think that poems, really beautiful poems like yours give the feeling of being lush and abundant, but the language is actually quite distilled. And again, I'd love you to talk about that balance and how you bring it to life in your work.
- [09:18]
Margot Lapierre
Oh, well, thank you for those lovely compliments. The language and the style. I think I learned most about my style through what needs to be stripped away and through revision. And so if I were to only think about what my style is when I'm writing, I think it would be a lot sloppier when I'm writing. And. And that a lot of my style comes through cutting and paring back and taking out, like, whole swaths of things and rearranging everything. And so that precision is something that I have to work really, really hard at in my prose, as in my poetry. One of my, I want to say bad habits, but because it's part of my process, I'm not. I'm not quite going to say that, because even though something needs to be taken out afterwards, maybe doesn't mean that it's bad for us to use it in the process. Right. I don't really like the idea of, like, limiting the writing part, and that is stacking metaphors. So I will mix metaphors. I will put together metaphors, make sense. I will stack sounds. So if I am, sometimes I'll work with words, and in the rush of writing, I will forget exactly what that word means, but it sounds just right. Then I have to go back again later, look it up. Even editors look stuff up too, all the time. That's a major part of being an editor. It doesn't mean I know all the Words I have to go back and interrogate every single kind of every single moment and every single choice that I made on some of that writing, which is initially quite sloppy. And I was working on this book for a long time. Again, it was like seven years, I want to say, before it was ready. And I was still working on it right up until publication, even after it was accepted, like doing major, major edits. And I went back to some of the earliest things that were published from it. And it was so these poems were so much different. And I recognized, like, it would be like a single line from a whole page of prose poetry that made it into my book. And I can maybe I'll look that up and I'll find it later. But yeah, a lot of revision.
- [11:42]
Holly Gattery
I just love that answer. That, that's so perfect. I love what you said about nothing in the process being bad. Because some things I know when I write some things can feel like, oh, I shouldn't be doing that. It's like, why it gets you where you need to go in the end, not hurting anyone. Just do it.
- [11:59]
Margot Lapierre
I call it the, like, the lube of writing. Like, you need, you need it to get the writing on the page. And there's nothing wrong with that.
- [12:09]
Holly Gattery
Oh, I, I agree. I actually find often when I'm writing poetry, I mean, when I, when I write crows, I can like, I can just sit down and write. Like, I can start in one place. When I write poetry, it's so fragmented. I'll do in like five minute spurts. And if I tried to sit down and write more, I don't know if I could, which is probably why it takes me so long to write it. But I also find that I read it the same way that I have books of poems around the house. I don't know if anyone's ever seen that movie signs with melted.
- [12:38]
Margot Lapierre
Yes, the water pots, like, just in.
- [12:42]
Holly Gattery
Case it's like a safety measure. But like, you know, going up the stairs in the, in the window, but in the stairwell, like, I have a book of poems there and I'll just like, okay, I'm just going to stop and read a book of poems. But that, that, like, it makes me happy and I read it the same. Like, I engage with poetry the same way no matter which way I engage with it. So I really do absolutely love, love that answer. So I think this might be a good time just because we've been talking about style to pause and perhaps have you read us one of your poems to give our listeners a taste?
- [13:10]
Margot Lapierre
Sure. I Mean, let me pick one of my Sentos, actually. And so talking about curation and using sort of a prismatic view of fragments, there was one night where I had been collecting for months favorite lines from the poetry books that I was reading of all the poetry books that were in my house. Many, many, many books. And I would put them in a word doc. And I eventually printed them all off. I cut them and spread them all around me on the floor and put like prepositional phrases here, I statements here, imagistic descriptions or that sort of thing. And I stayed up by myself till like 4 in the morning and I just wrote 4 centos at once. And then I pared back even more. So I will read one of these Sentos. Every line is taken from another poet. I didn't write any of these words, but I did put them together. So these are with lines from poems by Jacqueline Deforge, Chris Johnson, Michael Mirola, Stuart Ross, Sonnet Labe, Paul Lisson, Claudia Kutsu, Radmore, Pearl Peary and Grace Lau, who are all of them Canadian poets. Sento for pyrokinesis what is real is taking the unreal what's to come Exhaust, smog like doubts upon the world Acting as if the front door is slamming and undulating in the cool air stream scraping the lavender sky nestles round the scalp A vague thing, a pity object A wreath the color of howling light.
- [14:46]
Holly Gattery
I love the Sentos in, in this collection. It actually felt like I have to. I have to do one now, I guess. And when I know I love.
- [14:54]
Margot Lapierre
They're so fun.
- [14:55]
Holly Gattery
Yeah, I know I love poetry. Like, I can tell I love something when I read it. I'm like, I have to write it now. I don't, I don't feel that with novels. I don't know about you, but I feel like when I finish a novel I really like, I'm like, oh, that was nice. But I don't feel compelled. Write on poetry. It's like that you're tapped into the, the ether of the universe, you know, it was like, I have to do this. It's just being plugged into something. And I, I just love that. My, my question for you next is about the connection between bisexuality and suicide, because I was talking to you about something earlier, predating this conversation we're having now, and you brought up a connection that I did not even know about. And I reread some of the poems in your book with not a greater appreciation because I. I didn't need to know about that connection at all. To appreciate them, but with a new appreciation of them, perhaps.
- [15:51]
Margot Lapierre
So there are. I can talk about the statistics, and I can talk about my own opinions. Maybe I can do a little bit of both. So bisexual people among the different sexualities are very likely to die by suicide. So it is higher, certainly, than gay, lesbian, and heterosexual people. And this is a statistic. It's a fact. I think the last study of this was done in 2022 in Canada. And what I think for bisexual people, for one, it's a huge, huge category within the LGBTQ community. Bisexuals are. Even though there is certainly bisexual erasure. And on top of that, it may be the one that people are most likely to hide or not to be out about, or their being out isn't recognized. I've been out since I was a teenager, and that often, I think, hasn't been recognized. And when we hide things, it is easier for there to be shame. There is something correlated between hiding and shame, whatever feedback loop that is. And hiding certainly leads to a greater likelihood to die by suicide. There is something to be said about being able to be open and present in one's identity and seen and acknowledged that really means something for me for a long time. And it may result in me being more impulsive with what I say. I don't filter a lot of what I say, and maybe I risk saying too much. And I am not very good at keeping my own secrets, certainly not in this book. Ajar. But that is a very conscious choice because I think that keeping my own secrets is a very dangerous, dangerous game. And so I think that might be, you know, sort of a nebulous answer to that question. Did that answer?
- [18:04]
Holly Gattery
Absolutely. I live for nebulous answers because, I mean, how do you answer a question like that, especially while talking about, you know, the chasm of experience in this world, which I think, again, I think poetry captures that nebulous quality better than anything else. And I mean, that's how I live. So this leads as if seamlessly into my next question, which is about capturing psychosis, capturing mental illness within poetry. I was talking to Concetta Principe about her book Disorder, which talks about bipolar disorder and amongst other things, and about how I feel that out of every genre, poetry always, to me, feels like it captures my experience living as someone with mental illness and neurodivergence better than anything else possibly could. And I've read widely in every single genre on mental illness. But there's something about poetry in the way that it shows, without having to necessarily explain that Feels most authentic to my experience. And I was wondering if you would share your thoughts on capturing mental illness and psychosis and how you have done it within a jar.
- [19:20]
Margot Lapierre
I think we're talking about slant ways in when we talk about psychosis, for one, because it doesn't push what is considered normal aside, right? Psychosis and the agreed upon state of reality are completely capable of living side by side. There's a real term for this coined by Eugene Glueler, who was a clinical psychologist, I believe, writing about schizophrenia, which the psychosis is not the same in these different disorders, but the term is double bookkeeping where two different sorts of reality can coexist at once despite being incompatible. And so you need a slant way through to describe what is happening in psychosis and even kind of the prodromal pre psychosis and sort of the affective mood things that are happening as well. And I actually just have sort of an analogous example of one way that I was really able to get into a poem that I think speaks really well to this sort of experience that might not be exactly psychosis, but certainly part of the mood disorder. I was taking a course with Susan Musgrave and she had us all writing in the point of view of some object or some person as though we were God. And she had this whole list of things. And one of the items on the list was new anchor. And I knew right away that it was supposed to be news anchor. It was clearly a typo, but I just loved the humor in that typo. And I'm like, I'm going to write a poem as if I were a new anchor and I was God. And so I wrote this poem, God is a new anchor dipped into the sea. And after I wrote it and after I revised it and I actually had help revising it as well, I had it edited like it went through a lot of thinking after the initial writing phase, I realized that this was a poem about getting something you really wanted. The exuberance and the exhilaration of having that thing, but then also feeling like you were going to sabotage it and self sabotage like if. Like the fear and the exhilaration that come with achieving something when you are the type of person to have, you know, a disorder like this.
- [21:44]
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Holly Gattery
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Holly Gattery
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Holly Gattery
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Margot Lapierre
Okay, here we go. God is a new anchor Dipped into the sea I was surrounded by good things Curtains of wake do gods abide barnacles afraid of immensity I couldn't get my bearings until I touched bottom self sabotaged newly sucking their iron godmother Suckling shine in the slip of water A God is a dipped thing but the bottom rang my bones I saw shapes in my pain tethered to cloud it need not be a straight course I lifted when I was Ready to feel weight ho to be faithful. Powerful hook is this aching, exuberant steel. The eye of the world. I just pictured, like, being an anchor and plunging into the ocean for the first time. Like, what would that feel like? This is what you. This is your purpose. This is what you were created for. And yet it's completely different than everything you've ever experienced before and totally scary. What is that like, when you find your purpose?
- [24:55]
Holly Gattery
I still remember reading that poem for the first time. Yeah, I love that one, I think. And that ending is just chef's kiss. Oh, thank you. It's beautiful. One of the questions I wanted to ask, and this is just a personal interest to me, is because.
- [25:12]
Margot Lapierre
I have.
- [25:12]
Holly Gattery
A gift that not everyone has. I saw this in an earlier incarnation, and one of the. To me, most marked changes in it was talking about fertility. And then, not that there's a. You know, there's a lot in this collection, but we are talking about fertility here, which, you know, I don't remember being in the earlier draft I read, but I was really interested in and talking about things like fertility and motherhood. I mean, I have my own opinions about writing about motherhood, writing about fertility, which of course, are not the same things necessarily, but I was really interested about how that thread became included in this collection and about writing about, you know, motherhood, infertility, which can be very fraught subjects through this prism of a jar, which is quite singular because as you said, everything is. It's slant, which I found perfect. So I know it's really broad. Speaking of nebulous answers, like, here's a nebulous question for you, but I hope you're. You're picking up what I'm putting down.
- [26:20]
Margot Lapierre
I totally am. And that did change. And I think I have a tendency to, if I'm experiencing problems in my life, like, they always trickle down into the book that I'm working on, even if. Even if that's not what the book was about. And this happens with my prose and my poetry. And so I was going through infertility struggles, and this came through in the book. And then actually after the book was already accepted and it was essentially the publisher thought, ready to go, I got pregnant. I was very excited about that. And I thought, oh, my God, I have to change the ending so people don't think I'm lying about my infertility. But also that kind of became part of my arc. Like, this book was totally woven in with my real life. And I was also in the process of breaking the structure down. And restructuring it. So I spent, I want to say, a whole fall season. You know, it was the fall where I found out I was pregnant. I had the entire manuscript taped on my kitchen wall. And so I could see everything happening in sort of a linear way, even though the book is a non linear book. And I did change the ending. I have a nod to my daughter in there. And I got the proofs actually when I was in labor, I had just had an epidural and I was like feeling so great that I decided to check my emails and Michael Marulla, my publisher, was like, here are the proofs, get them back to me. I was like, ah, I'm about to have my baby. So they kind of have the same birthday. But the book and the baby, I did have to change, or I chose to change the ending. And I actually changed the first poem because of that. And there's one line that I added to the first poem as a way of acknowledging the presence of my daughter in the book by the end. And that line was, your name is a hand I want to hold.
- [28:25]
Holly Gattery
I love that. And for me, I think writing about motherhood and challenging the notion of who mothers should be is so important to me. And I think that's why I found a home within your words and your work. Because it isn't this June Cleaver sanitized version of motherhood and of womanhood and of self. It allows for all these tumbling multitudes of who we are and it allows her darkness. Because, you know, I, I'm not a mom who like plants a smile on my face when things aren't okay. The only rule we have in this house is you're allowed to be in a bad mood. You're not allowed to take it out on other people. But yeah, it's like you feel your feelings, by all means, be miserable, just don't take it out on me. And I, that I hold myself to that too. That I can be a little dark rain cloud sometimes and still be a acceptable mother. And I, I really, I love that you, you make space for that truth, truth stuff. Multiple truths of self within, within this collection. And that how it allows for women, specifically queer women, neurodivergent women who live with psychosis, other mental illnesses, to be all of these things at once and move beyond this binary, which I find just terribly suffocating. I agree.
- [29:53]
Margot Lapierre
And if I could add one thing to that, and you know how meanings can change even after publication. Like now being postpartum, having my 6 month old daughter and really feeling like wow, this feels like a dangerous text for me because if ever anyone wanted to take my daughter from me or say that I, you know, was not a good mother and I love being a mother. This has been such an amazing experience where this book could potentially, there are people who would use it against me. As, you know, all of history, people have been using mental illness against parents and people in general to take things away from them. And I do think that the more examples that we have and the more power that maybe we can take back and just say no, look, I can be both. I can be an amazing mom and a loving mom, and I can also be someone who's had this history.
- [30:56]
Holly Gattery
I agree. I, I once wrote an article for CBC about living with OCD and being a mother and made a mistake of reading the comment section and people just tore me apart and said I should have my kids taken away from me. So I, it really, I have to admit, it scared me into not writing about something that I may have otherwise written about. And not because I don't think it's important and I don't think there wouldn't be people who would understand, but because I don't think I could, I don't think that I could navigate to people who don't. But maybe that will change. I don't know. Maybe I will write about it some someday, especially as my kids get older and I don't have to worry, like, they can speak for themselves. Like, you know, she may be a little bit strange, but she, she loves us.
- [31:45]
Margot Lapierre
She may be a little bit out.
- [31:47]
Holly Gattery
There, but she's a good mom.
- [31:49]
Margot Lapierre
Yeah, you're an amazing mom. You're just such an incredible mother.
- [31:53]
Holly Gattery
Yeah. Well, I, I did a, for our listeners, I did a post recently on Instagram and one of my other mom friends just said, how have my kids not kicked me out of the house very lovingly.
- [32:06]
Margot Lapierre
But I was like, yeah, living with.
- [32:07]
Holly Gattery
Me is a lot, but that's okay. But no, that's why I love this collection so much, is that I think it's. I, I, I understand what you're saying, and I have felt exactly what you're saying. And I also think it's so important to push against that. And I agree that the more of us who push back, the more normal it will be, because the only thing dangerous to our children is our continued silence and burying these things. And you're. This book is just beautiful. I, I, Whenever I think of your writing, especially this book, I just think of this vibrant, rich bouquet of flowers. But there's Also like a darkness around them and it's. That's just the visual I get. And there's like a, that, that kind of earthy smell around them too. It's not a fake smell. It's. It's not an artificial flower smell. It's just this wonderful smell, like after the rain or something.
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Margot Lapierre
Earthiness. Yeah, there is some. There is definitely. There's some fluids and substances in this book. I'm like, maybe it's the vomit smell.
- [33:06]
Holly Gattery
Maybe. I mean, I'm familiar with that smell. Spent a lot of my life. So this is actually what, my second last question for you. And it's not a question I ask often, but I'm very interested in this. And I'm a little bit disappointed in myself too for asking about it because I feel like I should be above it. But I have to know about the COVID because I absolutely love this cover. Where did it come from? And there's the grapefruit, which is something that is in the book too.
- [33:33]
Margot Lapierre
Okay. This I got so lucky with. I found this artist, this wonderful artist, Nithya Swaminathan. She lives in Germany. She does these incredible still lives. She's so prolific. And it was actually through this site, artfinder.com and once I found her work, I was like looking specifically for grapefruit because I knew that she did all these different fruits. And I got in touch with her and I said, if I buy the oil painting, could I also buy the rights and I'd love to put this on a book. And she was really enthusiastic about it and so was my publisher. And so I got to pick my own cover, which doesn't always happen. And I just, I love how well it, it matches the book inside and it's something kind of different. And I really do love. And I love this about your covers too, Holly. Like, I love a good painterly cover.
- [34:30]
Holly Gattery
Well, I did the same thing. I found somebody who did a cover that I felt like I recognized it from. I don't know, a dream. My past, my childhood. I don't know, there was something about the style. And then I reached out and I bought the painting. So I did exactly this. Artists have to support other artists when we can, as we can. So I was more than shout out to Katie Powell in. In the U.S. she, she did my coverage. They're playful and nostalgic.
- [34:55]
Margot Lapierre
Is that for widow fantasies or for the unraveling of. Ooh.
- [34:58]
Holly Gattery
She did both.
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- [35:00]
Holly Gattery
Okay.
- [35:00]
Margot Lapierre
So you've got a relationship now. This is how it's done, folks. This is how it's done.
- [35:04]
Holly Gattery
This is how it started. And she's illustrating my kids book, which is coming out with Gornac auditions, same as Margot's publisher next year. So I mean, it's. Yeah, it's. Once you find something you love, I mean, I tend to find things I love and then kind of shake them. I don't let go, so I can't help it. I love her work. So. Yeah, your cover does it so beautifully. Matches. And there's the jar in it, which is this kind of like deep, dreamy blue color. Like I can't even describe. I've never seen a blue like this. I'm sure an artist would be like, holly, this is the kind of blue it is. But I've never seen a blue like it. But again, it's. It feels so perfectly aligned with the content of the book that I had to mention the COVID because I don't feel like everyone gets that lucky with covers all of the time.
- [35:46]
Margot Lapierre
It's true. But Grinnica editions, and this is. If you, if you get a small press publisher and a really good one, and you know, some of them, you have more agency than others. I felt like I had a lot of agency with this in my last book, which was also with Granica. My last book was my painting on the COVID And that was a huge painting, like the size of a big carpet. But I also picked, and this is just sort of like, I don't think I've ever told anyone publicly this before, but I also picked the color of my spine. So I have this great yellow spine and yellow. I actually have like a poem that I took out of the book. I have always hated yellow. Like in always been my least favorite color. But the more I say I hate yellow, the more I like it for some reason, I don't know why, but in publishing school, we learned in the graphic design course for making book covers that people buy more yellow spined books than any other color spine. So I was like, I need to have that yellow spine. This is a poetry book. It needs every bit of help it can get. So we went with the yellow spine.
- [36:49]
Holly Gattery
Oh, I love that. Yellow is actually buttercup. Yellow specifically is my favorite color. And my daughter was doing a deep dive into what your favorite color says about you. And apparently yellow is the color of creativity and insanity. And she was like, mom, it checks. And I was like, think. I think what? I'm all for yellow. I mean, it's hard for me to say I have favorite colors. So many colors are just so beautiful. But I I do love a buttercup yellow, that's for sure. And you're, you're. The COVID is gorgeous and everyone, the book is gorgeous. So my final question for you is about what are you working on now? Now I hope I know this answer, but I also know that writers often work on multiple things at once. So I might not know.
- [37:29]
Margot Lapierre
I think you do know. But I am, I am technically, I'm working on two things at once still. So I have a novel that I'm working on which is also a novel about madness and about suicidality, but it's also about love and community and it centers on three people. And the book of short stories is. Each short story is titled with an article of clothing. And so the idea, the project I'm calling its working title is Lost Socks. And the novel is Lucid Mechanics. The Lost Socks idea is that each story is an article of clothing, kind of like a capsule wardrobe for short fiction. And each one is based on an item, an item of clothing that I've owned. So those are the two things and I am having. It's tough to find time to work on them with a six month old and editing full time freelance editing. But it is important to me and I have a lot of late nights.
- [38:34]
Holly Gattery
Yeah, I know about those. Actually, I don't. If I'm staying up late at night, I'm reading. I cannot, my brain does not function. If I'm up late, I'm reading. I've had a night. I know our listeners don't need to know this, but it is going somewhere of like four nights in a row of staying up to almost 4am reading. It's. I blame, I blame Canadian writers who keep writing these amazing books. They're keeping me up. My. I, I know I said that was going to be my last question, but when you're talking, I was actually, I have a question and I, I think like I have a very loosely formed opinion of my own, but it's only something that's occurred to me relatively recently. And that is. Okay, you're a multi genre writer. Why do you think it is that poets are more likely to dabble in other forms than let's say novelists are like. You don't hear about many novelists, not that there aren't any, but people who consider themselves quote unquote, novelists don't usually be like, hey, I'm going to try writing poetry. Where I find that poets are far more likely to try everything else.
- [39:31]
Margot Lapierre
I wonder if it, if it's that we're playing with forms and new forms constantly. Like, we write a poem and we can experiment with a new form the next day. And when you're working long form with a novel, if you do that, it can be hard to move forward with the project. And maybe that's it. We have, you know, brevity is a very, very important, I would say, sought after and valuable quality for so many things. And one of those is writing and learning to work with brevity as poets do. Maybe we just have more surface area.
- [40:14]
Holly Gattery
Yeah, I like that answer. And it, it aligns with the feeling, though not the articulated thought of my answer, because I hadn't bothered to try to even articulate an answer for.
- [40:25]
Margot Lapierre
It was perfectly articulated. It was perfect.
- [40:28]
Holly Gattery
Yeah, I just, I just, I feel, I just, I. I think I've. Poets no matter what. To me, every poet I've ever met has been unfailingly playful. And not that novelists can't be playful, but there, there is something about the playfulness of poets that I feel like is tapped into the other side of the mountain where we all originate from, that's tied in there very closely. And I think it's, I don't know, just. It's something that I, I know it's a lot of poets, but, you know, here's to all the novelists that may be listening. Write a poem. See what you can do. Pick up Margo's poetry collection as inspiration. It's like I said, I picked this up, I read it, and I immediately wanted to write after every single poem. Like, I want to do that. I want to do that. It was like a kid, you know, take a toy to school day and the kid wants the other kid's toy. That's how I felt after. So everyone pick up a jar by Margot lapierre. It's published by Grenica Editions and available wherever book books are bought or borrowed. I hope you feel as alive and electric after reading it as I do. Margo, thank you so much for joining me today on mbn.
- [41:34]
Margot Lapierre
Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.
- [41:48]
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