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Hello everyone and welcome to nbn. I'm your host, Holly Gattery and I am really excited to be joined today by the wonderful Patrick Grace, who is no Lie, one of my favorite poets in the world. He wrote the fantastic debut collection Deviant which traces a trajectory of queer self discovery from childhood to adulthood, examining love, fear, grief and the violence that men are capable of in intimate same sex relationships. Patrick is an author and teacher who divides his time between Vancouver and Victoria, bc. His poems have been published widely in Canadian literary magazines including ARC Poetry Magazine, Best Canadian Poetry, Columbia Event, the Ex Puritan, the Fiddlehead, the Malahat Review, Prairie Fire and more. His work has been a finalist for literary contests with CB2 and Prism International and in 2020, his poem A Violence won the Malhot Review's Open Season Award for Poetry. He has published two chapbooks, A Blurred Wind Swirls Back for your and Dastardly, both which explore aspects of love, fear and trauma that represent a personal queer identity. Deviant, as mentioned, is his first full length poetry collection and he continues to explore these themes. Welcome to the show, Patrick.
B
Hi Holly. Thanks so much for having me. And thanks for that nice introduction.
A
Yeah, thank you. It's, it's. It's a. It's a treat to talk to you. I. I read this book a while ago. I know I interviewed you on another show a while ago. And then it took me a while to, you know, work through some. Some of my backlog. But I immediately, when I started working through my backlog of guests and books, I was like, I have to talk to Patrick. Because just before we hit record, I was saying how much I recommend your book to people. It is probably one of the top five recommended books across genre that I. I recommend to everybody. And there's a lot of reasons for this, but one of them for me is because your work has. Has legs. And what I mean by that is, stylistically, you go from what I would call very. When I say accessible, I just mean, you know, anyone can read it. Anyone can understand what's going on. And accessible, which, you know, means it's easy to read, but not stylistically simple, necessarily, just, you know, right into your brain. And then you have poems that I would also say, like, Full Blown, which is one of my favorite poems of yours, which I would say is like a. A gorgeous abstract painting. And. And it's a completely different style. And you move back and forth between these styles really seamlessly. And I'm going to ask you about that in a second. But I do want to begin with my standard first question on the show, which is, where did this collection come from?
B
So evening was kind of a number of years of work of some of my earlier things that I'd written that have been published in Canadian literary magazine, some of which you mentioned, the Malahat Review, Prairie Fire. But I. I really wanted to showcase kind of a trajectory of sort of childhood budding, sort of realizing who I was, adolescent experiences. And then a large part of near the End is about a specific relationship that I was in with somebody who unfortunately engaged in a lot of gaslighting, a lot of psychological abuse. And I think for me, I. I was trying to think of how could I put together a collection that shows a lot of fear. I think for me, fear is a really interesting emotion that people don't want to talk about because it's uncomfortable and they don't know how to talk about it. But I. I like fear. I like reading scary things. I like writing about uncomfortable things. So there's. There's a lot of fear in this book all the way through, from the early pages of, you know, childhood crushes that terrified me because I didn't understand to teenage and early 20s experiences, kind of realizing who I was, that you can't change those things. And Then to the very end, where with my ex partner, things just got really dangerous and scary. And I think I just wanted to showcase what men could really be like, because men can be scary, men can be dangerous, men can be deceptive. And unfortunately, I. I've kind of seen the darker side of what men can be. And I was, in writing this book, I was trying to find collections that really showcase this. And it was, it was hard. It's hard to find this, at least in Canadian literature, where the very queer experiences of. Of relationships that are, you know, that have violence, gaslighting, the things that I wanted to write about, I wasn't seeing that in Canadian literature. So then that's where this book came about. And it's funny because the title deviant, it actually doesn't appear anywhere in this collection. It's not a title of poems. This word doesn't show up anywhere in the book. And I just thought that that was such a good way to encapsulate it. Deviant being, you know, in an older term, deviant as in queer behavior back in the 70s and 80s, but deviant also as in deviating from the norm of what is society's expecting of behavior. And so for me, this deviant word is. It's partly me and my, you know, queer experiences, but it's also my ex partner in the way that he deviated from what would be societally acceptable of his behavior.
A
I would really love to take a few steps back and pick up on what you were saying about fear, because I find that really interesting. I was talking with another author recently, Bruce Hunter. He's a disabled author, and he said that one thing about being disabled is that you really have to conquer your fear because the world's a scary place for a lot of people, but especially when you have disability. And he said that he thinks so. Fear is the greatest disability that everybody has and it stops us from doing so much. And what I found really interesting about your collection is that it's not that it's fearless. It's not fear like fearless at all that, you know, you get told, oh, it's a fearless collection. It's a fearless novel. It's not fearless. There's fear everywhere in here. But you write it anyways. You talk about it anyways. You sit in the dark spaces under the porch at home. You, you just, you're just there. And you, you deal with the poems. Not you specifically, but the poems just deal with it. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about writing poetry that is intentionally Meant to sit in fear and even make. Make readers uncomfortable. And me, I. I really love being uncomfortable, which sounds so strange, but it's because I read too enter new spaces and to learn new things. So being made uncomfortable by a poem, while something can make me scared, I also realize that I'm safe. So it's a safe way for me to, you know, micro dose fear or uncomfortable emotions because I don't have to live in that space necessarily. But I was wondering about the process of writing that for you, writing these poems that are asking people and asking yourself to be deeply uncomfortable.
B
Sometimes I think the fear comes from childhood. There's a lot of things in childhood that scared me. Sort of knowing that I was gay growing up and really trying to push it down because, you know, back in the 90s, it was just something that was not talked about. There weren't a lot of resources. You know, anything that I saw in the media was usually, you know, gay people were the butt of jokes and, you know, comedies or things like that. I just, I wasn't seeing me really anywhere. This was kind of before the days of the Internet, if people can imagine that growing up without the Internet. And we lived in East Vancouver in this really big scary house, we tended to watch a lot of scary things on tv. Are you afraid of the dark? Goosebumps. Scary movies. So there was sort of this inherent fear growing up of my surroundings and who I was. But also I kind of gravitated toward it because I liked reading, you know, the Alvin Schwartz's scary stories to tell in the dark. I like watching Goosebumps and, you know, reading scary things. So it was this fear. But it also was something that I excited me in a way. But writing about it and like you said, sort of, you know, sitting in the dark under a quiet light, I. I didn't want this book to be triumphant. I didn't want it to be. Here's this fear that I've. I've conquered and I've. I've overcome it because I didn't overcome it. And I think sometimes there's this expectation in books to, you know, here's the problem and then there's a solution. But there. There wasn't a solution to this book. I mean, even some of these poems, it talks about the fear of, you know, what if one day my ex comes back? What if he's still plotting something? You know, he was a very jealous man, a very, you know, vindictive man. And I didn't want there to be. I didn't want there to be sort of a happy, conquering ending. But it's funny because when I first put the book together, the publishers, they. They did say. They say your book ends on too heavy a note. And they said you've got to kind of bring it up out of the muck somehow. So the fifth section is sort of a return to childhood and a little bit of hope. And I guess, you know, the book's been out a year and a half now. I can safely say that I didn't necessarily want it to end like that. I wanted it to end in this dark, scary fear. And maybe that's just the publishing side of things, that they want you to have some kind of a light or hope at the end. But I kind of wanted the book to stay in this dark, scary place. But I'm not to say that I don't like how it ends. The last three or four poems I'd written fairly recently before the book came out, the one you mentioned, full blown, I mean, it was shortlisted for a pretty prestigious award with the Malahat Review. And it's one of my favorites too, that I've written. So I think it was nice to go back into childhood at the end of the collection. But writing about Fear, yeah, I think it's something that comes naturally to me and it's something that I really try hard to find when I'm reading, but there's not a lot of. There's not a lot of scary things out there to read.
A
Yeah, I know. I grew up reading a lot of like R.L. stein and Christopher Pike. Do you know them?
B
Oh, yeah. Fear, Fear. Fear Street, I think.
A
Yeah. Yeah, that was. I mean, I don't read that kind of stuff anymore. My. My children want me to watch. I think it's a movie called the Black Phone with them. And like my kids have watched it and I have teenagers, but I also have like a 7 and 11 year old. They're like, mom, you'll be fine. I'm like, I don't. Mr. Boogity scares me. Like. Like that movie on the. Like that scares me. I think, I think, like, I think I'm just a little bit too frazzled. Like, I'm a little bit too raw right now to do that kind of thing. And one of the things as we're sitting here and we're talking about, you know, your book being so dark. I also want to say to listeners, though that it's. It's what the themes it's dealing with are dark. And there are definitely dark images in the book. But the color that runs throughout the book, and I underlined it in so many places or variations of this color, is yellow. Yellows everywhere. So I would love. Maybe it's something that you're like, what are you talking about? But I promise there is so much yellow or slash gold or that. That hue in this. In your. In this book, in this collection. And I was wondering if you could talk about yellow.
B
And I. I mean, I'm glad you picked up on that. I did that on purpose. I love gold. There's something magical about gold. The color gold, the object. Gold I love. And gold is mentioned in pop songs. Hard gold. Yeah. There's a number of poems in here that bring that out, and I. I think maybe that's the. The light in the darkness. Not to be super, totally cliche, but maybe that's a little bit of it. I don't know. There's just something magical about gold. I. I think even in newer stuff that I'm writing, I'm still kind of putting that out there. Gold and silver. There's something that I like about those two. I don't really know. I don't know if there's a why to it. I think I just. I think it just fits with the way that I write and that I. There's always this sort of light or something's glowing. I think as a kid, I was always really fascinated by things glowing in the dark. Bright lights in the dark, that contrast. But, yeah, into the find, they're gonna find gold. And fire, too. Fire. Little bits of fire throughout.
A
Yeah. I remember what it reminded me of is, like, swimming under a dock, like a dark dock when I was a kid, and. But there was lights through the slats or the spaces between the boards, and so underwater there'd be this, like, dark water, but then gold, dark water and then gold. And that's. That's what I felt like. Like I was submerged in darkness. But there is these, like, piercing, piercing, just like, slats of gold everywhere, too. And it was, you know, that's. That's the vibe I got, and I loved it. So. Just one of the other reasons. And, you know, you don't know why it's there. I mean. Yeah, you do. You said why it's there? I mean, we don't need some, you know, deeply metaphysical answer for this. It's there because it's a great color, and it symbolizes so many amazing things, and it's a powerful color, too. And just a personal note, it's also my favorite color, and I said that to someone recently, how I love yellow, and especially like a nice buttercup yellow. But somebody said to me, that makes sense that yellow's the color of creativity and insanity. So it makes sense that it's my favorite color. And I was like, I'm just going to take all of that as a compliment. Take it all on board. Yes, yes, to both of them. Creativity and insanity. I'll take them both. My next question for you is about what I was talking about at the beginning, which is how your poems have legs. So again, they can be very, you know, just the ways that a lot of people would think of contemporary, not contemporary poet, but maybe, maybe the poets we were reading, you know, at least I'm 44. When I was in high school, you know, just. We have everything left aligned and it's a little bit a more standard fit. So there's, you know, some poems that are kind like that, but then you have poems that completely detonate that and do just playful, wonderful cartwheels across the page. And, you know, it feels like in some poems you are taking out every single bit of unnecessary language until it is just distilled down to essence. And it is. It's such a really remarkable collection to read because I. You actually don't know. Know what you're going to get next. Every poem is a total surprise. And I do mean this as the best kind of compliment. You read a lot of poetry too. You know how it is when you can. You get a vibe for a poem. You're like, oh, it's going to be a new poem, but it's going to kind of have this vibe or this feel or the style to it with you. I had no idea. And I love that. And I was wondering if you could talk about having that kind of stylistic agility in your writing.
B
I think with this collection, I wanted to. As it progressed, you can kind of see that it's. I like to use the word disintegrating. I mean, the poems start to disintegrate about halfway through. And it's sort of the disintegration of this relationship and just sort of the expectations that I had. And I thought, well, how can I put that into my writing? How can I disintegrate the poems and pull back on traditional punctuation and line lengths and stanzas? Because a lot of the earlier poems, they're, you know, they're pretty neat. They might be quatrains or tercets or, you know, two line stanzas with very neat finishing. I. I think I wanted to start with Very neat finishing lines. But, you know, if you're, you know, if you're looking for clues, some of them are breaking off that tradition pretty early. I mean, there's one of my favorites called Water Gun, which has these em dashes at the end, which is kind of calling Emily Dickinson. And then as we get into the fourth section, it just starts falling apart. And I think that's when, you know, with my relationship with my ex partner, things were falling apart and I wanted to subvert a lot of the expectation. So when you're getting to the end, you're getting words, you know, with unconventional spacing, which was not something that I, you know, that was not a way that I used to write when I was younger, starting to write poetry. But it was fun. It was fun to experiment and be experimental with the poetry. It's fun when you have a very traditional cut and dry line by line poem and to just completely break it up. Can you throw spaces in there? Can you put a bunch of slashes in between where you would normally break the line? It's fun to experiment. And I, I put these poems in here purposely to, to experiment with the reader and kind of turn everything on its head as it went along to the end.
A
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A
I enjoyed them and I always say for me the earmark of an exceptional book of poems is one that makes me immediately want to write poetry, which is what your book is like, oh, my God, I want to play too. Like, move over, let me into the sandbox. Like that kind of really giddy excitement. And despite, you know, the very, you know, salient and dark themes in this book, I don't want to really harp on about the darkness because it's absolutely there, but it's not to me, if somebody said, you know, what do you think about this book? Like, what is. Like, how does this book make you feel? I'd say joyous. And it's because I love the poem so much. So I don't want readers to be like, oh, the world's depressing. I don't want to pick up this book. It'll make you happy for other reasons. And, you know, if nothing else, you'll end up understanding maybe something of the world that you didn't understand before. So right now I'd love to ask you to read from your collection.
B
I am going to read from Full Blown, which is one that you mentioned earlier. And I love this poem. Do I get to have a poem that I love that I've written? Full Blown was published in the Malahat Review about two years ago when it was shortlisted for the Far Horizons Awards. It's kind of a continuation from a couple of the other poems. Some of these poems are loosely linked, but this one, if you're. If you're kind of following through the collection and you can kind of see some of the same language used. So here's Full Blown Blonde when Cicero Mimic I hear you. Air throws its dusk and I color sepia along the unlit road Barefoot raised field cult scamble geese V and echo far from the rec room Shavu My insides chime their separate lakes Full blown ache in summer the girl on TV cries to the girl on TV My brother blows up pixelated cities on tv I'm not on tv. I'm not. But I want to tumble the golden droke sky over million scythes I'm not a girl but I want to Full blown the boy in red shorts opens a window a space in my chest Is this what they call out of body Falling inward and splitting my own rope? Tomorrow's fear is tomorrow's face of my body My body thistles in my devil in red shorts and climbing black walnut trunk without words blonde1 susurrus mimic I hear you drumming down balloon and blow away Boy above, boy below boy above boy below boy above boy below, boy above it's impossible not to cross hot tar and think this is heaven, all this burning.
A
I remember reading that poem was the first time I, first of all, ever heard the word shavu in my life. It's like, what is this exceptionally fun word? And I, of course, had to go look it up, but it was. It was. It's a great word. I've never had the opportunity to use it, but maybe I have to work harder. And my insides chime their separate legs like every. There's so many just golden lines in that poem. Thank you so much for sharing it. Can I entice you to read another one?
B
I will. And that. That shavu word, I can kind of credit Carla Funk, who's a poet from Victoria. I took a couple classes with her at the University of Victoria years ago, and that was one of her. That was one of her greatest suggestions, I think, to me was to just find really random words, unconventional words, uncommon words, and see how can you use them in poetry. And I think it's one of the things that stuck with me the most. And I still do it. I kind of go to, you know, Merriam Webster or someone like that's word of the day, unconventional words of the day. And sometimes they just stick. And I can make a poem out of it.
A
Absolutely. Shabu is a great word. I can remember the first time I heard the word intumescent. I was like, what is that about? Right? Like, it even sounds like what it is, you know? So, yeah, I think that's a great reminder for me to embrace more playful language and find more uncommon language. But maybe for some of our listeners who write poetry too. Okay, Patrick, I'm going to be quiet now and let you read your next poem.
B
So this next one is called someday you will ache, which there's a story behind that. Someday you will ache is a line from Courtney Love song. She was in the band hole. For any listeners who might remember 90s rock music hole. Courtney Love was married to Kurt Cobain. And someday you will ache was a line from the song Doll Parts. And that was. Actually, I wanted that to be the title of this collection, but a lot of the initial readers from the university press said, don't pick this title. It's too heavy handed. It's too dramatic. It's too sort of fall on the floor gasping. But I. I love it. I love the drama behind it. But they also said if this has anything to do with the music industry, that it's too. There's too much of a risk if, you know, I mean, I think it would be kind of funny if Courtney Love came after me because of this. But anyway, this is Sunday. You will ache. Not every driver wanted me dead that summer. Broken yellow lights. I played chicken on the highway. And little by little, the stars sped up. The men slowed down. I spread eagled over the asphalt. It was the warmest hug I'd ever felt. It takes 19 minutes to swap out a tire, even less to ask forgiveness. You can't tackle me if I'm already down. Curb stomping creates the finest dance moves. Thunder spread its roots beneath my ear. The water lowered a tunnel within me. That day I was capable of many things. Seeing my breath in summer flying even, or giving credence to a fresh roadkill. The speed in which it left us. Every second a new wheel of opportunity presented itself. The curb reassured me things were looking up. Can I read one more?
A
Yes, please. Thank you.
B
I'm going to kind of go back to some of the earlier ones. I'm going to read one about my childhood. And this is a story that I love to tell that I was told many times by my mom and my sister of something that I don't remember doing. There were these little figurine toys that my mother used to collect. And there was a big hole in our porch, big old broken down house in Vancouver. And there's a hole near the end of the porch that apparently I used to throw these toys down and she lost them all. And I don't remember doing that. But I was told that story so many times growing up that it, the memory kind of sort of formed itself in my mind. And so this is a kind of a poem toward that of how does memory work? Are we, you know, if we've been told something so many times, does it happen because we remember it that way? Did it actually happen? Or do these memories just form themselves because somebody told us it happened? Which interestingly enough, could be another form of gaslighting, much like the later collection with my ex partner. So this is a cone of light on my bare stomach. I disappeared. Old toys down crumbling holes in the porch. The kids next door soared on a new swing set. Clink, clink over the fence, hidden in rhododendrons, birds chattering, mom asleep again somewhere. My sister ran barefoot along the burning sidewalk. Gate open, they all swung to the clink, clink of the chain links. I wasn't allowed over nothing new. Breaking heads off trolls with bejeweled bellies and disappearing them down the hole. After the last beheading, I stretched myself on the sidewalk and burned ants with my magnifying glass. I was still learning about convex lenses in school. A cone of light entered my palm. Nothing. A screen door banged and the mother screamed for her children, calling them back or calling them away. It might have been lunchtime. The sun was high, our mom asleep somewhere, traffic and chittering and grass upon grass upon grass.
A
Your poem had me thinking that this, this piece was such a perfect piece. That leads wonderfully into my next question about cruelty. You know, burning ants, which is something so many children too. Burning ants with a magnifying glass. And how examining cruelty is a reoccurring theme in your book. And I'm not going to say examining, I don't mean we're going into some deep theatrical examination of it. I just mean even maybe just acknowledging cruelty. And some might be an even better way to think of it. And how, as I said in the beginning, that this book examines how there's a systemic dismissal of same sex partner violence. And when I was reading about this before our interview, I came across an interview with an activist, a queer activist, talking about how part of the reason is that even queer people don't want to come forward about it because they're already seen as. I'm paraphrasing here, but like deviant enough and not wanting to bring on more criticism of the community. So while it's not talked about within the community, and then when it is, it's not. And when it's brought forward to authorities, it's often not dealt with seriously. It's not taken seriously. People aren't taken seriously. And I was wondering if you could talk about. I mean, because poems are not necessarily autobiographical things. There's the poem, there's the speaker of a poem, and then there's the poet. And these are not necessarily the same entities ever. But, you know, you've mentioned that a lot of this was at least rooted in things that actually happened to you. So writing about cruelty, to me at least, can be very difficult to do without it seeming affected or dramatic. And your poems are neither. So I was wondering if you could talk about writing cruelty.
B
So that's interesting about the ants. I hadn't thought about that, but there was a cruelty in that. And there is, yeah, there's a fair amount of cruelty in here, but I mean, some of it's almost in a gleeful way, interestingly enough. Like it's. There's kind of a gleefulness in how some of these things that I experienced were done, whether it be, you know, encounters with men that I'd met along the way or some of the childhood things. You know, there's some bullying in these. There's some, you know, childhood chasing. The very first poem, why not? It starts off with two boys throwing a baseball, and one of them just gets really angry and just sort of, you know, wails it back at the other kid's face because he thinks that's what he's meant to do. So right from the start, there's this almost gleeful anger that propels it all forward. And I think with near the end of the poem, if we're talking about the, you know, the systemic dismissal of violence and any kind of violence, whether it be psychological or emotional, I mean, it. It doesn't have to be purely physical. And I think that was. That was really what it came down to. It was. It was stalking. It was done, a lot of it through social media and, you know, text messages. Like it was. It was the correct term. And there's a poem in here about it called soft stalking. Because it's. There's that, you know, there was no physical chasing or coming after me where I lived. It was all done through the Internet, which is virtual. And so it almost seems like it's not. It's not as bad, but in a psychological way, I mean, you. You know, you can't look at your phone when it rings every time, wondering what is going on. Unknown numbers, block numbers, unknown messages, unknown friend requests. Like, it got so out of hand for the months after we broke up, but it just. It really does something to your head. I mean, so many of us, our phones are a huge part of our lives, and there's a trust with that, too. There's. You're. You're trusting what's coming through your phone, that it's safe and it's people that you know and it's opportunities. But when your phone almost turns against you every time it rings or pings, it's. There's that fear again. There's that fear coming through. So I think when it came to getting, you know, authorities involved, there was really nothing that they could do about it because it's just out in the ether somewhere, floating around in the Internet. And there was nothing to prove prove. There was really no hard evidence to bring anywhere.
A
My final question for you, Patrick, is if you would share with us about what you're working on now.
B
I've been writing a lot about my childhood, as you mentioned at the start, is going to come back to this, and I've been putting that in a lot of Bios that I've been writing because as I mentioned at the start, a, you know, big creepy house in East Van that we grew up in. And I, I love writing about this house. I dream a lot about this house often as does my sister. We often have pretty similar shared dreams, which I, I don't, you know, I can't see it as a coincidence at all. My mother passed away about a year and a half ago from a long illness with a lung disease from smoking. And that has really severely impacted me and my poetry. It's a lot of what I'm writing about because I'm, I think, naturally regressing back to childhood after you lose a parent. So I might not necessarily be writing about her illness right now. I think that's, that's going to come later. But I'm writing about the weird and strange things that I remember from our house. It was a three story house, we never locked the doors. There was a break in that happened when everyone was asleep and nobody knew that it had happened until a couple days later we noticed things were missing. So there's that. A large part of what I'm writing right now is about this break in and kind of imagining how it happened and who did it. It's nice to go back to childhood. It's nice to write about these things. It's nice to remember things that I have forgotten. And I'm really excited for readers to hopefully read these things someday. I've just found out I've got a couple poems coming out in Pinhole Poetry, which is a Canadian online magazine, coming out in January. A lot of the work I'm sending out now, it's all brand new. After my mom died, I took about six months off of work because I knew I'd need that time. And I just wrote. I wrote so much last year and hopefully a lot of that will turn out to be my next collection.
A
Well, I look forward to reading it. Patrick, as I said, I adore your work. Maybe you've hit on something I adore. So much about it is that I am endlessly fascinated with childhood too. And it was think Adele Wiseman who said that the best artists, or maybe she just said artists. Maybe I'm just adding the best. Because if I say that, it flatters both you and I. But have artists, let's say the best artists retain something in themselves. Of every age they've been through, of every person they ever were at every age and stage. I'm paraphrasing again and I never feel like I'm removed from who I was as a child ever and I really felt that in your work and I think I love the poems about your house. That house just feels like it's in my brain and I don't think it's the house is definitely in the book but it's not like it takes up a ton of space in the book. But it was definitely memorable. So I look forward to reading more about this house and following along as you publish the individual poems. I love Pinhole poetry so shout out to Pinhole and anyone can follow Pinhole online. And Patrick, thank you again for joining me today. Everyone you can get Patrick's book Deviant which was published by the University of Alberta Press wherever books are bought or borrowed. Patrick, I hope to have you back to talk to me again soon.
B
Thanks so much Holly and thanks to everyone for listening. Please pick up a copy of Deviant today if you haven't already.
A
Sa.
Date: October 15, 2025
Host: Holly Gattery
Guest: Patrick Grace, Poet and Author of Deviant
Episode Focus: An in-depth conversation with Patrick Grace about his debut full-length poetry collection, Deviant, exploring queer self-discovery, fear, intimacy, violence, and the complexities of style and memory.
This episode delves into Patrick Grace’s Deviant, a poetry collection charting a raw, intimate journey through queer self-discovery from childhood to adulthood. The conversation addresses themes of fear, the interplay of light and darkness, violence in intimate relationships—particularly within queer contexts—and the unique, stylistic breadth of Grace’s poetry. Holly Gattery and Grace discuss the book’s origins, formal experimentation, and specific poems, with readings and thoughtful reflection on writing from trauma, the challenge of cruelty, and the importance of representation.
(04:34–07:56)
“Fear is a really interesting emotion that people don’t want to talk about because it’s uncomfortable… I like fear. I like reading scary things. I like writing about uncomfortable things.” — Patrick Grace (06:02)
(07:56–13:16)
“I didn’t want this book to be triumphant…there wasn’t a solution… Maybe that’s just the publishing side—that they want you to have some kind of light or hope at the end.” — Patrick Grace (11:11)
(13:16–15:39)
“I think maybe that's the light in the darkness—not to be super, totally cliché, but maybe that's a little bit of it... I was always fascinated by things glowing in the dark, bright lights in the dark—that contrast.” — Patrick Grace (14:38)
(15:39–20:16)
“Can you throw spaces in there? Can you put a bunch of slashes in between where you would normally break the line? It's fun to experiment. And I put these poems in here purposely to experiment with the reader and kind of turn everything on its head as it went along to the end.” — Patrick Grace (19:23)
(22:46–30:26)
"My insides chime their separate lakes / Full blown ache in summer..." — Patrick Grace, reading from "Full Blown" (23:37)
"Not every driver wanted me dead that summer. Broken yellow lights. I played chicken on the highway. And little by little, the stars sped up. The men slowed down..." (27:04)
"Old toys down crumbling holes in the porch. The kids next door soared on a new swing set..." (28:20)
(30:26–35:14)
"It was stalking. It was done, a lot of it, through social media and...text messages. There was no physical chasing...But in a psychological way...your phone almost turns against you every time it rings..." — Patrick Grace (33:38)
(35:21–37:33)
“A large part of what I'm writing right now is about this break-in and kind of imagining how it happened and who did it. It's nice to go back to childhood. It's nice to write about these things.” — Patrick Grace (36:27)
“I like reading scary things. I like writing about uncomfortable things.”
(Patrick Grace, 06:02)
“I didn’t want this book to be triumphant… there wasn’t a solution… Maybe that’s just the publishing side—that they want you to have some kind of light or hope at the end.”
(Patrick Grace, 11:11)
“There's always this sort of light or something's glowing… I think as a kid, I was always really fascinated by things glowing in the dark, bright lights in the dark, that contrast.”
(Patrick Grace, 14:38)
“You actually don't know what you're going to get next. Every poem is a total surprise. And I do mean this as the best kind of compliment.”
(Holly Gattery, 17:28)
“Can you throw spaces in there? Can you put a bunch of slashes in between where you would normally break the line? It's fun to experiment.”
(Patrick Grace, 19:23)
| Segment | Timestamp | |---------|------------------| | Introduction & Author Bio | 01:35–03:03 | | Origins & Themes | 04:34–07:56 | | On Fear & Process | 07:56–13:16 | | Imagery: Yellow/Gold | 13:16–15:39 | | Style Discussion | 15:39–20:16 | | “Full Blown” Poem Reading | 22:46–24:43 | | Use of Uncommon Words | 25:12–25:56 | | “someday you will ache” Poem | 26:19–28:12 | | “A cone of light...” Poem | 28:13–30:26 | | Cruelty & Systemic Dismissal | 30:26–35:14 | | Current/Future Work | 35:21–37:33 |
This episode offers a moving, vivid exploration of Deviant and the personal, cultural, and literary territory it spans. Listeners will come away with a greater understanding of what it means to write from, and about, fear and cruelty—especially in marginalized contexts—while finding hope, surprise, and creative spark in the darkness.
Pick up a copy of Patrick Grace's Deviant (U Alberta Press, 2024) at your preferred bookseller or library.