Planet Earth Poetry’s Interviews shine the spotlight on our featured poets and their new collections. This new initiative aims to pair interviewers with poets wherever possible.
Estlin McPhee
Estlin McPhee is a writer and librarian who lives on the traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. Estlin is the author of the poetry chapbook Shapeshifters (Rahila’s Ghost Press, 2018); for many years, they co-organized the queer reading series REVERB. In Your Nature is Estlin’s debut poetry collection.
Interview: Anna Cavouras
Anna Cavouras: My first impression when I started reading was how will they weave Harry Potter, werewolves, and Jesus into this collection?
Tell us, how did these entities end up side by side? When did you first realize they would share pages together in this collection? (Side note - this ended up intuitively making so much sense once I saw them together!)
Estlin McPhee: At some point while putting together my chapbook Shapeshifters, I realized that werewolves – which have a strong if niche cultural association with transmasculinity – could be a potent motif to tie together the themes I was already exploring. In particular, I wanted to use lycanthropy as a frame to think about transformation, which I was interested in as it related to gender and queerness, but also adolescence, spiritual crisis, magic, death – these big concepts that are all about change. Jesus pops up because I grew up with him the way someone might grow up with a very noisy family ghost; he lived in our house. And unfortunately, Harry Potter seemed inevitable to bring in, considering both that the series was a linchpin for Evangelical moral panic in the early 2000s, which tied queerness and occult practices together in a neat demonic package, and that more recently J.K. Rowling has crowned herself queen of the transphobes. Unusual juxtapositions are a core part of my life so it was organic for me to include those elements in my work. But we all have weird layers of interests and experiences that sometimes seem like oil and water to people outside of ourselves. I hope that readers can find points of emotional connection with the book even if the topics seem, on the surface, to be outside of an area of personal familiarity.
AC: Reading this collection feels like you have offered readers a shift - a shift in how to read myths, religious texts, and stories we’ve been told about ourselves from a thousand sources. This feels like an integral part of your poems.
As poet Raoul Fernandes says, “It does what I want all poetry to do: somehow transport me while leaving me feeling more inside my skin than before.”
EM: I completely agree and it does feel like some of the best magic. Did you know that was what you were creating? Was this your intention for the collection? If not, please share what was!
It’s very kind of you to say to that, thank you. I love the idea that the book functions as its own kind of spell. Magic is at the heart of the project, so it’s fun to think about it being an act of magic in and of itself. There are a lot of characters and cultural references present in my book because I was thinking through what story means as an abstraction – what is a story, what is a self, and how do those two interact? How do the stories told about queer and trans people by other people differ from the stories we tell about ourselves? And how do memory and prophecy, two sides of the same coin, intertwine with story?
AC: I have unfettered queer joy with the collection. Yet, I often wonder about the rawness poets gift readers. Does the intimacy of poetry ever daunt you? If yes, how do you shield yourself off the page?
EM: It’s a strange paradox that poetry can be so intimate and personal but it only truly becomes that way once readers access it, once it becomes public. Before that, whatever’s on the page is just your own and so hasn’t yet moved into the realm of the intimate, which is a co-created experience. My favourite thing about reading poetry is the sense of connection, that someone else has put words to a feeling or experience that is alive for me too, or brings to life something new to me. I love that we can experience this intimacy across time, space, culture, language, and so many of the specifics of our lives. But I try to remember that whatever I get out of someone else’s poetry tells me more about myself than it does about that other person. Poetry is not biography and even biography is not a person. This is maybe a bit old-fashioned but I really do appreciate a distinction being made between the speaker of a poem and the author; I find that distinction facilitates a space where I can maintain some personal privacy and also where I can let the poem become something more interesting than myself.
AC: What’s next for you creatively? Anything from doodles to novels to manifestos count.
EM: I’m not sure yet, to be honest – a lot of my creativity and energy has gone into the logistics required to keep my life afloat with chronic illness. With the extra push of this book coming out, there hasn’t been anything left over for new projects. I’ve had various fiction projects going on the side for many, many years so maybe I’ll turn my attention to one of those once my attention returns to me. In the meantime, I help nurture a small child, an old cat, a variety of plants, and a myriad of other living things, which certainly requires creativity.
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Anna Cavouras’s poetry has been published by the Mississauga Writers Group and The League of Canadian Poets and in various anthologies. She is a former writer-in-residence with Firefly Creative Writing, a founding member of Alt-Minds Literary Magazine, and a graduate of SFU’s The Writer’s Studio. In 2022, Anna was long-listed for the Surrey Muse Awards for creative nonfiction and short-listed with the Federation of BC Writers contest in creative nonfiction. Her non-fiction work has also appeared in social work texts, Studio Magazine of Art and Design, and, Boneyard Soup Horror Magazine. She is currently a book reviewer with the Fat Joy podcast and an editorial assistant with Minerva Rising Press. Anna’s current projects include a collaborative project on civil disobedience in climate change protests and a speculative-fiction novel about revolutionary tattoo artists in the future. Her previous work was as a community organiser in Vancouver’s downtown East Side, advocating for food justice. Anna is Planet Earth Poetry’s current Assistant to the Artistic Director.