An interview with Alex Manley

Alex Manley is a writer living in Montreal/Tiohtià:ke, whose writing has been published by Maisonneuve magazine, Vallum, Carte Blanche, the Puritan, and the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day feature, and whose debut poetry collection, We Are All Just Animals & Plants, was published by Metatron Press in 2016.

Photo credit: Blair Elliott.

How did you begin writing, and what keeps you going?

As the child of an editor/technical writer and a translator, writing was never far from me while growing up. There was no television in my home, but there were walls and walls of books. I started writing short fiction and poetry around the age of 12—my English teacher at the time encouraged me to pursue it, even reading a really cringey short story I showed her out loud to my class—and never gave it up. I’m not sure what exactly keeps me going now, other than the fact that, well, I’m still going and I can’t really imagine not.

Have you noticed a difference in the ways in which you approach the individual poem, now that you’ve published a full-length book?

I think my poems grow less out of individual moments of emotion and more out of a broader framework of thought that I find myself in. My first book was sort of just a collection of several years worth of poems about exes and crushes. Since then, I’ve been writing more in the direction of mood and tone and ideology and curiosity about the world. As far as cohesion, I like it when poems go together, even when they don’t exactly go together. All of my writing these days seems to be in service of a larger “themed issue.”

How has the process of putting together a manuscript evolved? How do you decide on the shape and size of a manuscript?

At some point my editor brain grabs the baton from my writer brain and I start looking at the collection of poems I’ve just written, parsing through them for thematic similarities and such — like a miner looking for a vein. Then I cluster different types of ores together and see what that looks like. I don’t want to say it’s more fun than the writing, but it’s at least as fun, in a very different way.

What poets have influenced the ways in which you write?

My earlier work was heavily influenced by reading tiny fractions of the output of a handful dead white men: Williams, Joyce, Ginsberg, cummings and Eliot. So you can imagine that it was horrible. Over the years, I think I feel the influence of a more interesting group: two lyricists I love — Chris Hannah from Propagandhi and MF DOOM, some of my peers at Concordia like Frankie Barnet and Jay Ritchie, and lately some of the big American contemporary writers like Hanif Abdurraqib, Kaveh Akbar and Danez Smith.

How important has mentorship been to your work? Is there anyone who specifically assisted your development as a writer?

I don’t think anyone I know has ever been a mentor to or for me. I’m not sure what my poetry would look like had such a thing or person been present in my life.

What are you currently working on?

Two manuscripts, sort of. One about Canada, and family, and fatherhood; one about religion and romantic love and the past.

Can you name a poet you think should be receiving more attention?

Two Toronto poets, Zoe Sharpe and Faith Arkorful, spring to mind! Zoe’s chapbook with Trapshot Press back in 2010, Sullied, absolutely rocked my world. She’s such a smart and sharp writer and I’m really excited for a full collection from her. Faith wrote one of my favourite poems of 2019 over at Peach Mag, which was nominated for a Pushcart, and she was recently longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize, so I’m hoping that’s the beginning of that attention she deserves!