An interview with Toast Wong

Toast Wong is an activist, engineer and butch idiot living in Toronto, Ontario. Growing up on the Credit River, she writes about diaspora and gender, divorce and science with a lack of regard for her physical integrity. Sometimes, late at night, you can see her drive like an asshole in the West End.

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

I've always liked writing in high school, but never really spent the time to hone my craft or anything like that. I played in a bunch of bands that went nowhere, which I think helped me figure out the mechanics of metre and rhyme, but I took a very long hiatus while I was studying engineering.

Being a butch transgender woman makes you tough to the world, I think, because it keeps throwing things at you until you're whittled down. I try to keep those scraps. The first thing I ever tried to get published was a eulogy for my friend Maia, another butch transgender lesbian, and I try to keep her in mind when I'm writing.

What poets have influenced the ways in which you write?

For a poet I'm not very well read at all. I loved Good Bones by Maggie Smith, and I like Richard Siken. I'm split on how I find alt-lit poets like Tao Lin because I'm not a fan of that sort of navel-gazing, but it was formative for me. I find a lot of inspiration in mathematics textbooks, in punk music and political literature. The last thing I read was Jose Maria Sison's The Guerrilla is a Poet, which is a collection of poems written in political exile from the Philippines, which I think is a very different approach to diaspora writing.

Have you noticed a difference in the ways in which you approach the individual poem after you began publishing in literary journals?

In terms of approach, I sit on individual poems for much longer now. I don't really know what I'm trying to say in my poetry yet, so I write as much as I possibly can and try to group my poems together by vague themes (bodies in motion, history as it passes through the world). Then I think about how it fits in with the rest of the things I'm trying to say.

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

I really really do not know what I'm doing, and I think eventually that will catch up to me until someone actually tells me how this poetry thing actually works. There are friends who I probably couldn't have done this without – ML Gamboa and Aeon Ginsberg are two poets who have encouraged me, helped me through submissions and generally entertained my nonsense. Tea Williams, my ex-partner shows me lots of poems and gives me pointers on how I can improve a lot, and I'm very indebted to them.

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

I've been enjoying Guy Elston's work and Matthew Walsh's These are not the potatoes of my youth.