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!

Train : a journal of self-isolation

Issue #8 : David Barrick Lizzie Derksen Philip Kienholz Margo LaPierre Alex Manley Ren Pike

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David Barrick’s poetry appears in The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, Event, Prairie Fire, The Antigonish Review, and other literary magazines. He teaches and writes in London, Ontario, where he is Co-Director of the Poetry London reading series. His first chapbook is Incubation Chamber (Anstruther Press, 2019).

Lizzie Derksen is a writer and filmmaker from Treaty Six Territory. She is the poet through whom Aunt Rachel speaks and one of the authors of the collaborative novel Project Compass (Monto Books 2017). Her writing has appeared in PRISM International, Room, Funicular Magazine, Poetry Is Dead, The Vault, and on CBC Television. Lizzie lives in Edmonton, Alberta, where she walks her dog, hosts a multi-disciplinary salon called Open Apartment, and works on her proverbial first novel. lizziederksen.com

Philip Kienholz is a Buddhist lay monk, permaculture gardener, and architect retired from licensed practice in Manitoba and Northwest Territories. He has published a book, Display: Poems, and two chapbooks: The Third Rib Knife, and Born to Rant Coerced to Smile. Recent poetry is at Write Launch, Genre: Urban Arts, Unpsychology Magazine, Halcyone Literary Review, Burningword Literary Journal, and Whirlwind.

Margo LaPierre (www.margolapierreeditor.com) is a queer, neurodivergent Canadian poet and fiction editor. Her debut collection of poetry, Washing Off the Raccoon Eyes, was published by Guernica Editions. She is a poetry selector for Bywords Magazine and Membership Chair of the Editors Canada Ottawa-Gatineau branch.

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.

Ren Pike grew up in Newfoundland. Through sheer luck, she was born into a family who understood the exceptional value of a library card. She holds degrees in Physics and Computer Science. Her poetry has been published in antilang, Orson's Review, and Juniper. When she is not writing, she wrangles data for non-profit organizations in Calgary, Canada.

Snow Globe

Alex Manley








Today for show and tell, I've brought a tiny miracle of nature: Winter.
It’s a season people like to brag they survived—in this city it's a joke, ha 
ha, can't believe we made it through another one—but the truth is, here, no 
one does. What I mean is they say you can't set foot in the same river 
twice and I agree—not because the river's changed (the surface has 
frozen over, for starters) but because you have changed in the interim. 

The time it takes a city's worth of abandoned bikes to cycle through the
whole frost/unfrost thing like a big white lung breathing ten thousand
rusty gears in and out, we all freeze into something new—the same, but
different, the way water and ice are two sides of the same coin, value
forever in flux. At a dinner party someone asks if I've ever gone south
for the winter and I laugh. This city is the whole of my universe.

There have been years when I didn’t even leave the island, my life
circumscribed like a little glass dome that no one has shaken much lately.
As a child, I read about death; I still remember. You don't fight the 
snow—you just fall back asleep. You give in willingly to the feeling of 
warmth. I get it. Days like this, reality itself feels like it's under the cover 
of whiteness, the planet one big snowstorm, whole segments of the city

ceded to the invading air force of Hoth-pale storm troops, a calculated
surrender in the hopes we'll be able to recoup the territory come mid-
March, or, fingers crossed, April. Of course, the culture industry loves
glamming the violence of it: Hollywood uses fake snow—potato flakes—
in all its movies; there's that infamous Black Sabbath LP and Christ,
every carol in history. Television snow is everywhere, too. Printed snow

(like this) is harder to track your way through. For an illustrator, yes,
it can be a godsend—a few black lines to hold it in and you're golden,
freeing you up to get complex elsewhere, like turning simple cardboard
boxes into high-technology duplicators. It's a neat trick, but if I could
duplicate myself, I might never stop making copies. Like, one of me 
would run into my ex’s mom at the supermarket; chat unselfconsciously,

private detective of emotion. One would move to Toronto to have coffee
with you, and find out why you can't stop getting in touch every three or
four months, picking at  the scab of that little thing that never happened.
For the time being, one of me’s nestled into the turn of a third- or fourth- 
wave café, reading a poetry collection that ends on a sour note, mimicry 
of a long-gone poet’s ironic racism. In death, I’d think, we are all part of

the same snowbank. One of me would be staring at the sky, thinking:
So much of the natural world is twos, fours, tens, twenties. It’s nice to 
have snowflakes. The hexagon proof odd numbers are still viable 
options, this faker-than-a-three-dollar-bill notion the real false hood, and 
Yes, Virginia, There Is a Third Path. And then something like, Isn't it 
funny how snowflakes are all unique yet all the same? Or is that just 
trite.

One of me would stay, and have a second latte, facing the window this 
time; letting the large, lazy flakes outside be the things that I am, or the 
things that I'm not, a dialectic of the self. One version of me, picking at 
the pastry flakes dotting this little ceramic dish, would think: Today for 
show and tell, I brought the last chocolatine left in the glass case. Or: A
snowflake is a piece of air that has decided to make something of itself.

One of me would feel the cold hit like a drug, a knot developing between 
my blades like a pit in my gut. One of me would imagine waking up to a
cinnamon bun town glazed over, like eyes, like '98. The Sisyphean walk 
up the big hill to school. Later, coming home from a game, dressed like a
young man dressed like a hockey player, one of me would see a gaggle 
of poets on the metro, and remember a winter poker night from years 
ago.

Our chips had been quarters, bluffs as readable as any children's book. 
Hand by hand, the shining pot had shifted my way, through no craft or 
skill of my own. The cards were simply in my favour. Sometimes it just 
works out that way. By the end, I was rich beyond my wildest 
imaginings. But as I'd learned the previous fall, the more you have, the 
more you have to lose. You left. The remaining three of us watched the 
hockey game.

In storms, the air is just the empty space between the milling white. On 
the bus, one of me would cuddle up to the window, and wish the person 
next to me were a lover, or at least another duplicate. One of me would 
go to all the parties I keep flaking out on, another would try suicide just 
to see, yet another would film it. Artis gratia artis. One of me would really
'commit' to social; one would settle down, really 'commit' to parenting.

One of me would simply grow older, find themselves editing this poem 
again, one January, recalling what it was like to have been in the grip of 
their early 20s, once, and contemplate watching an old Korean film, set 
on a train. If I could duplicate this cardboard box, I'd keep going until 
one of them was a time machine. Today for show and tell, I've brought 
a groundhog, a Mag-Lite, and a blindfold. Who wants to go first?

 




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.