Two friends—in verse and in life—sit down to chat about the release of Ellen Chang-Richardson’s much anticipated collection Blood Belies out now with Wolsak & Wynn.
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Margo LaPierre: Congratulations on the brand-new release of Blood Belies! How was your first day with your debut poetry collection out in the world? What does one eat for dinner on such a momentous occasion?
Ellen Chang-Richardson: Thank you so much. Truthfully, my day was exceedingly busy and a bit of a haze. I haven’t even unboxed my books yet! They arrived on my front porch by way of a very friendly mailman around midday. In fact, I’m just getting back home. A friend of mine, Siobhan Angus, launched her book Camera Geologica (Duke University Press) this evening at Perfect Books in Ottawa. It was a fantastic evening of discussion about the history of photography, the medium’s inextricable dependence on mining / resource extraction, and a perfect way to spend the evening of my publication day. As for dinner, I wish I had a better answer than this, but I don’t. I ate frozen dumplings. They were wholly underwhelming. Their accompanying lotus root and fish balls were good, though!
ML: You always post such delectable homemade food photos on Insta, I had to ask! A book publication should come with a whole month of special-occasion meals. By the way, you spending your book birthday celebrating another author’s book launch totally speaks to how awesome of a friend and fellow literary person you are. Let’s talk about the photographs in the book. They’re so spectral and seem to live in some in-between memory. Tell me more about how you chose and arranged them to move alongside the text.
ECR: Just give me one second. I’m going to unbox my books.
ML: Okie! Exciting!
ECR: I’m back.
ML: How was it??? The unboxing?
ECR: Well, I think kid me is completely flabbergasted right now. I made my first (and possibly last) Instagram Reel for the occasion.
ML: Oh, I just watched it! Your beautiful, delighted faces at the end made me giggle with joy. Friend, congrats.
ECR: Thank you! I have conflicted feelings about the online social networks we are obliged to participate in, and the companies that own each and every pixel we upload, so I don’t fault anyone for opting out of that circus. Back to your question about the photographs in Blood Belies. I love this observation because they do indeed live in flux memory—memory that is constantly moving. The photographs are my own, the only exception being the old family photograph on page 18, which was given to me by my father in the process of compiling images for this collection. Combined, the photos track my movement across the last decade—rooting in the past, tracing landscape, the anthropocene, our relationship to both—and explore the possibility of various futures. Images are segmented and spliced because memory can be fragmented, and so can the way we experience it.
ML: Ah, so cool! It’s like there’s a splitting on both ends: possibilities for the future, memories breaking down. I found myself staring into those photos—the faces and spaces—like they were rooms in a dream. The unpopulated punctuation of your “base notes” juxtaposed with the photos’ patterns create an echoing visual rhythm. Can you talk more about those wordless, imageless poems?
ECR: Yes! I love this question. “base notes hit the edge of a high” is a ten-part piece that started out as a poem inspired by ambient music. In the editing stage, I realized that the marks on the page reflected the way my brain and senses experienced the world during a post-concussion flare-up. I fine-tuned “base notes” with that intention and the result is this long-form glitch running undercurrent to the entire collection.
ML: I love the sensory metaphor deploying scent and sound at once with the base/bass homophone. What effect have your eight concussions had on your experience of memory and your relationship to language?
ECR: Oof. Well, first off, I have to say that concussions affect everyone differently, and what I’m about to say is specific to my experience. My concussions have affected both memory and language in small, insidious ways. Sometimes, I forget what I am doing or where I am going. Back when I lived in Toronto, I once got completely lost walking up my own street. I was maybe ten doors down from my apartment and I suddenly had no idea where I was or where I was going. I remember the panic I felt before a random recycling bin triggered recognition. It’s been better since working with Ottawa Performance Care on concussion recovery. As for language, I often mix words up, either swapping unrelated ones or completely forgetting others. When that happens, I’m grasping at air in my attempts to convey a thought.
ML: So, have writing and poetry been a way of reclaiming language asynchronously, against the suddenness of speech?
ECR: Perhaps subconsciously. Experimenting with poetic performance—translating the marks on the page to sound—have been a way of reclaiming the slow loss and regain (and loss and regain) of language, and coming to terms with the helplessness those moments engender.
ML: What did attending to your family history in tandem with researching Canada’s history of anti-Asian racism involve in terms of process?
ECR: Lots of pacing. The history of anti-Asian racism in Canada and the US is not an easy thing to take in. I found myself walking away often to give my spirit the space it needed to digest what I was reading. Going through parliamentary papers and subsequent legislation brought up memories (and feelings) I had worked very hard, for a very long time, to forget. I think this is why I braided my own family history in. At least for me, looping trauma through other trauma makes trauma easier to process.
ML: I’m seeing potential influences of Ian Williams, Darby Minott Bradford … am I totally off base? Which poets or artists have been especially influential to you as you worked on this collection?
ECR: Not totally off base. I really admire what Williams and Bradford do with language and word play, and you can see that in these pieces. I’d be remiss, though, if I didn’t mention Shazia Hafiz Ramji’s use of grey text in port of being; Billy-Ray Belcourt’s intervention of archive in NDN Coping Mechanisms; BADBADNOTGOOD’s ambient scores in BBNG, BBNG2 and III; Alexei Perry Cox’s mastery of the contrapuntal form and geography in PLACE; and my editor Liz Howard’s brilliant mind—she encouraged me to push past my own poetic constraints.
ML: I still remember so fondly our road trip to Toronto in 2021—reading Howard’s Letters in a Bruised Cosmos to you while you drove, both of us experiencing those poems for the first time. What was the most surprising thing you discovered while working on Blood Belies?
ECR: My printable margins. Prior to the final stages of production, this wasn’t something I’d thought about. Facing the very physical limitations of print made me rethink how certain poems ought to appear. In all cases, the concrete changes I made were for the better. I do need to take a moment to thank my copy editor, Ashley Hisson, for her infinite patience; and my fantastic book designer, Kilby Smith-McGregor, for rolling with my punches.
ML: Okay, let’s get the insider scoop on that gorgeous cover and its visual support of your poems.
ECR: That’s all Kilby and Paul Vermeersch. They put their brains together to locate an image that would reflect the content of the collection without being too literal and landed on an open-source genome-sequence map from Thailand. Genome maps evoke blood, heritage, language, and encoding, while also being highly aesthetic, abstract objects. With the red tape—itself symbolic of the formal rules (and bureaucracy) that hinder or prevent action—slapped across it, I think it’s absolutely perfect.
ML: Some folks reading this might know that you and I aren’t strangers to each other … we’re good friends and part of a creative poetry collective founded in 2020 called VII. Shoutout to Manahil Bandukwala, Conyer Clayton, nina jane drystek, Chris Johnson, and Helen Robertson. And you’ve got friends all across the Canadian literary scene, in part because of your excellent work with Riverbed, the reading series you founded with nina. Why is community important to you?
ECR: Community—care, activism, intention, action—is how we have a fighting chance at changing the trajectory of our future.
ML: What’s your favourite poem title of Blood Belies and why?
ECR: I don’t know if I have a true favourite. The poems all work in tandem to one another! I suppose, if I had to choose one, it’d be “you may not believe in magic.” That piece is a little snippet of surrealist whimsy, an outro at the very end of the book that speaks to my favourite aspects of Toronto—a place I lived for eleven years.
ML: I adore that poem too. The lines “where punching bags hang by chains / in the dark and roses dead crawl” give me goosebumps. Speaking of favourite lines, in the poem “storm surge”: “My father clings to the fantasy like a / drowning man clings to seaweed”—this whole page and its visual-syntactical movement blew me away. Reading that, everything went quiet and loud at once. Would you share background on that page?
ECR: As a kid, my parents put me through years of swimming lessons that never properly stuck. I dreaded them, and would often futz around in the pool as opposed to actually advancing my skills, until I fell off a swim ring and almost drowned at age eleven. In that moment, my world went loud (heartbeats, panicked thoughts) and so quiet (muffled water sounds) at the same time; and my desperation kicked the basic urge of self-preservation into high gear. Because I discuss those exact elements in the poem—the desperation, fear and urgency to self-preservation that people fleeing from the Khmer Rouge must have felt—I wanted that page to reverberate with the sensation of almost drowning. ∞
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You can meet Ellen on their upcoming Spring Tour:
- April 7 @ 5:30 pm ET: Double Book Launch with Chuqiao Yang (Ottawa, in person)
- April 13 @ 2:00 pm ET: AngelHousePress Celebrates National Poetry Month (Online, registration required)
- May 1 @ 6:00 pm ET: FACL Ottawa Celebrates Asian Heritage Month (Ottawa, in person)
- May 5 @ 7:00 pm ET: LitLive Reading Series at the Staircase Café (Hamilton, in person)
- May 8 @ 7:00 pm ET: Blood Belies Book Launch at Novel Idea (Kingston, in person)
- May 19 @ 6:00pm ET: Patrick Grace DEVIANT Book Launch at Perfect Books (Ottawa, in person)
- May 23 @ 7:00 pm ET: Blood Belies Book Launch at Another Story Bookshop (Toronto, in person)
- May 30 @ 7:00 pm ET: Blood Belies Book Launch at La Petite Librairie Drawn & Quarterly (Montréal, in person)
Links to purchase Blood Belies:
- Wolsak & Wynn
- Your local independent bookstore
- Amazon.ca
- IndigoEmail contactus [at] roommagazine [dot] com by April 30th a receipt of purchase to win a free subscription to ROOM!
