What is the most confusing thing anyone has said to you about your work?
I try to bring a sense of fascination to this exercise, because sometimes I do get a wild mismatch of perceptions between myself and a trusted reader. While it's pretty common to participate in a poetry course and get the feedback "Oh, I can tell you're a fantasy writer!" just from the way I write even my non-speculative poetry, I think the really interesting stuff occurs in prose.

Writing primarily in horror and dark fantasy (which might include some love stories), my characters are often complicated people, and they sometimes inspire moral judgements that I'm not expecting. A friend recently brought me a very frank assessment of a character I wrote, and what they said reminded me very keenly of some awkward high school or work situations I experienced. I was being very obviously positioned as someone's deliberately malicious antagonist, while I had no idea why. I was genuinely startled the first time that a protagonist in one of my stories was perceived in the same way.

Working through the emotions that this inspires—sometimes by turning back to poetry!—can take some time, but digging into this abrupt mismatch of perceptions was immensely valuable for my work. I could give the character more depth, because my friend's outside perspective let me get out of my own head. I could better understand how the character's antagonists (and maybe my own) would actually perceive them (which perhaps gave me some insight into how mine perceived me). I could also more clearly see the negative traits that I had attached to the character, which allowed me to turn those traits into weaknesses within the story.

What writers/artists/filmmakers//musicians have influenced your work - either the work itself, or the way in which you work?
Several years ago, I had the opportunity to visit the exhibition At Home With Monsters at the Art Gallery of Ontario, about Guillermo del Toro's work and the artworks that he has collected over the course of his career. I lived a couple of hours away, actually, and I made the opportunity to visit it a few times. I have a very good photo of myself and my family members posing with the Pale Man, but I probably spent the longest time sitting with the collection of Del Toro's sketchbooks, which was a much more dimly lit and much less busy part of the exhibition. That show and the artworks that it brought together, the questions that it asked about what makes a monster and why some of us feel so much safer standing among fictional creatures armed with claws and teeth? Nothing else had made me feel quite so seen for a long time.

There is also an emotion, or state of being, that I'm drawn to in my work: this feeling of living through cycles with a fire burning in my throat. Some of the authors whose recent work have inspired me in that direction include Vajra Chandrasekera, Zen Cho, P. Djèlí Clark, Hiron Ennes, T. Kingfisher, Ann Leckie, Arkady Martine, Caitlin Starling, Adrian Tchaikovsky, A.C. Wise, and John Wiswell.

Is there one part of your creation process that’s harder for you?
I'm in love with the middle of the process, when absolutely everything is hypothetically possible, and the entire thing is speeding along to its conclusion. At this point, I often have an image in mind of what the whole thing will look like, but I can't explain it very well. This is sometimes because I think I've figured out the ending, but I'm completely wrong.

The hardest part is putting all of the pieces together. It's putting the finishing stages on a painting and accepting that it's always going to look like I made it. It's having the ending of a story or poem in mind—maybe I've already written a rough draft of that ending—while struggling to make the meat of the last little bit of the story lead into the purposeful conclusion. It's going back and rewriting pieces to make it all fit, now that I know with near-certainty what the question I'm trying to pose really looks like. I'm threading new words into the earlier parts, but I haven't finished that bridge yet. I'm bringing the story into a state of finality where I have to give up the idea that "everything is possible," and sometimes that's really difficult.

How do you handle rejection? Do you have any advice for other creators about handling rejection?
It's a sort of multi-part process, isn't it? Rejection can be felt at multiple points during the creation and reception of a work. I lean on my creative friends quite a bit here, as well as on workshops and other places that I can get feedback. When an artwork, story, or poem is important to me, then during the stages where I'm refining it, I've learned there's an emotional component to soaking up feedback. During those early stages, I aim to get all of the feedback that I need from individuals or small groups. I do look for feedback on a work's strengths (when I was younger I ignored the importance of this), but I look for the critical elements, too. Different people are better at pointing out different weaknesses. Importantly, at this stage, the critique comes from within the context of a small community, and with a level of understanding when it comes to what I'm personally trying to achieve.

Using that feedback, I can shape the things I make into the things I want them to be, but it also allows me to manage the existential despair I might feel about the submission or publication process. I'm not saying I've never thrown something out into the void to see what happens, but when I put a lot of love into an artwork, I want to make sure that I'm already fed when I put it out into the world. That way, if it doesn't resonate with an editor or an audience, I'm not dealing with the same kind of heartbreak, because I already have what I need. In theory, anyway.

Group chats—and other small groupings of like-minded souls—are also a brilliant way to be able to talk over the highs and lows when it comes to the art of making things.

What is your biggest creative doubt?
Out of my demons that aren't the fun kind, perfectionism is the plague that's been looming over my artistic process for the longest time. It's that very vague feeling of "not good enough" that implies that nothing I make is good enough, while somehow leaving room for the idea that it could be good enough if only I was good enough. It's an entirely destructive impulse, both in the personal sense and in the community sense.

Battling perfectionism is a roundabout lesson in how insidious the impulse really is. My early attempts at breaking the habit of being precious about my work were, ironically, also destructive. I would finish something, but I wouldn't value it. At all. Everything that I did was hard to look at. I would tear things up and work them into other projects. Based on the good advice of the people around me, I did manage to keep a lot of my older work, especially the artwork, but I never really allowed myself to be proud of the things that I did. I internalized any negative criticism of my work, but I struggled to let the positive remarks actually take root, even when that positive feedback was coming from people who really did know what they were talking about. For a while, it became extremely difficult, even impossible, to work through the process of cobbling together words or images.

I carry a lot of doubt about the value of my work. At this point, nearly 20 years after I was accepted into art school (and failed to finish), I try to put that question aside entirely. I try to stay fascinated with the questions that I see in the world. I play with those questions, and I don't try to answer them.

What piece of creative advice have you received that sounded good, but was ultimately not useful to you?
I was once hopelessly entangled in the idea that to be an artist, poet, or writer, I needed to create a specific type of work every day. The advice is usually presented as something like, "Write for an hour at the same time every day." This advice was perhaps unhelpfully rolled into the distraction of the common declaration, emerging in the 2010s, that I also needed to release "content" every day to promote myself. Putting aside all of the baggage about social media and markets driving our behaviour as artists, doing something every day is a very common piece of advice, and it genuinely is predicated on habit-formation. "If you're a writer, write every day" is built on the idea that "you" are lacking in motivation and need to push harder on the gas pedal. I don't think it puts enough focus on making sure that the tank isn't empty.

While consistency is valuable, and inherent to this "just go" (but at a specific time every day) philosophy is the valuable idea that it's important to break the habit of being precious about your work, the reality is that the messy process of making things is different for everyone. I needed to let go of the idea that I was ever going to do "just one hour" of anything at the same time every day. Many of us have awkward schedules, but I personally work best when I'm working very deeply on one thing within a session, and that tends to burn through a lot of my energy for the day. I rotate through projects, day-by-day and week-by-week.

At one point in my life, I was afraid to pick up painting again after taking a break for a few months. I had been told so often that my skills would inevitably atrophy, and anything I started would involve taking several steps back first. I don't believe this anymore, and I think the metaphor of filling the gas tank is a good one. In my iterative process, one thing that I make strengthens or makes room for another. Taking in the world, making observations, and living life is just as much a part of that as sitting down with a sketchbook or a notebook is. When I'm stuck on a longer-term project, the best thing I can do to keep up my momentum is to pick up something different in another format, working through my thoughts on the first project in a different form—one with less rigidity to it.