The following interview is part four of an eight part series of conversations with BC poets. All interviews were conducted by Rob Taylor.
What Love Can’t Do
It’s this endless orchestral ache, like the bow
never lifts from the violin strings. The note held taut.You, transplant, no matter what city or song.
The enormity of what I wishI could offer you an ocean streaming from my hands.
I will love you across all landscapes,across names, pronouns, your shape shifting
or not. I’ll love you so muchthat something will heal—the scars
you didn’t choose smoothed back into skin.The scars you did choose worn to the beach.
Let’s take them swimming.I will love you enough
that you’ll be able to walk into the water again,the way you haven’t in years, salt crash
and tug on your body. How long has it been?Since you were so young
you could have been swept away by the tide.I will love you until the tide changes
and we’re all swept backwards—your mother calling you into the house
instead of telling you to leave it.
Reprinted with permission from
In Your Nature
(Brick Books, 2025).
RT: In the second poem in In Your Nature, you write “I don’t want us to be the ones to gather / ourselves into our own arms and tell ourselves we’re beautiful. / Won’t someone else do that?” I hope you are rightly thrilled when you think about the publication of your first book, but I wonder if those emotions are at all mixed with anger or frustration about the necessity of its nature: singing the beauty of the “awkward in-between” when no one else will, in a world so often hostile to your right to exist. If we lived in a world where trans love and acceptance were firmly established, how do you think this book might be different?
EM: I am both thrilled and terrified by the publication of this book; it feels very vulnerable to have something like this be out in the world for anyone to read, though in truth probably very few people actually will, so I suppose I should take some comfort in that. Because I’ve been working on some of these poems for so long—I think the oldest poem in the book is from 2008 or 2009—I have wondered what the cultural climate might be when the book came out. It definitely feels discouraging to be in a moment now when there are so many attacks on trans rights. I’ve been “out” as trans since 2003, so I’ve seen a lot of shifts in the conversation in the last twenty years. Things are not how I imagined they might have been when I was imagining the future as a teenager. I didn’t expect trans people to be so specifically and aggressively persecuted. Also, in some ways, things are better than I ever could have imagined: there are so many incredible trans writers and artists creating complicated, compelling, and beautiful work these days. But the backlash against trans rights, trans visibility, trans healthcare, is very intense and very frightening.
I think my book speaks to the reality of this time, but so much of it is deeply rooted in my formative experiences that I don’t actually think those pieces would be different unless I had different formative experiences (and then who would I be?). If we lived in a different world, people might connect with these pieces differently, but it’s hard for me to imagine how the work itself might change. I think this is because so much of it is about excavating story: the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, about other people, about how we do or don’t fit into narrative arcs greater than ourselves. My story is what it has been. Thus far, anyway.
When you have a feeling that the project you’re working on wants to live beyond you. . . .trust that feeling.
Estlin McPhee
RT: Together with fellow poet Leah Horlick, you ran REVERB: A Queer Reading Series from 2013-2017. How did curating, and attending, your series impact your own writing? Did it shape your thinking around how your writing might reach and impact queer readers?
EM: One of the best things for me about REVERB was co-creating the series with Leah, who’s one of my dearest friends and such a magnificent writer. She and I started REVERB because we wanted to be in a literary space that really celebrated and centred queer writing, in all its complexity. The response to the series was mind-blowing: our first event sold out before we had even officially opened the doors, and we regularly had over a hundred people in attendance for each event. Curating that series connected me to so many amazing people that I never would have met otherwise. We tried to have a mix between established writers, early-career writers, and people who might even hesitate to call themselves writers in public. Maybe it was their first reading, or writing was something they just did for fun or in certain circumstances. Seeing how many people were interested both in sharing their own work and in just showing up to listen and participate as an audience member made me realize how hungry people are to share writing with each other and to connect. I loved getting to know people’s stories and seeing people shine on stage. It made me more trusting that there is an audience for what can sometimes feel quite niche. Supporting each other, cheerleading for each other, is an essential part of the work.
RT: Speaking of supporters and cheerleaders, in the book’s acknowledgments you thank Alessandra Naccarato for “reviv[ing] this project when I was about to abandon it.” Could you talk about that journey, from near-abandonment to publication, and Naccarato’s role in keeping the book alive?
EM: I had submitted the manuscript quite a few times, starting in 2020, and received very nice notes from publishers, but ultimately kept getting rejections. After revising elements, and the manuscript as a whole so many times, I couldn’t see how I could revise it further. I felt stuck. And I started to think that maybe I needed to intentionally set this book aside to make space for something else, that maybe this wasn’t the one that was going to come into the world, which was very sad for me, because I loved these poems and had put so much work into them.
Alessandra and I met about a decade ago in our masters’ program and I’ve been so fortunate to be her friend since that time, and also to share our work with each other. She’s a wonderful writer and a remarkable editor. After I’d been submitting this manuscript for about two years, Alessandra was asking me about it and I explained that I was thinking of giving up on the project. She was like, “Why don’t I look at your whole manuscript and give you some feedback?” which is a huge gift of time and energy, but it was my birthday so I felt that I could accept it. It’s one of the best birthday gifts I’ve ever received. She read the manuscript and then sent me a long, beautiful voice note that had a lot of great practical suggestions, but I think most importantly for me at that moment, re-energized my belief in my own work. She was very firm in her sentiment that this book was going to come out into the world, that it had value, and that people needed to read it. I had started to doubt all those things, which was clouding both my ability and my resolve to do further revisions. After that conversation, I made some big changes to the manuscript and Brick Books accepted it.
RT: What a birthday gift, indeed! What advice do you have for other writers who feel like they’re on the edge of abandoning their writing projects?
EM: I would say that if you’re able to have someone else look at it—someone you trust to truly see what you’re working on—do it. Another way that we can achieve the necessary perspective to re-imagine our projects is to put those projects away for a time and come back to them later with some distance. That’s classic advice for a reason. I’ve also found it helpful in better understanding my own larger projects to have to describe them, the way you do when writing something like a grant application or marketing copy. It’s excruciating to go that route but can clarify what you’re actually doing and refocus your sense of purpose.
That said, I’ve abandoned plenty of projects that I’m happy to have put down. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with composting work. But when you have a feeling that the project you’re working on wants to live beyond you (which is how I felt about this book, I was just so discouraged at a certain point) then trust that feeling. Invite encouragement, either from a human, whether editor or loved one or both, from the words of poems you love, from the space around you. And always keep reading. Sometimes seeing how other people construct their work is all you need to imagine yours anew.
It was sobering to realize that what had felt like totally normal experiences to me were bizarre and fringe to other people.
Estlin McPhee
RT: At times In Your Nature feels like a personal narrative of a poet’s adolescence, common enough subject matter for a first book. But just as we’re getting comfortable with that you veer off in wild new directions, often werewolf-related or—my personal favourite—a series of poems entitled “Martha and Mary Witness Jesus’s Death Across Space and Time.” (Those two directions even merge in a poem in which Jesus is a dying werewolf!) Why was it important to you to include these digressions from your personal narrative? Do they communicate your lived experience in ways “confessional” poems could not?
EM: It’s been so gratifying to hear that the Martha and Mary cycle has found appreciative readers! Those poems are a bit weird. I wasn’t sure if people would find them interesting or not. For me, the thematic heart of the book is transformation: how do we define transformation and how do we make sense of it? Adolescence is a major period of transformation, as is transition, as is spiritual crisis, as is death. What constitutes the self when the self undergoes immense and sometimes fundamental shifts? Jesus shows up in my work because of my personal background growing up in the church, but also because to me he epitomizes some of those questions around transformation; he’s a character who dies and then is resurrected, which is perhaps the ultimate—and unreachable— transformation. Part of taking him and Martha and Mary out of their context and transporting them to different situations is me asking what makes each of them remain themselves when all the markers of that selfhood have transformed.
The werewolf motif emerged somewhat organically from contemplating gender transition as shapeshifting, which is not an original thought at all: if you hop around on the Internet, it’s easy to find a longstanding association of transmasculinity with werewolves. I liked the idea of participating in that conversation and exploring the perceived monstrosity of trans people from a variety of angles—from playful to campy to actually frightening—using the werewolf figure.
RT: In In Your Nature, your complex, often fraught, often painful journey through gender and identity is paired with the often fraught, often painful relationship you’ve had with two books: the Bible and the Harry Potter series. You’ve already touched on your background in the church, but my sense is that both books shaped the way you saw the world and, at some molecular level, still do, despite the fact that they (or their authors or advocates) have caused hardship to trans people. Would you say that’s true? Do you have a similar relationship with both books, or do you think of them as very distinct from one another in the impact they’ve had on your life?
EM: It’s embarrassing to be writing about Harry Potter in this day and age, which I guess is a sort of adolescent feeling and thus appropriate for the book, but I do apologize for bringing it up. The reason Harry Potter came up in my book is because of the poem “Turning,” which involves a true memory of kids in my church advocating for burning the books. Once I mentioned it in that context, I felt compelled to explore further, since J.K. Rowling has, bizarrely, become one of the main characters of transphobia today. The series definitely was important to me as a young person. There was something very alluring about a story that my church, and Evangelicalism more broadly, explicitly condemned (although the witchcraft in Harry Potter ultimately conforms to a Christian worldview, so reading them really wasn’t a big issue in my house).
I don’t think anything can be compared to the Bible, or at least the Bible as I experienced it growing up, as both a book and a testimony. It’s so embedded in broader culture and literature that it almost contains its own language of reference. I still have my childhood Bible, which includes copied-out verses in my eight-year-old handwriting tucked between the pages. And I have the original copy of the first Harry Potter that I read as a ten or eleven-year-old, which is a library discard with an illustration of a random wizard on the back. Later editions have Dumbledore in that wizard’s place, but I think this one was made before anyone realized how big the books were going to be and that maybe a recognizable character should be on the cover. I guess in that way my relationship with Harry Potter and the Bible is similar, but I’d like to clarify that there are only three poems in my book that mention a bespectacled teenage witchcraft practitioner (other than myself). Don’t worry.
So much of it is about excavating story: the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, about other people, about how we do or don’t fit into narrative arcs greater than ourselves.
Estlin McPhee
RT: Ha! Harry can’t hold a candle to your wizardry, Estlin! In your acknowledgments you thank your friends for accompanying you on a “field visit” to church, and in the poem “Turning Back” you write about returning “to the megachurch of your childhood” to “test your powers.” How did you find that “return”? What did it reveal about the state of your powers?
EM: The Pentecostal megachurch that I went back to visit for this book was the source of a lot of intense and difficult memories (and some good ones, too) so I was very apprehensive about going to a service there. My family moved to a different church when I was nine or ten, so my memories of the space are really a child’s memories, full of corridors to get lost in and a cavernous sanctuary absolutely packed with people. I remember every sermon as quite scary, with a lot of talk about damnation, and people speaking in tongues every Sunday. I think maybe they realized that doesn’t sell as well these days because, going back as an adult, I found that the service was only half full, and the preaching was unengaging and not really about anything in particular. Nobody busted out the glossolalia. It felt diminished. Which was a relief to me, that I could be in that space and maintain a sense of self, and then leave and truly leave it behind.
I didn’t realize that my childhood religious experiences were particularly different from other people’s until I was in college at a screening of the documentary Jesus Camp and at the end, my friends were like, “That was so weird, can you even imagine being in that environment?” Whereas my thought while watching had been, “This is so familiar, this is so similar to the church I grew up in.” I hadn’t thought about my upbringing in the church in a while. I had been busy being a teenager and navigating my gender identity and queerness, moving very far from home, and it was sobering to realize that what had felt like totally normal experiences to me were bizarre and fringe to other people. And now, having the distance of almost twenty years from that realization, it’s been powerful for me to be able to examine those childhood experiences without losing touch with myself as I am now.
RT: Growing up, your nonna seems to have been one of those people who really “saw” you when few others did. You note in your acknowledgments how proud she would have been of this book. How would you say your nonna is present in its pages?
EM: My nonna was a vivacious person who loved art and music and food and dance. We lived close to each other for about a decade when I was an adult and we went to shows and restaurants together, watched movies together, and spent time with my friends together. She went through a lot of very difficult things in her life but somehow retained a sense of childlike wonder at the world; she loved watching clouds drift by and, while she could still hear it, was very moved by music. I know that she was proud of my writing because she told me so; she came to my readings, she treasured my chapbooks, she copied out a poem I had written and kept it in her wallet until the paper fell apart. So I don’t have to guess how she would have responded to the book, which I’m very grateful for. But at the same time, we never talked about some of the bigger gaps between us, like my gender or sexuality, which I know she had questions about. I waited to change my name until she passed away. But she never commented sideways on my clothing choices or hairstyles, except perhaps to say I should wear a hat in cold weather; she welcomed and adored the trans and queer chosen family I have. She’s present quite literally in the book in a couple of poems that are about her, which she would have loved—she was a Leo who thrived on being the centre of attention. Her love for me is a steadying force in my life, even now that she’s dead. I called on that force to express some of the emotional truths in the book. I hope people can feel her presence in the book, just as I hope her presence is felt in all things I do, as she is always a part of me now.
I loved getting to know people’s stories and seeing people shine on stage. It made me more trusting that there is an audience for what can sometimes feel quite niche.
Estlin McPhee
RT: Yeesh, your nonna sounds wonderful. Another person who seems to have had a really meaningful impact on you was Silvia Knittel, who passed away in 2018 after teaching English at Langley Fine Arts School for 22 years. Could you talk about the role she played in bringing you to writing, and to poetry?
EM: Silvia was hugely important to my development as a writer and a person, and while I can imagine exactly her response to me handing her my published book, I have a lot of grief that our interactions only take place in my imagination now. I majored in Creative Writing during my last two years of high school at LFAS and she was my Creative Writing teacher, as well as my English and English Literature teacher. As a teacher, she was what one might call kooky: she would lecture us while wearing a gorilla mask, instruct us to climb out of the classroom window to go roving around town, tell everyone to bite into a carrot at the exact same time and then write about that sound. She loved literature and she loved people. Her enthusiasm was infectious. I still remember some of the poems she shared with us because she was so taken with them, so delighted to dive into their sounds and pull apart their symbolism, that I fell in love with those poems too. I went into the Creative Writing major as a fiction writer and when we did our first unit on poetry, Silvia wrote “Write a poem” on the whiteboard and gave us two hours to do so, with zero previous instruction on how one might do that or even what a poem was. I was honestly a bit pissed off, sitting there feeling directionless and like I didn’t know how to get started. And then I wrote something, because I had to, and I kept writing. That open space was all I needed.
Silvia believed so completely that I was talented and had something special to say that I found it easy to believe that, too, at a pivotal time for believing in oneself as a young writer. After high school, she had me back to share my work with her current students and eventually hired me as a mentor as part of a special program she’d set up for her graduating students. And we would visit and write to each other; she always wanted to read what I was working on. Before she died, I could easily say that she was the person who had read more of my writing than anyone else in the world. I miss that, but I miss her, as a person, much more. I still think of things I want to tell her all the time to elicit her laugh, which she always committed to fully, her hair flying over her glasses while she leaned over to slap her knees.
Estlin McPhee is a writer and librarian who lives on the traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. They hold an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and are the author of the poetry chapbook Shapeshifters (Rahila’s Ghost Press, 2018). For many years, they co-organized REVERB, a queer reading series in Vancouver. In Your Nature, Estlin’s debut poetry collection, was published in April 2025 by Brick Books.
Rob Taylor’s fifth poetry collection is Weather (Gaspereau Press, 2024). He lives with his family in Port Moody, BC. You can read more of his interviews on his website.