rob mclennan : 2025 VERSeFest interviews: Em Dial

  

 

 

 

Em Dial (she/they) is a writer born and raised in the Bay Area of California, currently living in Toronto, Ontario. They are a Kundiman Fellow and recipient of the 2020 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award and 2019 Mary C. Mohr Poetry Award. The author of In the Key of Decay (Palimpsest Press, 2024), her work can also be found in the Literary Review of Canada, Arc Poetry Magazine, the Permanent Record Anthology from Nightboat Books, and elsewhere. 

Em Dial reads in Ottawa on Tuesday, March 25 as part of VERSeFest 2025.

rob mclennan: I’d first caught a glimpse of your work through the anthology Permanent Record: Poetics Towardsthe Archive (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2025). How did you get involved in that project?

Em Dial: It’s such an honor to be included in this anthology that’s full of writers I admire. I received the call for submissions through a mailing list for Asian diasporic writers, and the project seemed so fitting for some poems I had been working on at the time that were about the legacy of Quadroon Balls in the Antebellum American South. As someone who is entering the world of archival and documentary poetics, I really admire Naima Yael Tokunow’s editorial vision for this collection. 

rm: How does this particular piece fit with the other work you’ve been doing, such as the poems in In the Key of Decay? Structurally, the poem feels quite different from the work in that collection.

ED: The pieces in Permanent Record feel like clicking the magnification on a microscope up by a lens. Where In the Key of Decay is grasping at these big ideas of race, science, and gender and trying to spread them out on the page for examination, my more recent work is more constrained, trying to take a very specific idea and draw out the boundaries around it to better understand it.

rm: Part of what struck about the poems in your debut was the range of formal exploration throughout the collection. Was there a concern at any point about how to make the collection cohere through such variety? And what prompted you to attempt so many directions?

ED: Part of the range is due to the fact that this collection is a compilation of years of work. Over those years I grew more confident as a writer and willing to stray from traditional forms. I think the other reason for the diversity in forms is my intention to make this work one of attempting, of trying, of failing to find an answer. If I were to plod along in couplets for 80 pages, I think I would have felt too direct in my approach to poetic inquiry. In arranging the final manuscript, I did have some anxiety about the formal incoherence, but ultimately it felt like it built towards the intention of the collection and became one of my favorite things about the book. 

rm: I wouldn’t say an incoherence, but certainly an exploration that opens the possibilities of the coherence of In the Key of Decay. Has your sense of the poem, or the manuscript, shifted since the assemblage of this debut collection? Are you still exploring multiple directions through form?

ED: My sense of both has been constantly bouncing around since starting my MFA program last fall. In In the Key of Decay, I thought of both the poem and the manuscript as a whole as an opportunity for charting and sense-making. I think recently I’ve been learning about and utilizing the poem as more of an agent of chaos, of both making and unmaking. What this means for me formally is still to be determined, but I’ve been taking more interest in received forms and the opportunity of letting form come to you rather than seeking it out.

rm: Did you have any difficulty translating more performative elements of your work for the sake of working a printed book? There are moments within the collection I can feel and even hear the performance come through. Were you concerned about how a piece that might work well in performance might sit on the page?

ED: That was a huge concern for some of the pieces in the collection that I had initially written for slam stages. But rethinking how to communicate some of the same energy visually was one of my favorite aspects of developing the book. It felt like working on a sudoku or some other kind of puzzle, trying to fit pieces into their proper spot in relation to one another. I think much of my more recent work has tended toward quiet and reservation, so it was a fun challenge to revisit older work and think about how to preserve their louder integrity. 

rm: I’m fascinated in how your work articulates the complications and collisions of culture, borders, family and history, from external forces to the internal. How easy or difficult was it for you to open these conversations, some of which fall into the deeply personal, through the form of poetry?

ED: It has felt like poetry is the only way. I think I have felt and witnessed these collisions at global and personal scales for all of my adult life, and became deeply obsessed and troubled by them. Poetry became the only lens that allowed me to zoom from the large to the small and back, and similarly from the individual to the universal. I can be quite reserved in day to day life, but strangely, I seldom feel hesitant to implicate the details of my own life in the context of the issues I discuss. It feels like the only way.

 

 

 

 

 

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. His latest title is Snow day (Spuyten Duyvil, 2025). This fall, University of Calgary Press will be publishing his poetry collection the book of sentences, a follow-up to the book of smaller (2022). The current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta.

nina jane drystek : 2025 VERSeFest interviews: Oana Avasilichioaei

 

 

 

Oana Avasilichioaei interweaves sound, poetry, performance, and translation to expand and trouble ideas of language, histories, polyphonic structures, and borders of listening. She has created many performance/sound works that mix electronics, ambient textures, noise, and vocal play, published seven collections of poetry hybrids, including Chambersonic (Talonbooks 2024), award-nominated Eight Track (Talonbooks 2019), and Limbinal (Talonbooks 2015), and written a libretto for a one-act opera Cells of Wind (FAWN Chamber Collective, 2022). She is based in Montreal/Tiohtià:ke.

Oana Avasilichioaei reads in Ottawa on Tuesday, March 25 as part of VERSeFest 2025.

nina jane drystek: Hi Oana, I am very excited that you are coming to Ottawa for VERSeFest as part of the Riverbed Reading Series showcase, curated by myself and Ellen Chang-Richardson. We have both really enjoyed your past work, and as poets who also experiment with sound and the page, we were very excited by the forms in CHAMBERSONIC.

Oana Avasilichioaei: Thank you very much for the invitation and interest in this work.

nj: CHAMBERSONIC is very much about sound, and the pieces in the collection reflect on the role sound plays in our world. CHAMBERSONIC features various sound pieces which you link to through QR codes in the book. As a poet, how did you move into sound art and performance?

O: I’ve always been fascinated with the performative space, even as a very young writer in the late ’90s when I first participated in open mics (in cafés and bars around Vancouver) and started to understand that the live stage is very different from the static page. Later, after co-writing Expeditions of a Chimæra (Book*hug, 2009) with Erín Moure and performing dual-voice readings with her, I got a glimpse of the vast potential of the non-singular voice. Soon after, I acquired my first pedal (a BOSS VE-20 vocal processor) and started experimenting with layering and multiplying my voice. This opened up a vast terrain of sound exploration, which has continued and expanded over the years. My writing, performance, sound art practices have become increasingly intertwined and cross-pollinating.

nj: When you are creating sound works, how does the page play into how you conceive them? Or do you start with sound itself? Space?

O: At this point, thinking about what “starts” something might be a kind of chicken and egg quandary. The catalysts for the sound works may be a text, a particular sound vocabulary or research, a concept, a graphic score, a material exploration of objects or tools, but even when it “starts” with a specific text, I might be driven to write that text partly because of some other sound or visual work I have previously made.

For every performance that involves my written texts, I never take a text exactly as I wrote it for the page and then simply add sound to it. Instead, I always extract, remake, recompose, resonify the text I am attempting to make performative. I re-envision it into a sort of score, which then no longer works on the page but only works in its new sonic medium. For me, this transformation is absolutely necessary to breathing sonic life into the paginated text.

nj: In CHAMBERSONIC, you have two variations on a piece. “Let Form Be Oral” is a graphic score, which places text within a musical staff, and “Let Form be Aural” is a QR code link to a recording of the piece. These are followed by a related third piece that is an essay and text interpretation of the sound work through the experience of recording it. Similarly, “Fellow Statements,” and “Chambersonic: Soundpace // Eavesdropping on the Process of a Dilettante Composer” is all about the process of creation. Why was including pieces about the experience of creation integral to this collection?

O: CHAMBERSONIC explores how sound and voices move in and through various types of chambers (bodies, organs, rooms, small and large spaces, theatres, as well a social constructs, which can act as enclosures) and how such chambers shape, determine, make possible, and also limit what these sounds and voices can be or do, how they behave, what they might become or transform into. As such, the book-album is more concerned with process, with how something becomes, and less concerned with the end results, the “products.” I felt this was important to explore in our contemporary moment when we are so obsessed with the immediate, the product, the outcome. Therefore, I used various strategies to embody the idea of process, including transmuting works into various media and writing about the act of creation.

nj: In addition to poems and QR code links, your collection also includes photographs and poetic essays, and visual poems. In that sense it is truly a hybrid work but in book form. Can you talk about how you pulled all these threads together?

O: This goes back to some of what I said in the previous answer, in that the threads weaving this web are the movements and existences, possibilities and impossibilities, enactments and silences of voices and sounds in various types of spaces. Altogether, the work endeavours to materialize and activate (in language, in the body, on the page, in an environment) an in-between space, something that is not of one genre, field, medium but exists and translates between and is materially made out of two or more genres, fields, media.

nj: There are many references and influences listed in your book, from the epigraphs to the acknowledgements. While reading your book I was thinking about Cecilia Vicuña’s Spit Temple, which was an important text for me as I began to think about sound and space. I had this little “aha!” moment while reading the acknowledgements when you mentioned it as a book that inspired your thinking while conceiving this collection. As your work is so interdisciplinary, I was wondering if you could talk a bit more about your influences and how they informed the ways you think about sound and language.

O: My influences are multiple, cross-genre, cross-generational, cross-historical, and plurilingual. They might include anything from poetry, philosophy, social discourse, sound and performance theory to experimental theatre and dance to electronic and ambient music to visual art and sound art. They might also include topographies, technologies, vegetation, industrial spaces, interior design and architecture, wind, colour, rock formations, urban alleys, clouds, ancient manuscripts, political transcripts. I guess what I am trying to say through this non-exhaustive list is that ultimately it is a deep curiosity about and an attentive listening to the world around me that propels most of what I write or make.

nj: The lines in “Chambersonic: A Graphic Score” reminded me of the work of Canadian-American visual artist Agnes Martin. Did her work filter in while you were working on this piece?

O: I’ve certainly been a longtime admirer of Agnes Martin, and the 2017 retrospective of her work, which I saw at the Guggenheim in New York, remains one of my favorite exhibitions. I would see any influence she may have on my work as a huge compliment. But there was something else that I wished to develop through “Chambersonic: A Graphic Score,” which is based on the musical staff. Whereas in traditional music notation, the notes arranged on the staff are the markers of sound, I wanted to transform the five lines of the staff into markers of sound in these drawings. The arrangement, spacing, length, thickness, shape, proximity, colour, and texture of the lines combine to suggest various gestures, qualities, volumes, tones, and frequencies of sound.

nj: This collection was exciting for me because its language and ideas resonated with those that I have been turning over lately. Of particular interest to me is the presence and relationship of the earth and sound. In your poem “Voice Scree,” you allude to the shifting of stone, both visually and thematically. In the piece “Chambersonic: Porous Seuil Possible Solo” you mention erratics among other aspects of the natural world: “Whose lifetime? You may ask. The insect’s? The tree’s? The human’s? The erratic’s? The planet’s?”. Perhaps this is too granular, but I would like to know why “scree,” why “erratics” resonate for you? And what role the earth and natural world play in your conception of sound art.

O: I imagine erratics, stones, and scree as the earth’s “noises,” as dissonant and cacophonous presences in their environments, but also ones that are very old and that shift over time, either very slowly or suddenly, so they also point to different notions of time. From these and from other patterns of the natural world, I draw inspiration for both written and sonic forms and structures and of how time can function within them. I often think of sound and language as environments, and I try to consider how natural, built, or socio-politically constructed environments affect those existing within them and how they in turn affect these contexts. As a species, we’ve become so disconnected from the natural world, which is in part what has led to the environmental crisis we’re currently facing. I want to resist this disconnection in any way that I can. Listening, doing field recordings, and experimenting with the interplay between naturally occurring sounds and mechanically or electronically made sounds are some of the ways I try to do this.

nj: Reading and listening to the works in this collection, I started to imagine what a performance of CHAMBERSONIC is like, and I cannot wait to see and hear it. I was hoping you could tell readers and people who will be attending VERSeFest a bit about what they can expect from a performance of CHAMBERSONIC.

O: The performance will focus on two sound works that feature vocal experiments and doublings, electronics, different types of microphones (which capture sound in a variety of ways), and also the drones of motors and electricity. 

 

 

 

 

 

nina jane drystek is a poet and performer based in Ottawa, Ontario, unceded lands of the Algonquin-Anishinaabe. she is the author of the chapbooks missing matrilineal (above/ground, 2023), a : of : in (Gap Riot Press, 2021) and knewro suite (Simulacrum Press, 2019), and two collaborative chapbooks with the collective vii, holy disorder of being (Gap Riot, 2022) and Towers (Collusion Books, 2021). she writes and performs sound poetry and was shortlisted for the 2020 Bronwen Wallace Poetry Award as well as the 2021 Priscilla Uppal Poetry Prize. more info at textcurious.ca