Paula Turcotte in Conversation with Cassidy McFadzean
Cassidy McFadzean is the author of three books of poetry: Crying Dress (House of Anansi, 2024), Drolleries (McClelland & Stewart 2019), shortlisted for the Raymond Souster Award, and Hacker Packer (M&S 2015), winner of two Saskatchewan Book Awards and a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award. Her fiction has appeared in Joyland, Maisonneuve, and EVENT, and is forthcoming in Dead Writers (Invisible Publishing, 2024). Her chapbook, Third State of Being (Gaspereau Press, 2022), was a finalist for the bpNichol Chapbook Award. Cassidy was born in Regina and currently lives in Toronto.
Paula Turcotte was born and raised on Treaty 7 land, home of the Siksika, Piikani, Kainai, Tsuut'ina and Stoney Nakoda First Nations. Her work has been published in Arc Poetry, untethered, PRISM international, and elsewhere, and she was the 2023 People's Choice winner in CV2's 2-Day Poetry Contest. Paula is a poetry editor at MAYDAY.
Paula: Hi Cassidy! I’ll try not to rave too much, but I’m such a big fan of your work. It’s really great to speak with you about Crying Dress. This is such a rich and gorgeous book.
Even though it’s cliché to say there’s poetry in everything, I kept coming back to that thought while reading. Your writing touches on everything from Powerpuff Girls to lentils to cherry angiomas (thanks for teaching me what those are called). I love how much your poems lean into specificity. After thinking about this, I became really curious about what your writing process looks like on a day-to-day or week-to-week basis.
Cassidy McFadzean, Crying Dress.
House of Anansi, 2024. $21.99 CAD.
Order a copy from House of Anansi.
Cassidy: Paula, that is so kind! The feeling is definitely mutual, and I’m such a fan of the poems in your forthcoming chapbook Permutations, which I was honoured to edit for Baseline Press.
I love this question. There’s definitely an encyclopaedic urge in my writing to try to fit everything into a poem, to push against the boundaries of what a poem can contain. I think it varies for each project, but in Crying Dress I rarely sat down to write a poem from beginning to end. A lot of the poems were composed in a more fragmented way, taking phone notes of lines that came to me, overheard segments of speech, unusual images I encountered. Once I had 10 or so lines that felt similar in mood or sentiment, I would compile them in a Word doc and start the process of collaging the lines into a poem, adding images, refining the language.
Paula: I’d be remiss not to mention how much architectural influence there is in this book. In the opening poem, “Chamber Music”, the speaker lays plain their honesty in the way of brutalism: “What does it mean to be vulnerable? / I don’t disguise my raw materials”. And from “The Crown Was an End Stop”: “You called architecture / a detour to the human.” Can you speak a bit about the inspiration you find in the intersection of design and humanity?
Cassidy: The architectural element really arose from a personal connection. My boyfriend Kourosh is an architect and through our relationship, I started thinking more explicitly about the buildings I spend time in. When we met, I was living at 100 Spadina Road in Toronto, a building made famous by Estonian architect Uno Prii’s inventive forms and we eventually moved into a one-bedroom in that same building. Many of the striking elements of the building—cut-outs on the balconies, or the space-age like form of the exterior feel really charming or even kitsch. I became fascinated by these type of aesthetic flourishes to a building as well as architectural terms that, because I haven’t studied architecture in a formal sense, sounded strange or unusual to me—the perfect material for a poem.
That specific line is borrowed from something Kourosh said early in our relationship. He was reflecting how our conversations about architecture walking around Toronto were one way that we got to know one another. Walking down the street and talking about various buildings is a way of expressing different views and preferences, who you are as a person, a way of talking about yourself and forming connections. I like this idea of a physical “detour,” as though we can access the human through spending time in a building, reflecting on our routines and rituals, even the way that people layer meaning onto space.
Paula: I was so struck by how you employ rhyme and wordplay as architects for the poems themselves. One of your speakers even laments the way they “languish, in language.” How do you see the role of sound in your work?
Cassidy: I’m sort of obsessed with sound and musicality, and for me that’s when a poem really comes alive. I honestly think my interest in sound play stems from my core relationship with language, which is one of dysfluency. As a child I stuttered so badly that speaking often felt frustrating, and I had a very mercurial relationship with language. I hated the way that words betrayed me, and I had to invent ways to learn how to do things that came naturally for others such as ordering at a restaurant, or even introducing myself. Maybe this experience imbued language with an otherworldly power, as if every conversation was a riddle or a spell. It was through rhythm and musicality, stretching out a sound, or using a synonym to talk around the word that I wanted to say that I was able to coax the sentence out of my mouth.
In this collection, after encountering the work of other poets who stutter like Jordon Scott and JJJJJerome Ellis, I started thinking more explicitly about my relationship to language and dysfluency. Do I intentionally write poems that are easier for me to say? What would happen if I wrote a poem that I actually struggled to read aloud? Some of the poems like “Feral Parenteral” feature this heightened musicality, sort of like tongue-twisters for the stuttering voice. In others, I tried to replicate the feeling of stuttering itself, like the pun “Heir / Air / Err” in “Enfilade Terrible.” I like the space that stuttering opens up—it forces me to think more expansively about language, to consider alternatives to clear, linear narratives such as fragmentation or association. Sometimes I like to linger in that space of pure sound, or like the line you reference, to lean into my difficulty with language, and allow myself to languish a little.
Paula: Your titles (“Mutter of Pearl”, “It Worms My Heart”, “Well We’ll Well”) often play with the reader’s expectations. What usually comes first for you—a poem or its title?
Cassidy: Often the poem will come first and a title will come to me later, or I’ll use one of the lines I cut from the poem as a title. I wanted to have fun with the titles, and convey a sense of playfulness. I think in “Mutter of Pearl,” one can trace the associative connections from the iridescent mother-of-pearl to the muttering of the final line, those “vibrations / thrumming against my body.” In “It Worms My Heart,” I was interested in writing a love poem where the speaker is a little embarrassed about writing a love poem, and is adopting a breezy affect, so making the word play with “heart worms”—something decidedly unromantic but that still conveys “puppy love”— felt right. “Well We’ll Well” is another case of trying to replicate the “luxurious self-taught stammer” referenced in the last line. I like to think of titles as riffing or conveying the mood or feeling of a poem, maybe offering another kind of entry point or even a slight “detour” to the poem itself.
Paula: A lot of the time, you eschew punctuation—especially periods—in favour of caesuras. In the titular poem “Crying Dress,” the speaker imagines “each fragment opening up the text.” Is that what you hope for in the blank spaces of your poems?
Cassidy: I don’t know what happened in the course of writing this book, but I became very allergic to conventional punctuation. I think it started in a few of the poems and then spread to the others. I definitely was interested in introducing more associative spaces in a poem, as well as these pauses. Some of the poems are written in monostichs, sort of as discrete lines collaged together, and without end-stops you can sometimes read a line ambiguously, attaching it either to the clause that precedes or the one that follows. This to me felt really exciting and expansive.
In the title poem “Crying Dress” I was referring to Heather Christle’s The Crying Book but the line does lend itself to an ars poetica for my book as well. What if instead of feeling frustrated by fragments, treating them as though they’re incomplete, we took fragments as generative pathways to follow? Introducing the caesurae also highlights my interest in collage and juxtaposition. I wanted to remove the emphasis on a poem having one specific meaning, and allow for the multiplicity of meanings that arise from any number of reading experiences one may have.
Paula: These poems are awash in flowers—too many to list, though I have to say I especially loved the recurring tulips and lilacs. What, for you, feels fruitful about flora?
Cassidy: I loved walking by all the flower gardens in Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood when I lived at 100 Spadina Road, and I also spent a lot of time at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens while writing this book. It’s one of my favourite places to visit, and I always feel really at-peace and rejuvenated surrounded by flowers. Lilacs in particular I associate with the lilac bush that grows outside my childhood home in Regina. I remember my mother clipping a bough of flowers to bring inside each spring. My mom died suddenly in 2020, which a few of the poems reference. The smell of lilacs is so nostalgic for me, and I’ll always associate it with my mom, which feels really comforting and I wanted to include it in the book. Flowers also have great names. I had a lot of fun titling poems things like “Tender Perennial,” and “Deranged Hydrangea.”
Paula: You wrote Crying Dress over the span of five years, and it’s divided into four sections for the four seasons. How did this organization come to be?
Cassidy: The sections came pretty late in the editing process. As I looked for similar threads, I realized that many of the poems convey some mood or aspect of one of the seasons, and the sections arose pretty naturally. I realize this may lead some to read the book chronologically, and the book does sort of follow a narrative if one wanted to place a story on it, but I didn’t write the poems in that order or with that intention in mind. I wrote these poems while spending a lot of time outside, walking around Toronto, or getting to know Brooklyn in the two years I lived there for my MFA in fiction. Most of the book is about observing daily life: walking to Brooklyn College where I taught classes, going to an art gallery, watching the bird-watchers in Prospect Park. Seasons are also cyclical and to go back to the flowers, those green sprouts reaching through the earth feel really primordial and give me something to hold onto when I lose all perspective and start to despair.
Paula: I’m also curious about your editing process for this book and the iterations it went through, especially since it took shape over a relatively long period of time. How did you know when you were ‘finished’?
Cassidy: I tend to write a lot, so a lot of poems get cut, and I also went through 4 or 5 different titles for the book. I think I reached out to Kevin Connolly, my editor for my first two collections, when the book was 75% finished. When we started working together, I had four sections but not the seasons, and half of the poems had conventional punctuation, and half didn’t. Kevin gave really perceptive edits and also suggested the title, which helped me to envision it as a book. So most of the poems were more or less finished, especially the ones stretching back a few years, but a lot of the scaffolding hadn’t yet been put in place. I had a bit of time in between Anansi accepting the book and final edits so I was able to include some of the newer Brooklyn poems. Working with Bardia Sinaee as my copy-editor was also really helpful with the final stages of editing and thinking intentionally about the caesurae. I probably could have tinkered with the poems forever, but at a certain point I had to let go, happy that the book was in good hands.