Interviewed by Duncan Catellier
Daniel Zomparelli is the founder of Poetry is Dead magazine and a prominent literary voice in the gay community of Vancouver. In 2011, he was the recipient of Pandora’s Collective Publishers of Magazines Award. His latest book, Everything Is Awful and You’re a Terrible Person, was published in the spring of 2017. It is a collection of interconnected short stories in which he meshes poetry and fiction prose to great effect. He has also published two books of poetry, one of which he co-wrote with Dina Del Bucchia.
I was interested in interviewing Daniel Zomparelli because of what he has done with his writing and his work as an editor, which is incredibly inspirational to young up-and-coming literary voices. I can only hope to one day be able to deliver honesty with such tender sass in my writing as well as in my responses to simple interview questions. I asked him about his beginnings and about how I should get my own start (by proxy of an elusive fictional character, who may or may not in some regards reflect my personality).
When did you decide to you wanted writing to be your career?
I was in University and was working on LSATS and getting my GPA up to go to law school. To get my GPA up I had to switch all my courses to English Lit because it was where my grades were stronger. I had always wanted to be a writer, but had been trained by my parents, who came to Canada with no money, to think of a financial career over one I enjoyed. I remember that in some classes the professors would let me write poems and short stories instead of essays and I was getting perfect marks. It brought me so much joy to create worlds, especially since I was closeted at the time. I found that I’d rather be happy than financially successful. I told my mom and she was devastated. I, on the other hand, was excited to do something I loved.
Tell me a bit about how you started Poetry is Dead magazine. I know you were young, but did you have any prior experience with editing, and how did the idea come about?
I had plenty of experience in magazine publishing but not in editing. I wanted to start a poetry magazine that represented all the things I like about poetry paired with reading events that were a little looser than the ones I was attending. I was young and wanted to have a fun party but also hear poetry and attempted to figure out what that could look like.
As for the actual magazine, it was a very tough learning lesson in editing. I made a LOT of mistakes and sent a lot of apology emails, but don’t regret creating it. I’m happy to pass it along now as I think there are more in-tune editors than me and I want to see the magazine change and grow.
How has being the editor for Poetry is Dead helped with your own writing?
I’m not sure if it did help all that much. I’m already and was an avid reader of poetry, and that helped inform my writing. I would say that the people who I befriended and admired that we published in the magazine helped shape my writing. Poetry Is Dead helped more with my career as a poet, via networking and creating an additional space within the poetry world.
I’m curious about your collaboration with Dina Del Bucchia on Rom Com. There aren’t names attached to individual titles in the book, so I’m wondering what the process of writing it was like. Did you co-write poems or is the book a collection of both of your separate works?
It’s a mixture of both. We have separate poems, but even those were edited by both of us. And many of the poems were collaboratively written. We had a Google doc, and we started by writing call-and-response poems to each other, but then it got weird and we got experimental. So the poems expanded, and changed, and edited, and remixed, and moved around. It really did become a collaborative book that I’m super proud of. I don’t fully believe books need to be written by one person. I think we are just stuck in that mindset, or maybe writers are too controlling to collaborate. I think Dina and I will produce another book again, I hope.
A lot of your work centers on gay culture in Vancouver. Do you feel that occupying quite a specific demographic niche has helped your voice reach a wider audience?
Honestly, no. I think people expect me to write something outside of the gay experience and I just don’t want to. For the most part, writing that centers on gay culture will more than likely stay within a gay market, and I’m fine with that. I think people expect gay books to be an “It Gets Better” campaign, and I want to write about the muck. I want to see the humanity in our shittier moments, in our fuck-ups, in our messes. Also I am very bad at sticking to one form or another, so I enjoy experimental writing. For all these reasons I think I’ll always be in that niche category. And that’s cool with me because I get anxiety when an audience is too big, which causes me to stop writing altogether. If I ever write a bestselling book, please make sure there is some sort of panic room I can go in.
Here’s a hypothetical situation: you’re walking down the street, it’s kind of a rainy day in Vancouver, and you come across a young man who’s not looking so happy at the bus stop. Something comes over you. You feel the need to stop and ask him what’s wrong, so you do. You don’t expect it but he opens up to you and tells you he is a young gay writer who is afraid to take his experiences and put them into his work. He’s not sure it will appeal to the audience he wants. What do you say to him?
I would probably say that’s not why he is sad, but then also explain that worrying about audience is for someone who already has a book deal. No magical being is going to show up at your door once you’ve written something and be like “HERE IS A BOOK DEAL!” If someone does show up like that, they will probably steal your identity and get thirty credit cards made in your name. Write what you want to write. If you decide that it isn’t what an audience wants, then fuck that audience and get a new one. Also, not all writing has to be for an audience, you can write your experience down and say, “Cool, this was for me. I feel better and now I can work on writing something else.” There are hundreds of poems I’ve deleted that were just for me and I don’t regret deleting them. In this scenario you described, for some reason I imagine I’ve had three beers and I’m yelling at him, so I don’t know if my advice is sound. I grew up in an Italian household where yelling means caring.
To be more sensitive to this imaginary young gay: writing your experience is scary because it means an audience can potentially reject some form of you, or not even like you. That’s an understandable fear. Make sure that if it is something that will hurt too deeply to be rejected for that maybe it isn’t time for it to be sent out and some growing and healing needs to happen. If you’re ready to share your experience, then prepare for some people not to like it because not everyone is going to like it. Have you seen Goodreads? You’re going to get some one-stars and it will sting, but you’ll be okay. Rejection is a part of growing as a writer, and your experiences are valid even if they don’t make it on the page.
What is, in your opinion, the single most important piece of advice you could give to the young emerging writers out there?
It would depend on the person so I think my advice is to my younger self and maybe that will be of help: Learn to love what you write, and not the idea of being a writer. Being a writer is not very exciting. Creating art is exciting. Being a successful writer means going to literary parties where there is still a cash bar and maybe a free snack or two and reminding people that, actually, they have met you several times before and no you are not that old guy from that TV show. I think enjoying what you do is more important than people enjoying what you do, but that’s probably why I haven’t written an award-winning bestseller.
Duncan Catellier is a BFA student in Creative Writing at UBC and is well on his way to completing a six-year degree. Before UBC, he completed a two-year diploma in Creative Writing as well at Langara College. His writing aspirations range from anywhere between chalking poetry on sidewalks to having several of his screenplays produced by Hollywood.
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