Join Rollie Pemberton this week in Montreal as we talk about Rollie's memoir, Bedroom Rapper, which serves not only as a personal history but also as a history of rap and a documentation of creative communities in Edmonton and Montreal. We also talk about his music as Cadence Weapon, his time as the Poet Laureate of Edmonton, our mutual respect and admiration for Buck 65, what it's like to write memoir at a young age, the difference between the practices of writing songs and writing poems, and what it felt like to be booed by a massive audience of Rihanna fans.
Rollie Pemberton, aka Cadence Weapon, is a Canadian rapper, producer, writer, and DJ whose latest album Parallel World won the 2021 Polaris Music Prize and whose memoir Bedroom Rapper was published by Penguin Random House in 2022.
Order Bedroom Rapper here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/671425/bedroom-rapper-by-rollie-pemberton/9780771051883
Join Šari Dale this week in Prince George. In this episode we talk about Šari's debut poetry book, Para-Social Butterfly, in which the narrator, a young woman disillusioned with her life, decides to live in a digital space called The Ultra-Glam, blurring the lines between the reality experienced in physical and digital spaces. Šari also talks about how her work as a copywriter plays into the writing of her poetry, as well as early experiences in internet chat rooms and current experiences in social media. We discuss persona and influence, her obsession with reality TV, and her current work which draws from the influence of nature and of monster trucks.
Šari Dale writes from Prince George, BC on unceded ancestral lands of the Lheidli T'enneh. She holds a B.A. in English and Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia, where she was the recipient of The Creative Writing Prize. Her poetry has been published in Arc, Grain, and The Malahat Review among others and anthologized in Best Canadian Poetry 2021 and Poetry Daily.
Order Para-Social Butterfly: https://www.metatron.press/work/para-social-butterfly/
Join legendary Canadian poet bill bissett this week on Metacösm. Deemed The Godfather of Canadian Poetry, bill bissett is a prolific artist whose writing and painting span seven decades. In that time bill has published over seventy books as well as created countless paintings and albums of music, has performed hundreds of readings, ran blewointment magazine and blewointment press, was the subject of documentaries, was persecuted for his work by conservative politicians, received support from Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, and bpNichol, was sampled by The Chemical Brothers, has been an advocate for gay rights, women's rights, and the environment, and so much more. His writing, which is lyrical at heart and employs a style often described as unconventional, employs purposeful misspelling, visual and auditory elements, and focuses on love, pain, death, politics, sex, longing, beauty, and an attempt to make sense of the senselessness of this world. He is a true artist.
In this episode our host Brad Casey pieces together several recordings done with bill over the last seven years, beginning in 2014 when he contacted bill to do a formal interview on his life, an interview which became lost. Since then Brad has conducted several informal interviews with bill, the latest being in late 2021, and pieced together clips from all of these interviews to create this episode which serves primarily as a portrait of Bill Bissett but also a tribute to the friendship that has grown between bill and Brad over those years.
Join Marlowe Granados this week in Toronto. Find out why Marlowe prefers hanging out with poets over fiction writers, or why she eye-rolled her way through her university creative writing program. We also get a behind-the-scenes peek at what it was like to publish and release Happy Hour, including being profiled in New York Magazine, hiding out in her hotel during her press tour in NYC, and what it's ultimately like to be perceived through your writing.
Marlowe is a writer and filmmaker. She co-hosts The Mean Reds, a podcast dedicated to women-led films. Her advice column, "Designs for Living," appears in The Baffler. After spending time in New York and London, Granados currently resides in Toronto. Happy Hour is her début novel.
Order Happy Hour: https://www.marlowegranados.com/
With music by Blue Hawaii: https://bluehawaii.bandcamp.com/
Join writer and poet Ali Pinkney at her kitchen table for the latest episode of Metacösm this week.
Ali Pinkney is a literary writer based on Tkaron:to/Toronto where she is a graduate student with the Department of English in the Field of Creative Writing at the University of Toronto. She published her debut collection of poetry, Tampion, with Metatron Press in 2014. Ali holds a BA in English and Creative Writing (2017) and an MA in English Literature (2021) from Concordia University in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. Her thesis work focused on Percy Bysshe Shelley's idiosyncratic use of extended and accumulative similes. She sees Shelley's operations with this poetic technique as a way of producing matrices of reciprocity that poetically engender a politics of sympathetic intimacy that values plurality and alterity over the logic of likeness and categorical subsumption. Currently, Ali works as a teaching assistant of undergraduate creative writing at the University of Toronto.
Join writer Lee Suksi this week for our third episode of Metacösm.
Lee Suksi's debut book The Nerves (Metatron Press, 2020) won the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Erotica. Their art writing accompanies and has been presented at exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Cooper Cole, Georgia Scherman Projects, Susan Hobbs, Towards, The Table, and Calaboose. They’ve presented at Doored, Images Festival and Blackwood Gallery.
Join writer Fariha Roísín this week for our second episode of Metacösm.
Fariha Róisín is a multidisciplinary artist, born in Ontario, Canada. She was raised in Sydney, Australia, and is based in Los Angeles, California. As a Muslim queer Bangladeshi, she is interested in the margins, liminality, otherness, and the mercurial nature of being. Her work has pioneered a refreshing and renewed conversation about wellness, contemporary Islam, and queer identities and has appeared in The New York Times, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Vice, Village Voice, and others.
She is currently the co-founder and director of Studio Ānanda, a space of cultivation and archive for radical, anti-colonial wellness; deputy editor of Violet Book, and sits on the Board of Directors at Find Center. She also teaches a quarterly class called Writing with Vulnerability and writes a weekly newsletter.
Róisín has published a book of poetry entitled How To Cure A Ghost (Abrams, 2019), a journal called Being In Your Body (Abrams, 2019) and a novel named Like A Bird (Unnamed Press, 2020).
Her first work of non-fiction is forthcoming and entitled Who Is Wellness For? An Examination of Wellness Culture and Who it Leaves Behind, which will be published by HarperWave, on June 14th, 2022. Her second book of poetry is Survival Takes A Wild Imagination and will be published by Andrews McNeel, Fall 2023.
Join poet Ivanna Baranova this week for our first episode of Metacösm.
Ivanna Baranova is the author of CONFIRMATION BIAS (Metatron Press, 2019). Her poems have been published by or are forthcoming with Cixous72, Jubilat, Newest York, and Peace on Earth Review. She lives in Los Angeles and helps with communications at The Poetry Project.
