Sandra Brewster (Photo: sandrabrewster.com)

Regardless of medium, be it video, paint or photography, Toronto-based multimedia artist and art educator Sandra Brewster has a story to tell and will do so in the most vividly expressive fashion possible. Brewster has successfully navigated the Canadian artistic granting program process to achieve her current level of success, and her installations have been featured on a national and international level.

Currently focused on holistically telling the Black community experience, both in Canada and abroad, Brewster recently secured a grant and completed an artist residency at Alice Yard in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. URBAN/Intersection connected with the talented Brewster to discuss African-Canadian art, the power of mixed media and what goes into a successful artist grant proposal.

State who you are and what you do.

My name is Sandra Brewster and I am a visual artist.

How would you best categorize/define your art? How would you describe your work to a complete stranger?

My work consists of drawings and paintings and mixed media pieces that examine and narrate concepts around identity and representation among people of African descent. In my current work I use a symbol called “The Smith” – an afro head character with the Smith section of the phone book transferred in the face area. I use these characters in visual narratives. I also grid them on a large scale with images – mostly people – transferred among them.

What is the most important idea, issue, dilemma or thing that you want to address in your art?

My ongoing interest has been in realistic representations and creating a focus on natural characteristics — some that may have been regarded as negative or ugly and/or transformed into a caricature. I believe that an awareness of individuality within communities exposes the diversity within and challenges the stereotypes onto which they are bombarded.

Art by Sandra Brewster

How much do you visualize before creating? Do you know what it will look like before you begin? What’s your process?

At this point with my current work, I do at times know what the piece will look like before I begin, but it depends though. Sometimes I’m not sure. I allow myself to play and end up experimenting a lot, however when I get to a certain place in the work, it’s all about production. I generally know what the outcome of the “Plain Black” and “Untitled Smiths” pieces will look like as there are specific elements that must be chosen to make up the final piece: an image taken from photo shoots, gridded panels of the “Smiths”, a composition that is loosely figured out before executing it on the panels. My recent experiences with process have been about playing more. In this case I only visualize the end close to the end.

What themes do you like to touch on in your work?

I like to either tell stories or to present images that convey an examination of race, identity and representation. Being of Guyanese parentage and curious of that time period when folks migrated from the Caribbean to North America, my work also touches upon this and those who are effected by this movement. I also like to touch on humour and feel that generally the Smiths are humourous characters in their presentation.

What are the most important influences that have moved you as an artist?

I remember being a little girl drawing at my father’s desk in his office of a house we lived in. He always had large sheets of graph paper on his desk. The most memorable moment for me, when I realized that my engagement with drawing and painting came from somewhere, was when I was about 12 and my parents seemed to be competing over who could draw better. My dad drew a fantastic sketch of a cowboy full of expression, the lines full of movement. My mom then drew an even more fantastic sketch, more accurate in body proportion and fluidity in line quality, of a woman with a frilly dress.  This event solidified things for me and made me want to become as good as they were in being able to express themselves with these types of tools.

Concepts of community have always been very influential for me. My Guyanese family has continued to speak of “back home” and how Guyana impacted their lives. Living in Canada, they never lost their connection with home physically and how they interact with folks here. Also, I practically grew up in the Senior Guyanese Friendship Association, started the year I was born by my mother and her friends to create connections between their parents who had just arrived in Toronto from Guyana. The group focused on a fostering of the Guyanese community through ongoing social activities. It is still active today.

As time went on I became affected by anything creatively impactful to me. Artists of note include: Charles White‘s graphite drawings of life in Black America, Charles Close‘s large scale, high realism portrait paintings and the formal diversity in Kara Walker‘s silhouette works and drawings.

How do you define success for this project and your career in general?

Recently I spent time at the artist residency Alice Yard located in Trinidad and Tobago. My two months there were spent exploring new possibilities with the work I’ve been doing in Toronto, and creating and presenting that new work. I literally practiced the objective of the Yard which was to play, and I did so with the components of the “Smiths”.  I also networked and connected with interesting artists, traveled and experienced carnival (which greatly impacted the work).

Art by Sandra Brewster

I was more successful than I thought I would ever be in my visit to Trinidad and the activities I engaged in defined the success of my trip. I interacted with the Yard itself as the entire space was used for creation and exhibition — the Annex as my studio, then artist talk and exhibition space for drawings, the walls of the gallery space were used for a mural of a Mohammed procession (the “Smiths” turned into “Mohammeds” when I started creating them in Trinidad, seeing as the name Mohammed is the most common in their phone book). The floor of the Yard had aluminum cut Mohammeds staged throughout [as shown above], and the room where I stayed also held a wall mural and objects that I covered with images of the Mohammeds. I discovered new possibilities to formally create the work, and the entire experience was simply full of new beginnings as to where these directions could go.

My interest in going away to work was not only to carve out time to create, it was also to see how the “Smiths” would travel. Changing the name from “Smith” to “Mohammed” brought forward a new conversation around the project, and made it more international. It was interesting for me to see and hear people’s reactions.

I feel I was also successful in challenging myself to see how the work may develop organically through my playing with it and experimenting. I wanted to see what would transpire at this point in my development as an artist. I also hope that there is more to experience from  the results of this residency.

What goes into creating a successful grant proposal/package in your opinion?

I believe a strong grant proposal has a clear, concise delivery that expresses an understanding of the work and how it relates to the artist’s proposed project. The artist must write in a way that will be understandable to the people reading it. In some cases it can be simple. Just write what you do, then write what you want to do and why it is important or connected to what you do. Exposing influences will show that the artist understands that we do not create within a vacuum as there may be events, other artists, time periods, etc., that have made an impact on us and therefore the work. Be thorough and realistic about how funding will allow you to succeed in the completion or advancement of the proposed project. If there is a budget included, attach a detailed outline of each section of the budget.

Other elements of the package would include images of previous work. An artist should pick the best-executed work that best represents their practice, regardless of whether or not it is their favourite image. The quality of the jpeg/slide should also be excellent so as not to confuse or distract the jury.

***

You can find visual artist Sandra Brewster here. 

GIVEAWAY! Guelph area friends! Love roller derby? Looking for some action on June 1st? Canada Arts Connect is giving away two tickets (possibly more) to the Royal City Roller Girls June 1st Home Opener at the Sleeman Centre!

Enter by Thursday, May 30 at 11:59 p.m.

There are multiple ways to enter:

1) Leave a comment below letting us know you’d like to go.

or…

2) Email us at info@CanadaArtsConnect.com with “Royal City Roller Girls June 1st Home Opener Giveaway” in the subject line.

or…

3) RT our Twitter message about the giveaway.

or…

4) Leave a comment on our Facebook or Google+ posts about this giveaway letting us know that you’d like to go.

Good luck!

Natalie has been the steadying hand behind Canada Arts Connect Magazine, an incredible literary force, and an amazing friend. She has supported CAC tirelessly and has always been willing to go beyond when it came to this awesome adventure we’ve been on.

Natalie will still be writing her popular Girls Don’t Like Metal column, so be sure to watch out for it on Canada Arts Connect Magazine.

We wish Natalie all the luck in her future creative endeavours and are excited to watch all the amazing things she gets up to next!

With much love and thanks to Natalie,
Desirée and the CAC team!

Museum adventures after dark. Dancing with dinosaurs. Drinking cocktails among relics while being offered a tasting from a collection of pop-up snack bars. These may not seem like the typical night out, but in an attempt to make a museum space more accessible, the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) has found a way to capture the attention of cool kids looking for a mix of culture and Friday night revelry.

A savvy idea, but not entirely inventive, ROM plays host to Friday Night Live (FNL), a weekly party featuring curated events, live entertainment and in-gallery experiences. With the hopes of making enough noise to get people talking about Mesopotamia, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and new-found dinosaur fossils, FNL successfully sparks interest in a crowd that might be otherwise engaged on a Friday night.

ROM party planners take a leap of faith with FNL, anticipating that this kind of unconventional museum experience could result in more FNL visits, an eventual ticket buy to a special exhibit, or better yet, a ROM membership. An ideal situation for an institution focused on making the past mean something relevant in the future.

ROM’s Friday Night Live runs until June 21. Upcoming FNL dates include May 17 Rocks Rock, as the ROM celebrates the Toronto International Jewellery Festival and May 24 ROMic-Con, which offers a chance to check out a retrospective of super heroes.

Tickets are $10 for students and $12 general admission. Drinks (and food items) are $6 each. Dress is anything from leopard printed denim, to suits and cocktail dresses. Arrive early, as the lines become longer and the night ends at midnight.

How Poetry Saved My Life

But enough of this preamble. The goods are in the conversation.

I was lucky enough to be able to spend a lovely morning with Amber Dawn, who is also the author of the Lambda Literary Award-winning novel, Sub Rosa. Over pizzelle coffee and tea we discuss sex work, survivorhood, queer grief, small town sexuality, the riot grrrl movement and, of course, poetry.

Was it your intention when you put this memoir into book form for it to be a mix of memoir and poetry? How did it come together?

Here’s my process: I’d write a couple of poems that tackled primarily sex work and some other topics. Then I’d feel terrified and I’d shelve those. That continued for about eight years.

Were you taking a long time between?

Sometimes a year. I would often write pieces to perform at conferences or universities that had programs that were interested in “Ghetto Feminism,” that tackles issues that I was writing about.

I knew I had a book before Sub Rosa. And Arsenal knew as well because Brian Lam is something of an intuitive genius. Sub Rosa was my heart. I really wanted How Poetry Saved My Life to be a book, but I wanted to have my first book be fiction. I felt like it would mark me too much to be a quote unquote confessional author.

Even after all these transitions in your life you still had reservations about the perception?

Yes. Definitely. Brian said to me what about just a book of your collected stories and I asked could there be poetry in there too and he said yes. And I went back to the work and wrote some new pieces and worked with Susan (Safyan, Associate Editor at Arsenal Pulp Press) and put it together in a more cohesive way.

Memoir is extremely popular. Poetry is extremely unpopular. It’s like the prom queen and the skid in the same book. It’s like a John Hughes movie. The poetry is so integrated within the prose sections. It’s not some creative addendum, it’s load bearing poetry. Was your intention to have the poetry do a lot of load bearing work?

For survivors and sex workers, stigmatized people, writing a memoir doesn’t save their life. And memoir of late, I believe is narrow. There’s the inciting moment when the author/character makes their descent into the sex trade, or is sitting in their doctor’s office and are told they have cancer. Whatever that inciting moment is where the identity of stigma attaches itself to the author. They go through the ups and downs, reckoning with their family, to almost destroying themselves and they hit rock bottom, they work back up from and at the end there’s a whole better, wiser person. That’s bullshit. It doesn’t work like that. That’s the movie version.

The poetry isn’t secondary. It doesn’t “interrupt” the prose, it’s woven throughout, it’s part of the structure and the poems inform the pieces before or the pieces after.

[It] shows readers that there are many different ways to tell a story. Poetry is such a wonderful medium to address lesser chosen topics. Poetry was my first love. My oldest writing was poetry.

I think poetry is often associated with young people, or immaturity. You grow up and you’re supposed to stop caring about poetry and ideas. And poetry is about ideas. Like activism, you’re supposed to grow out of it. It’s often dismissed.

In that is a heightened sense of ideas that we care about and as we age we can’t have a heightened sense of our emotions or ideals or values.

People are discouraged from doing that. I hope people read the poetry. Do you worry that people won’t read it?

Gosh no! It never even occurred to me! If they read the introduction it’s a pretty big call to action and it champions poetry in a big way. And the poetry that’s at the beginning of the book, the Outside section, it’s very accessible, there’s not much form. I think a non-poetry reader will still be able to access that.

The book isn’t necessarily chronological, but it is divided into distinct sections. Could you talk about developing that structure?

There’s such a huge divide in my work, outdoor and indoor sex work, and they’re almost completely different vocations and bring up very different sets of problems and relationships.

I think people are often unaware of that.

I think that too, but I’m also surprised by how much people do understand. My friend, the poet Elizabeth Bachinsky, who had seen some versions of the outside poems, told me that when I got an indoor job she was so relieved. At the time no one said that to me. I guess I thought that my friends were oblivious, but they weren’t.

I think people in Vancouver understand that there is a real risk to women on the street. They might be more in tune with why I wanted to start the book outside. Inside work is more clandestine that outdoor work, and it’s this weird almost carnivalesque world.

In the inside section, your humour, or a different kind of voice, is allowed to come out.

I feel like I can make fun of myself in the inside section and the other women I worked with I can parody. But I would never do that about the outside section.

The third section, I still don’t know how I feel about it, I still have a lot of insecurities about it, but it’s me looking back. And it’s about intimacy and how my intimacy was shaped by survivorhood and sex work and a bit about my childhood roots.

I like that the coming of age isn’t at the beginning. Like you were saying earlier about memoir structure, you’re not doing it that way. And you do a really wonderful job of writing about small town Canada without it being this quaint Canadiana that’s very popular and prominent.

But there’s a screech owl!

Yes! So small town life. How was that for you?

In my next book I am happily going back to fiction. And I’m just getting started, so it’s premature to talk about it, but it’s going to be about my hometown. It’s about Fort Erie, which is near Crystal Beach. The amusement park there, after 100 years of operation, closed in 1989, so I’m setting it in 1990. Basically that closure rendered my hometown a ghost town.

Something about small towns that got me thinking that there are sort of two modes of thinking about sex when you’re from a small town. Either it’s great and freeing or it’s oh my God, I cannot-

Get pregnant.

Exactly!

Yeah, you become a young mother and feel trapped.

And also when you’re in a small town you think about escape, and there are many kinds of escape.

Escape and coping become synonymous when you’re in a small town. Coping usually has some kind of silence attached to it as well. One of the reasons I wanted to bring in that story of Fort Erie and my small town was to talk more about love and intimacy. In our formative years when we’re starting to explore things like crazy, in terms of our sexuality, it comes with shame or not communicating. I think I communicated about 1/16 of what my sexual choices were. They just spontaneously happened to me.

That’s very common for girls.

And I think people know that’s common. There’s not a huge leap in my mind between learning as a teenager that you should not talk about the choices you’re making sexually and sex workers not talking about their work. Somewhere women are just asked to not talk about their bodies.

Amber Dawn!

You did bring up a lot about communication or dialogue and how we choose to engage or disengage. You write about being in grad school, or being at work in a massage parlour and studying literature. Could you speak to the idea of people being in a similar situation but having these completely different ideas? 

First and foremost I didn’t want to tell anyone else’s story, but I definitely wanted to show that sex workers are very different from one another and queer sex workers are different from one another and sex workers who are survivors are different from one another. We have different coping mechanisms and things that we enjoy. But I wanted to humanize the experience.

Every thing I did from dancing burlesque to reading Sylvia Plath in a massage parlour staff room to writing poems in the UBC classroom that were about sex work, all those things didn’t seem to easily fit into whatever environment I was in.

The more that I reflected on this book and my experiences, the more I realized that we all just don’t fit. And there is either something wrong with us or very wrong with the world and that is the human experience.

It’s how we reconcile or talk about the human experience that’s interesting to me. What I most wanted to do, even more than humanize sex workers, was to explore the idea that everyone has a part of themselves that they don’t feel seem to fit into everyday discourse. But what if it did? What if we just talked about it regardless? And I’ve talked about that and this book is a huge part of that. I’m going to talk about sex work and being a survivor in a literary, non-fiction memoir and bring it to writers’ festivals and encourage people to do the same.

The places where we do that, for me that place would be in queer and gender-variant, activist, artist circles, which I guess is a kind of counter-counter culture. But the places where I can feel I can let a full expression of my being come out. That’s freedom. I don’t feel like I’m going to get freedom through sex work being decriminalized, I feel like I’m going to get freedom and safety through being able to tell my story and people receiving it and vice-versa.

Because that’s creating another level of knowledge. And it’s difficult for people to engage with because it’s not part of their own experience.

hat’s not a skill we’ve been taught.

I was thinking a lot about empathy when I was reading your book.

I would like to believe that people do have empathy, but where they get stuck and frustrated is they don’t know what to. What action is attached to this emotion? For some people it might be a specific activism or to write letters. But with this book I want people to forget about action for a while and just emote. Sit with the feeling.

I’ve started to receive the Q&As that come with reading from this book, and the inevitable questions about decriminalization vs. abolitionism, and I can talk that talk. But part of me thinks this book isn’t about views, it’s about feeling. What actually comes up for us when this is being spoken plainly and creatively in a public forum. Don’t think about what we’re going to do. Just for a minute. Ask yourself, how does this feel?

In terms of empathy this leads into the section on grieving, “How We Bury Our Dead.” You Googling “Queer Funeral Etiquette” and wondering what’s out there.

It’s changing. It certainly helps that there’s more discussion about even marriage equality. I just think the wider the channel of dialogue is when it comes to the really vulnerable feelings, like grieving and death, then there will be more ways to talk about it.

I also think documentary film has done us big favours in terms of grieving with dignity as queer people. And that overlaps with AIDS activism. Documentaries like We Were Here, directed by David Weissman, and United In Anger (about ACT UP). People were grieving and also acting and talking, being very verbal. They were having die-ins as a way to respond to death and grief and the lack of responsibility that the government and medical institutions were taking at that time.

I look at AIDS activism a lot when I look at my own communication skills, my coming together with my community skills. Everything from the AIDS pandemic, to scores of youth suicides really marks our community. And grieving marks our queer experience. It’s part of the human experience.

It marks our whole culture. But it’s something people want to make niche so they don’t have to confront it in the same way. Death and grieving are already difficult and if you’re talking about it within a community you’re not familiar with, it’s harder for people to push that dialogue further.

I also think funerals are a place where birth families and chosen families come together. Sometimes for the first time. How do you navigate that space? It’s way better at a wedding than a funeral. You’re going to have a way better time.

What is the most common question people ask you? Either about your book or about sex work?

Always, it’s how did I get into sex work. Which I don’t answer. I used to give facts and stats instead of answering personally. And I tell them that there is a lot of value attached to how people get into sex work and I’d prefer not to answer.

But I have a new strategy, which is to answer how I exited. It’s a more political thing to talk about. Because I used an exiting program specifically for sex workers called PEERS (Prostitutes Empowerment Education Resources) which was a stronghold in Vancouver and there was one in Victoria. When the Tories came in they cut federal funding. Then when Christy Clark got in the provincial funding was cut. And the city held on for a while but eventually withdrew funding and they had to finally shut down. So sad.

In that environment there was someone to help me with my taxes and I got to consult with a lawyer, to get me above board, and there were counsellors and employment counsellors. Resources for sex workers are being axed in this country and it’s such a critical time.

The weirdest question I ever got asked was in a southern state when I was on the Sex Workers Art Show tour. One of the questions was how we felt about war, were we pacifists (which we all were). The next question was: now that the anti-war movement has won the endorsement of sex workers it feels like you’ll be unstoppable. Do ya’ll think you can you teach the Democrats to be whores for Al-Qaeda?

Wow. Did anyone do or say anything?

I just stood there with my mouth open. I’m from Canada, get me out of here.

Ok. I want to talk about Bikini Kill.

Who doesn’t.

You were obviously inspired by the riot grrrl movement.

There was such energy. Both that and third wave feminism introduced to me that you don’t have to have institutionally sanctioned skills set to make art or to be a speaker. You just need to start making or saying stuff.

And I just feel a lot of gratitude that I was around to catch that message. I keep it near and dear forever.

I saw them open for Sonic Youth. Wooo! I was so close to Buffalo and Toronto. I could literally walk over the bridge to shows in Buffalo.

The Kathleen Hanna energy is in this book. There’s a whole poem about that references it too, “Bikini Kill Lyrics.” 

That was the newest piece that I wrote, along with the three postcards that end the book. Who ends their memoir with erotica? I do.

It’s lovely.

We learn so much about ourselves through our sexual experiences.

***

How Poetry Saved My Life is available now from Arsenal Pulp Press. To find out more about Amber Dawn go to her fancy website here.

A still from The Manor

Shawney Cohen’s highly anticipated film The Manor kicked off the Hot Docs Festival at Bloor Cinema last Thursday night. The film paints a humble picture of Shawney’s personal life in Guelph, Ontario, where he helps with his family’s business: The Manor strip club and motel. The film begins something like a home video, with innocent experimentation filming his father and the day-to-day life at The Manor. Shawney tells the audience he became “addicted” to filming and quickly found himself painting a raw portrait of his family’s dysfunctional relationships and how they’re rooted in the family business.

For the excited audience, comprising of what seemed like more University of Guelph students than an alumni reunion, the bleak suburban landscape hit close to home, and the neon-lit club conjured memories of legends told by those who braved the Tuesday Amateur nights. For the most part, the film stays close to its four main characters: Shawney, his brother Sammy and his parents Roger and Brenda. Those wanting a peepshow into the scandalous life of a stripper, however, will be disappointed, yet this is what makes Cohen’s story so strong, because he keeps scandal secondary (despite having more than enough to work with!).

Still, the intimacy the viewer shares with the characters is sometimes unnerving and the film’s blunt honesty can border on exposé. Shawney’s mother, easily the most affective character, is also the quietest and admittedly needs to be coaxed into opening up in front of the camera. An unusual technical slip-up near the end of the film made an already tense moment all the more real. During what may have been Shawney’s mother’s most vulnerable moment onscreen, an accidental hit of a switch caused the back curtain of the theatre to slowly open. I turned my head to the glass room behind me, and to my surprise, Brenda Cohen was gazing back at me in the flesh. Her eyes then shifted to view the screen, a moment of self-recognition that only documentary film can create.

Author Nalo Hopkinson (Photo: David C. Findlay)

In the second part of my interview with celebrated sci-fi/fantasy author Nalo Hopkinson (find part one of the interview here) we talked at length about the creative process around her latest novel, the Toronto-based fantasy bildungsroman Sister Mine. We also discuss the merits of writers having a social media platform, the ongoing issue of being an advocate for racial themes in fantasy literature, and how she defines success as an author.

With a sci-fi/fantasy novel such as Sister Mine, you’re playing with Caribbean influences along with elements of magic, spirits and superpowered god-beings. What did you hope to accomplish with this particular book?

It’s hard to remember how and where the ideas accumulated. Part of what I’m working with is definitely the Caribbean belief systems that are based in Orisha. As I will do, I mess with them a little bit. So I put the Trinidadian lord of the forest in Toronto, and then I figure out why he was there. But I’m also playing with Christina Rosetti’s 19^th century poem Goblin Market, which is a wonderful poem about two sisters who live together who are very close and one of them gets in trouble by eating goblin fruit, which she knows she’s not supposed to do but does anyway. And as she starts to pine away and die her sister tries to save her, and basically her love saves her. But the way that it happens is the sister who is well goes to the goblins and tries to buy the fruit from them. But because she won’t eat it they attack her and “smush” her body with the fruit. She goes home to her sister covered in the juices of the fruit and tells her to suck the fruit off her body. It’s a poem that manages to be simultaneously innocent and very, very rude. So was I thinking about that poem – I’ve used it twice in my work – and came up with the characters of Abby and Makeda. Not sure how I got the idea of them being so close that they were actually conjoined, but once I got there, the idea of when you separate people who are conjoined, the doctors often have to choose who’s going to get what attribute over another. And this being science fiction, it doesn’t have to be a physical body, so it’s about what could one sister lose and the other gain. And I thought, well it could be the magic.

Cover of 2012 release The Chaos

In terms of world-building for the novel, what was your process? 

Anything that will get the damn novel done. If it’s spreadsheets, if it’s plotting, if it’s going for long walks or talking to friends about the story problems I’m having, I do it all. The plotting for this one was hard. Because when you write gods, who are theoretically omnipotent and immortal, that messes with plot. Fiction is about problems and what problems does a god have that they can’t get out of through their own superpowers? So the plotting for this one got really involved and I think a few reviewers have complained about it. But I think that if it wasn’t plotted this way there would be gaps in the story where things just wouldn’t make sense.

Do you write a certain amount of pages per day? How much are you driven by deadline?

(Laughs). My learning disability is ADD. If I can do anything for consecutive days in a row it’s a miracle. If I’m on deadline and the adrenaline and fear kicks in it’s a little bit easier, but I very rarely work every day. When there’s a few weeks to go before the deadline, then the adrenaline will kick in. But it’s a constant battle for me to write at all. I have learned that if I do even a sentence in day, that’s a sentence more than I had the day before. And it adds up. So I’ve actually set my goals lower. Writing a sentence in a day can be considered a complete working day. The strange thing is when you do that you take the pressure off yourself. And you’re more likely to write.

Speaking on the issue of race in science fiction/fantasy, does it get exhausting for you to constantly speak about it? To be seen as that go-to person for something like this? Or are you fine with having this wider discussion?

You’ve been reading the speech I gave to the International Conference of the Fantastic in the Arts? It only bothers me when people decide I am the arbiter of what is right and proper to do in terms of race. But in fact there are all kinds of people writing and thinking about it that they can just as easily go to. When people essentially make me into a token where people think of a black science fiction writer and think, ooh, Delany or Hopkinson, when there are so many others,  that irritates me. It just ignores the wealth of others that are out there. Other than that, it’s what I talk about anyway so I don’t mind getting asked.

You are pretty active on social media. Is it a double-edged sword in terms of that two-way interaction with readers and fans? What’s your take on writers who engage in social media?

I think you do what appeals to you. I see a lot of budding writers getting their knickers in a knot thinking they have to be on social media to promote or sell themselves. And the fakeness shows through – they are either not enjoying it or they are so desperate that they just keep hitting you over the head with their book in the hopes that you will buy it. I got off Facebook because it’s not very friendly to people who want to have privacy controls. But I use Twitter, I use Google+, I use email and my website. But I put there what I want to put there. And I don’t have to engage with people I don’t want to. Twitter’s blocking function is a beautiful thing. And I do it because I enjoy it. Half the time I’m not talking about writing or appearances. I talk about other things in my life. I’m one of those awful people who Tweets about their meals and I’m a writer so when I describe it, it actually sounds good (laughs). So I really like being able to have that instant conversation with people that is mediated in a way that I can control. I do get people asking me to read their book and I’m very picky about who I take on. 99.9 per cent I do not. But they aren’t at all the majority. Most of the people just want to say hi. I think you can decide how you access the world and how you want people to know you.

How do you define success?

I think it would be if I’m happy where I’m at. At the moment I am. Those previous years where I was hungry, broke and homeless not so much. But I don’t think I thought about what success was. I just wanted to write and get published. I’ve done that and I’m doing that. I’m getting mostly good reviews (laughs). I am in a place where someone is paying me to do what I do and paying me regularly. I think that’s success.

What motivates or inspires you to keep writing?

Well the process of writing is like pulling teeth. I don’t much like it. But I love having written. There’s no high to match having finished a story. That’s before you find out if anyone cares to sell it. The very fact that you have finished it – if I finish a story late at night I know I’m not going to sleep because I know I’m on a high off it. And if it does get sold – does get out in the world – you never know if your writing is going to touch somebody or make a difference to them. The thing you think is the lightest thing you’ve ever written, could be something that’s very profound to someone else. When readers are generous enough to contact me and let me know that something has moved them or affected them, that’s worth everything. It’s a blessing and a gift. I appreciate it more than I can say. And just being able to be a creative person in the world is a lovely thing.

A ballet dancer spends most of his or her career as the subject of the gaze. The watchful eyes of a choreographer, ballet master, critic and audience member permeate the existence of the moving body. The dancer attempts to create the ideal image – perfect placement of the limbs, supple feet that accent an accompanying score, and appropriate emotional intensity, all with the hopes of hearing an applause at the conclusion of a performance.

It is this traditional role as a vessel for a creator’s artistic vision, that is both inspiring and at times, limiting. Thus, what happens when a dancers steps off of the stage, picks up a camera, and casts his gaze upon another body?

A collection of resulting images, striking and sculptural, can be viewed in Aleksandar Antonijevic’s inFORMants exhibit, as part of the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival from May 2nd to 30th, 2013 at Berenson Fine Art.

National Ballet of Canada principal dancer Aleksandar Antonijevic was born in Pozarevac, Yugoslavia in 1969. He joined the National Ballet of Canada in 1991, where he has been a Principal Dancer since 1995. Antonijevic recently extended his love of dancing from the theatre stage to the camera lens and editing suite. After participating in a documentary photography workshop with Donald Weber at Pitko Gallery in the Distillery District, Antonijevic embarked on an ongoing exploration of the human body and the documentation of absolute truth, themes highlighted in his inFORMants exhibit.

The implementation of dancerly principles such as form, space, composition and expression seamlessly transitioned to his work with the camera. Peering through the lens, gazing upon his models (who all happen to be National Ballet of Canada dancers), Antonijevic seemed to find an inspiring role off stage, and out of the spotlight.

inFORMants is part of the 2013 Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival from May 2nd to 30th, 2013. inFORMants will be shown at Berenson Fine Art (212 Avenue Road, Toronto) on Tuesdays through Saturdays from 12:00 pm – 6:00 pm.

Last Woman Standing premiered this week at the Toronto Hot Docs Festival to a raucous and receptive audience of women boxers, film buffs and sport enthusiasts alike. This debut documentary, collaboratively directed by Juliet Lammers and Lorraine Price, shows the lives of middleweight boxers Ariane Fortin, from Québec, and Mary Spencer, from Ontario, as they fight to compete for a spot on the 2012 Olympic team—the first year women’s boxing was included as a sport. The clincher? Due to limited weight categories (women can only compete at the 51kg, 60kg, and 75kg levels) the close friends and former teammates are forced to compete at the same weight class—against one another—for a single spot on the Olympic team.

The directors, who met at Blue Cat Boxing Club in Montréal, wanted to highlight the dedication and fortitude it takes to train, as well as the monotony of the training process.

“It’s extremely repetitive, you know. Making your strategies with your coaches is a really pragmatic process,” Price tells me. “So we really wanted to showcase that reality behind the sport.”

The film’s vibrant imagery is notable; expect rapturous shots of thick female frames, righteous bag work, dingy boxing gyms and barren Canadian landscapes.

“Our film isn’t a film about boxing. And I think that that’s kind of an important distinction to make. It’s a film about two athletes who are boxers,” says Price.

“I think and I hope that this story—even though it’s about two boxers—is about fighting for a dream and putting everything you have into that dream. And then the fragility of that dream, and what it means to maybe—actually in both cases as it turned out—not fully achieve the dream that you had set out to,” Lammers adds.

Attendants at the premier included the documentary subject herself, Ariane Fortin, as well as Savoy “Kapow” Howe, founder of the Toronto Newsgirls Boxing Club, who offered Fortin free training at her own gym during the Q&A. The documentary screens Sunday, April 28th @ 12:30 PM at BLOOR HOT DOCS CINEMA and Friday, May 3rd @ 1:30 PM – TIFF BELL LIGHTBOX 2.