Writer in Residence

Well it’s a pretty chilly and off-and-on miserable day here in Toronto.  The leaves have almost all fallen and the sidewalks are slushy with their wet brown paper bag like bodies.  Today my cats officially took over the couch and so I was forced to get up and be productive instead of falling asleep on the couch to the movie channel.  Yesterday I discovered this amazing documentary called Zombie Girl: The Movie, about this 12 year old girl who’s making a feature length Zombie movie (with a lot of help from her amazing MOM).  Watching this made me jealous that I wasn’t more productive in my high school years.  Like, when I was 12 I was just into my horse phase and spent a lot of time setting up horse-jumping fences, made out of lawn furniture, in my backyard.

I didn’t get really productive until I went to University and discovered this incredible punk arts scene where people dressed up all the time and put on little shows in warehouses (likely full of mold).  My first performance of my first poem was at an anarchist slam thing.  I wore fishnets and polyester and was sweating bullets the whole time.  I might have even heaved before I got on stage.  Still, you know, what a thrill.  The audience!  The lights!  The creative appreciation!  Bliss!  After that I was pretty hooked on the idea of being an artist and writing.

And now, briefly, for Simmone, Skim was born on a road trip from Toronto, Ontario to Wisconsin, part of a tour for this book on superheroes called Girls Who Bite Back.  One of my fellow mutant travelers was the editor of a Literary Magazine in Toronto called Kiss Machine and she was looking for new comic artists and writers to collaborate on mini-comic projects.  I suggested that myself and my cousin Jillian would be perfect candidates.  It took about three different diner-conversations to convince her to let us do it - this “Gothic Lolita” story I was proposing.  It was the first time I’d ever written a comic and I had not idea how.  Fortunately Jillian didn’t really have any set ideas on how to go about it either so we were able to invent a kind of mutually acceptable format that is probably a lot more bare than the average comic script.

Wow look at me babbling on.  Must get back to my day job!  Take care and talk more soon!

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