Dream Space: an interview with A. Light Zachary

A. Light Zachary is a writer in Toronto, an editor with The Puritan, and the host of a local reading series. Their poetry has appeared in over 30 magazines and anthologies & won the E. J. Pratt Medal in Poetry in 2015. Their first novel is The End, by Anna (Metatron), and their twitter is @yyzachary. 

I first encountered their work at a Metatron reading in Toronto, and was immediately struck by the fine balance of ease and control in both their work and their performance. It takes a tremendous amount of work to write prose that flows as effortlessly off the page as theirs does, and it takes a real understanding of the mechanics of space and community to command the attention of a room as easily as they do. I like that our interview ended up being about physical spaces, both real and half-imagined.

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EH: What's your current online obsession, and what exactly is so fascinating about it?

ALZ: I am "obsessed" with other peoples' homes. I relentlessly browse real estate listings, flip through designers' and architects' websites, click around Google Maps for hours. (When I learned about Pinterest, I blocked it on all my browsers and resolved to never make an account because I knew I would never leave my desk again.) In the past ten years I have saved at least 10,000 screenshots ofavourite rooms or exteriors, and at this point I have an encyclopaedic memory of Toronto's residential geography—and Montréal's, New York's, a plethora of other cities and small towns. 

I do this because whenever I look at (photographs of) a home, I am helpless but to imagine whether I would like to live there, and if so, to imagine the life I would have if I lived there—as a child or adult or whatever, depending on the mood I'm in. This is endless entertainment, somehow. I also seem to pride myself on identifying whether a particular home is a 'good home' or not, and collecting (screenshots of) only 'good' ones—I have some criteria, but it's more instinct than anything. I never tire of this stuff & it seriously impedes my productivity. I would become a real estate agent for my 'day job', but I hate working with people & can't drive.

EH: I've spent many late nights bingeing on those Apartment Therapy "house tours" where they show you around the beautiful minimalist apartment of an LA graphic designer, her recording engineer husband and their adorable 8-year-old pug or whatever. I think what you're talking about is a little different, though—more imaginative, because it involves picturing a life laid out inside a particular home instead of just wishing you had all the stuff these other people have. (Unless that's in there too.)

 ALZ: Right, I don't care about the stuff. I have my own (real and/or imagined) stuff. Just the spaces.

EH: I am extremely curious about what makes for a "good home" when you're looking at them? Is it decor, layout, a particular style? Or does it change according to your mood? 

 ALZ: I think a “good home” is a home that is the best version of itself. This isn't limited by location, size, price/luxury, or anything like that. Even boring suburban tract houses or McMansions (which city-people like myself love to hate) can be 'good homes' if they are decorated thoughtfully and cared for.

 My criteria for apartments/condos are unclear, but some kind of outdoor space is of paramount importance. What I'm most drawn to in houses, though, is twofold. First, a subtle incongruity with the houses around it—e.g., if I see 20 red-brick houses on a street and 1 yellow-brick house, I'm dreaming about moving into that blonde. Second, a feeling of place, like it couldn't possibly be anywhere but where it is. (A lot of contemporary architects build cool houses that feel like they could be anywhere in the world, and I'm less interested in those; a feeling of regionality is important. For example, a 21st-century vernacular thing in Toronto is a classic bay-gable townhouse that has been hollowed out and reinvented in some way—sure, they're "cliché" (whatever that means) but I like many of them.) 

EH: How does this habit work with or against your actual IRL living situation? Do you find yourself wanting to actually move a lot, or does the whole thing stay firmly lodged in the realm of fantasy?

ALZ: I may imagine moving all the time, but I also have a really strong “nesting instinct.” I've lived in my current home for 6 years and packed it absolutely full of myself, and it's perfect, and I don't want to ever give it up. I also feel that the protective energy of a home strengthens the longer you live there; that's a factor, too.

EH: How do you feel this interest leaks into (or interacts with, or manifests in) your writing?

 ALZ: Well, in my fiction, most of the action is set in characters' homes...  (I think this is because I spend most of my life bouncing between my home and friends' homes, I don't do much socializing 'in public', so this feels natural to me.) So of course I have to, like, look up exactly where a character lives, and because I'm an obsessive procrastinator, this always snowballs into a wild hours-long research odyssey. Even though most of my fiction is set in my own neighbourhood. Nearly all of my first novel took place in an apartment just east of me, on the 30th floor of a building I've never set foot in, but I have so excessively studied photographs of it that I can picture it better than some of my childhood bedrooms. And in other things I write, especially my second-novel-in-progress, a character's home can itself be a passive character, in kind of the way that assholes in New York are always like "but the fifth character in my screenplay is New York itself!"

EH: I really love the idea of your fiction taking place in these real, actual spaces that exist, but that you've never actually been to. There's something that feels really dreamy and shimmering about it—this imagined world you're creating with your own mind, going on in a space that is physically real but that you've never actually touched. Ghosts inside ghosts, dreams inside real physical spaces. I wonder whether your poems are similarly grounded in real (or "real") places? I know a work doesn't have to be narrative for it to be "set" somewhere—like, some of my poems very clearly belong to certain apartments or buildings or cities, even though you can't always see those physical spaces so explicitly in the work.

 Most of my poems are without setting because my poetry is introspective, set in my head if anywhere. But, as I draw on memories, I can't help rooting a few things in my homes—even if, as in your work, these associations can only be picked out by very squinty eyes. Mostly my home in Toronto (thick rugs, skylight, never cleaning after parties, raccoons fighting on the roof) but also my childhood home nearby (too-quiet, museum-ish, dense sun-blocking trees) and my mother's home on the ocean in Nouveau-Brunswick (eagles, mile-long dirt lane, storms stripping the siding off). 

 I have also written a few poems that address something via interaction with an idea(lization) of a place. Like, the first good poem I ever wrote was about being very afraid of death while imagining myself on a fantastical, walking-around-in-a-daze trip to Venice, which is always presented to us in literature etc. as a fantastical, walk-around-in-a-daze kind of place. Now that I've been to Venice, I want to write a sequel, but... idk, I always try to write poems 'set' in places I have travelled because that seems like a Thing To Do, but I either succeed and end up with bad poems, or fail and end up with decent poems that are not at all about those places.