I write because it's the only thing I do well, or fairly well, or sort of well. It's the only thing I do.
 

I write for myself. I write for my friends. I write in hopes that writers I admire will admire what I wrote. I write because it's too late for me to become a jeweler or cake decorator.
 

Dennis Cooper. Kathy Acker. Dodie Bellamy. Kevin Killian. Ken Sparling has shown me over and over again what it is to write well. Tony Burgess forces me to be a little braver than I'd be naturally. I have friends who make brilliant art, and it bedazzles my brain: David Altmejd, Vincent Fecteau, to name a couple. My friend Jason McBride is infinitely inspiring. I'm head over heels in love with Andy Devine right now.

Fashion history. Fashion theory. Bruce Hainley.

 

Strength: My books are short so readers don't have to waste too much time on them. Weakness: My books are short so readers don't have to waste too much time on them.

I have a soft spot for this section of "God's Gaultier," an essay I wrote about an exhibit of Kathy Acker's clothes that Dodie Bellamy staged in San Francisco. It's silly and serious. It's about fashion and spiritualism:

"Acker wore her dresses, wore them out. Shaped them, and stained them: blood, sweat, supper stains. Bellamy didn’t dry clean them. She hung them in an art gallery, where they seem spooky, spectral, signs from the afterlife. Like remainders from Acker’s life, but also like Acker’s doubles. Ectoplasm, according to occultists, is supposed to be the cloth from which the cosmos is cut – more substantial than matter itself. 'Truly,' said British spiritualist Oliver Lodge in 1925, 'it may be called the living garment of God.' What does it mean when God’s garment is a Gaultier? Is Gaultier God? Is Kathy Acker?
    Is the universe stretch velvet?"

I'm writing a new novel, the third in a trilogy that includes "The Haunted Hillbilly" and "The Show That Smells." I recently collaborated with Micah Lexier on a sculptural installation that will be unveiled in Toronto early in 2010.  I'm co-creating and curating a show at the Art Gallery of York University. I'm cooking up a crazy project with Alana Wilcox at Coach House Books. And I'm thrilled to death that a theatrical production of "The Haunted Hillbilly" is being staged in Montreal in December, 2009 -- I saw a workshop production of it last year, and it knocked my socks off.