Women Asking Women: Leila Marshy & Ellen Chang-Richardson

In honour of Women’s History Month, we asked women writers from across the country to pair up and interview each other about their process, their inspirations, and everything in between.

 Interview: Leila Marshy and Ellen Chang-Richardson

LEILA MARSHY: You really play with form and the arrangement of text on the page, which seems very exciting to me. It’s like each poem is also a short film. Not to mention, the person who designed the cover and formatted the book seemed to really understand what you were doing. Can you talk a little bit about the visual element of your writing and how conscious or not your process is? 

ELLEN CHANG-RICHARDSON: I love this question, Leila. The visual elements of my writing are absolutely conscious choices and it thrills me when readers pick up on it. I come from an art history and visual studies (i.e., studio art) background with a focus in drawing, installation, filmmaking and performance—and I view each empty page of a book project like a visual artist might view a blank canvas. Each mark, grammatical point, word, is carefully chosen and placed; and a good chunk of my editorial process is spent agonizing over where these elements ought to go. Questions I ask myself include: If the words flow up, why? If they cascade down, why? If a grammatical point is placed on the page at this place, what is the reason and then how will that grammatical point exist translated into sound?

I was ecstatic to work with Paul Vermeersch, Liz Howard, and Kilby Smith-McGregor at Buckrider Books. As a wordsmith, Liz (my editor) encouraged me to apply the same incisive thinking towards finalizing each poem’s language. As visual artists themselves, Paul and Kilby (who recommended the cover and stayed true to the formatting of my manuscript) truly understood what I was aiming for with the visual components of this collection.

ELLEN: I love the characters found within the pages of My Thievery of the People. Can you tell our readers what compelled you to write these powerful, beautifully braided stories?

LEILA: Honestly, I think it’s an entire lifetime of intense people watching. I’ve evolved from an introvert to someone who’s pretty comfortable being extroverted most of the time. But all those quiet years really added up into some kind of sense of people, I think. Small expressions, overlooked gestures, little interactions. “The Ugly Father,” for example, first rooted in my head after spending a few hours in the park with my daughter when she was younger. Everyone was so cool and confident and shiny, happy people. Except for this one awkward slightly uncomfortable-in-his-skin plain man. And I started watching him, and I went from judging him to kind of really noticing him, to actually loving him. Loving his humanity, his awkwardness, his kind eyes, his very-quiet-but-brimming-with-love interactions with his child. Ugly is rarely what you think it is.

For “Ramadan,” another one-person sketch, I guess, came about from being immersed in the Middle East and seeing how so much of the culture and daily life rested on the shoulders of invisible women. Women who toil and sweat and serve. Not that life is any easier for men, but there is something especially tragic about invisibility and inexpressiveness. Poverty trains you for that, and there is a lot of poverty in a place like Cairo. But it’s more than financial poverty—it’s an impoverishment of the imagination, from being trapped by circumstance and expectations.

A story can percolate in my head for a long time, years and years, building outward from a gesture or a small inkling. After a while, words get attached to these observations, and a little later it starts to weave out like what feels like an actual story.

Or I write them pretty much overnight out of anger and frustration, like “Not Blood.” Trying to imagine the destruction and settling of Palestine from the point of view of the European settlers and how for them, they were the good guys and the Arabs were invisible non-entities, just people to pillage and erase. And how even violence against their own was justified in the name of expediency and ensuring a clear conscience. I tried to write a story where that conscience is alive and not at all clear.

LEILA: Blood Belies builds to a kind of climax, and one of the things we begin to understand is the title. And then the last page, the observational “you may not believe in magic,” grounds it in a surprising way. You’re doing something really interesting with the weight of histories and generational trauma legacies. Can you talk a little bit about that?

ELLEN: Histories; generational trauma—these topics are heavy but important to pin as the world we are familiar with tilts towards fascism and crony capitalism. Through the onslaught, I am attempting to offer a pathway of magic; of hope, rebellion, resistance—to remind both myself and my readers that we are not necessarily restricted by the legacies we were dealt at birth. We can transmute. And as exhausted as we are, we are not alone.

ELLEN: We both write about lives that span continents, cultures, and time. While these topics mirror the trajectory of our own lives, I wanted to ask you specifically about how our shared third-culture existence inspires your work, and how it has guided you both as a writer and as a person in the world?

LEILA: I am not sure I would be the writer I am had I not left Canada in my twenties to live in Egypt. I spent three years there, essentially becoming the person I wanted to be. Prior to that, I had been living in a very comfortable queer women-space artsy bubble in Montreal. It was fun, it was creative, it was sexy. But it also felt small and white and privileged and enabling and, ultimately, boring. I had to escape. Cairo broke me down, turned everything inside out, then gave it all back but placed differently. It made me feel part of the world, like I had a stake in it, in what happened, in how the world around me was shaped, and that my presence was a thing; it mattered. Everything mattered, in fact; everything was connected, everything was important, and everyone was beholden and responsible to everyone else.

It’s still hard to always believe that I matter, but I’ve gotten better at it. It’s not easy to be a writer when you don’t think you matter, and that sense of (lack of) self is exacerbated when you are between cultures. Who are you anyways? Who do you speak for, who do you represent, whose history and experiences can you call your own? I have always felt very close to the Middle East since first going at age 10. But I am also white passing and speak crappy Arabic and grew up in a weird suburb that was mostly Jewish, so we kind of hid or were quiet about who we were. It was what you did in those days. No one liked Arabs, and Palestinians were savages.

I explored a bit of that in my novel The Philistine. Maybe I got it out of my system because there is much less of that in My Thievery of the People. Now I want to write more stories like “Not Blood.” Stories fueled by piss and vinegar and history.

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Leila Marshy is of Palestinian-Newfoundland parentage, which might explain a lot. She has worked for the Palestine Hospital in Cairo, the Palestinian Mental Health Association in Gaza, and Medical Aid for Palestine in Montreal. She founded a ground-breaking community group bringing Hasidim and their neighbours together for dialogue. She’s been a baker, a chicken farmer, an early mobile app designer, a film editor and a political campaigner. Her stories, poetry and articles have appeared in journals, newspapers, magazines and anthologies. Her first novel, The Philistine, was published in 2018. She lives in Montreal.

Ellen Chang-Richardson is an award-winning poet of Taiwanese and Chinese Cambodian descent whose multi-genre writing has appeared in Augur, The Fiddlehead, Grain, Plenitude, Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis, The Spirits Have Nothing to Do with Us: New Chinese Canadian Fiction and others. The co-founder of Riverbed Reading Series, they are a member of Room’s editorial collective, long con magazine’s editorial board and the creative poetry collective VII. They currently live on the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe (Ottawa, Canada).

Photo of Ellen by Nicolai Gregory.

Many thanks to Ellen and Leila for this generous exchange on storytelling and identity.

Get a copy of Leila Marshy’s My Thievery of the People here and Ellen Chang-Richardon’s Blood Belies here on All Lit Up, or from your local bookseller.

Next up on Women Asking Women is Rebecca Morris and Nadia Staikos. Stay tuned for their discussion this Friday!