“A set of variant covers in a bookstore might be thrilling and mysterious”: An Interview with MA|DE

All Lit Up: How did MA|DE begin?

Mark Laliberte & Jade Wallace: To tell the story of MA|DE, we have to go back to 2018. That’s when we—Mark Laliberte & Jade Wallace—first began working together. In the beginning, our collaboration was single-celled, a free-form thing. We wrote together in a shared document, word upon word, line upon line, without much sense of where it would all end up. We wrote daily, and just began building poems.

As we continued working together, day into month into year, the specific nature of our collaboration started to take shape, or reveal itself. We were writing and experimenting. We were also looking at the history of collaboration in Canada, both in the visual and literary arts scenes—and, to be honest, we felt more spiritually connected to long-term artistic collaborations like General Idea, Public Studio and FASTWÜRMS (who, incidentally, were Mark’s MFA advisors at the University of Guelph back in the early 2000s). We began calling ourselves MA|DE in reference to our shared projects—taking on the branded positionality of a contemporary pop group, adopting a “band name” of sorts. For us, this naming gesture is symbolic: it indicates that this collaboration has a life of its own, and hopefully a long one; it is not simply the brief nexus of two writers’ careers, as so many literary collaborations are. MA|DE is a kind of entity or spirit we manifest, our third mind.

ALU: How did MA|DE’s debut collaborative poetry collection come together?

ML & JW: The collection is a result, an almost inevitable effect, of MA|DE’s existence and practice. The writing we were doing began to spin in several directions; we could see themes and constraints influencing the work. We were submitting individual poems to journals, and having a lot of luck getting them published, but we hadn’t taken anything further.

Next, we created a chapbook, conceived specifically in response to chapbook publisher Collusion Books’ very first call for short collaborative manuscripts. The timing was perfect. We decided to look at our work-to-date to see whether we had a set of poems that made sense together, and were surprised to find we did. These were poems about the overlap of human and animal life, concerned with treating animals as beings with subjectivity equal to our own. We called this collection ZZOO, submitted it—and the manuscript was one of three accepted in 2020 for Collusion’s inaugural season. In general, working with Collusion was a great experience. There was, however, one consequential bump in the road that is significant enough to talk about, something that really affected our trajectory in a positive way in the long run. When our manuscript was accepted, we assumed that we’d be in full control of the look of the thing because chapbook production is usually quite a scrappy affair with relaxed expectations around design and production. At least that was always the experience we’d each had individually when releasing chapbooks in the past. However, in this instance, publisher Andy Verboom had a plan for his new chapbook press: he wanted a unified approach to the three covers, a vision of how he wanted the first season of chapbook releases to look. We hadn’t been expecting that—and indeed we’d already sketched out our own cover prototype for the release. From the start, covers have been a real space of careful consideration for us because we generally have highly developed cover ideas, which often come about simultaneous to the writing itself. Mark has decades of experience as a visual artist and book designer, and we consider the design elements of a book to be an intrinsic part of its authorship.

There was certainly a day or two of debate over this clash of visions. In that interim space, we had a chance to think about the project as a whole; it was actually our attachment to our original cover prototype that made us realize that we needed to do a full-length version of ZZOO. The project simply didn’t feel complete yet; we had a lot more to say. At that point, we proposed a renaming of the soon-to-be-released chapbook, calling it A Trip to the ZZOO, a way to reflect its ephemerality. For us, this gesture implied a future definitive ZZOO release, which we’d yet to write.

From there, it was easier to view the chapbook as a stepping stone; not less important, but less conclusive. It became possible on our end to approach the cover problem with fresh eyes, as a kind of three-party collaboration that merged some part of our vision with the chapbook press’ seasonal approach in a satisfying way. Andy was also willing to take this approach, and we found a middle ground. One of the kindnesses Andy agreed to was our idea to issue the chapbook with two cover variants—one with a deer and one with a wolf—an approach that really gestured at the idea of collaboration.

After the chapbook came out (and went on to be shortlisted for the 2021 bpNichol Chapbook Award), we put the cover sketch in a metaphorical drawer as we worked on writing more poems with an eye to a full-length ZZOO collection. We also had a good look at MA|DE’s production-to-date and began working on several other full-length projects simultaneously: a collection exploring a constraint-based form we created; an innovative take on blackout/erasure poetry; a very ambitious project involving sculpture, photography and ekphrasis, which will likely take us many years to complete; and, a collection called Detourism, which is a series of shorter-term experiments (we think of it rather like a compilation of our band’s B-sides and rarities) which will be published by Palimpsest Press in 2028.

ALU: Can you talk about the full-length collection’s unique cover approach?

ML & JW: Flash forward four years to late 2024, which found us finalizing a cover design for ZZOO with Palimpsest Press, at which point we revisited the old cover sketch. We still felt the initial design—which we hadn’t really looked at since it got passed over for use on the Collusion chapbook—was simple yet elegant: the title dominating the bulk of the cover space, its letters set in stacked pairs, a visual representation of our two-person collaborative; the negative space in and around the letters revealing zones of animal life beneath, represented as skins, furs, feathers, scales and of course, eyes, the windows to the soul, as it were.

After exploring many different textures and combinations for a final, print-ready cover, we had several versions that we thought all worked equally well, each offering a richness of perspectives on animal life. The cumulative effect of all these possible versions proved to be very interesting to us—a panoramic view of kingdom Animalia. It dawned on us that we’d already had a two-cover-variant chapbook, so it only made sense to up the stakes and pitch an entire “zoo” of covers to Palimpsest for this full-length work. We developed a romantic notion of a bookstore being rather similar to a zoo; we felt that seeing a set of variant covers in a bookstore might be thrilling and mysterious for potential readers, like walking through a real zoo and seeing a multitude of creatures on display.

We discussed the practicality of five cover variants with the printer, and it seemed possible to do without over-extending the budget, so we pitched it to Aimée Parent Dunn, our publisher at Palimpsest Press, who thankfully agreed. This was new territory for the press, and we’re very happy that she allowed us to go there. She even figured out how to modify the Palimpsest website a bit to allow buyers to select their favourite of the available covers, each of which has its very own pet name: FOXHOLE, TANNIAN, SERPENTINE, INSECTOID and COSMICIST.

ALU: What has MA|DE set out to achieve?

ML & JW: Of the several manuscripts we’ve now completed, the key reason that ZZOO felt like the right choice for our debut is that it is the project most recognizable as a traditional poetry collection. It features predominantly lyric poems, and is less experimental/less hybridized than the bulk of our other projects. The intention is for our subsequent manuscripts to push at traditional boundaries, to become stranger and mutate further with each successive iteration.

The structure of ZZOO itself as a collection is also concerned with trajectories and evolutions, though on a much more macrocosmic scale. The book is divided into four sections: beginning at the lowest point on earth, underwater, where all life on the planet began; then moving onto land; then, into air; and finally out to “elsewhere,” which we envision as a kind of metaphysical space, the unknowable beyond. Just as MA|DE is an adaptive, evolutionary entity, so too is ZZOO. 

ALU: Talk about how the process went.

ML & JW: Part of our guiding ethos as MA|DE is a sense that we should optimally function like an indie band, with the publisher acting as a label. It’s crucial for us to be actively involved in every stage of the book’s life cycle—including writing, editing, designing, marketing and touring. We won’t simply hand our work off to others and trust / expect that everything automatically gets taken care of. Small presses have budgetary and time limitations when it comes to designing or marketing their books, and we understand that, so we want to be there to help out where we can. At the same time, we feel we have a good understanding of how to position our work in the market, so it serves our interest to put in some extra time to get our voices heard. Part of this surely comes from being two people with unconventional ideas and decisive opinions, as well as extensive collective experience in literary spheres informing our beliefs and preferences.

With ZZOO, the manuscript had already been through its design phase before any potential publisher got to see it. The overall print-ready design had been undertaken on our end in the final months of putting the manuscript together as a direct part of our authorship of the work. This allowed for some rather complex layouts to be worked out for poems such as “Vortext,” “Subsidized Housing for Small Birds,” and “Arbeitslied” that would otherwise likely have never properly taken their shape. This tends to run a bit counter to traditional publishing expectations, creating a manuscript in this manner was a risk. We were aware that some editors prefer a manuscript of poems that they can make a selection from, something with a lot of space for sculpting into a final work. I guess the truth is we’re not that act. When we submitted our completed manuscript to presses, this design intention was clearly described as a condition of acceptance in our cover letter.

The version we submitted—complete with cover prototype and end notes (or “Taxidermia,” as we call them here)—was not vastly different from the book that was eventually printed. Certainly the collection is more seamless for having gone through the final editing process with Jim Johnstone, who heads the Anstruther Books imprint at Palimpsest Press. Jim is a long-time friend and peer, and he understood from the beginning what we were after. He gave us his assurance when he accepted the book that he was accepting the full package, subject, of course, to editorial input. The majority of edits Jim suggested were fairly small in scale; the largest edit we accepted was his suggestion that we cut one poem out altogether.

One of the realities of collaborative writing, at least for us, is that by the time a poem or a manuscript is sent out into the world, it has already undergone extensive back-and-forth between the two of us as we struggle to come to an agreement about the final or near-final product. There’s only so much additional tinkering the work can bear after that. We’re happy to say we essentially got the book we wanted—Mark might have preferred some spot varnish on select areas of the covers to make them pop that much more, but it wasn’t really in Palimpsest’s budget at this time, which is completely understandable. Two can dream.

Now, of course, ZZOO is finally in hand and is just about ready to begin the touring stage of its life cycle. This means we’re booking gigs and rehearsing our “set list,” which is very much like band practice because there are two of us reading simultaneously, and we have to figure out methods and approaches to performing every poem. When writing, we’ve tried to obscure the authorship of individual lines in favour of our “third voice” and we want to find ways of reading that are similarly opaque or slippery. In this sense, the “process” of bringing ZZOO into the world is still very much an ongoing event—much like MA|DE itself, as we continue to re-envision and refashion ourselves as a collaborative entity.

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MA|DE (est. 2018) is a collaborative writing entity, a unity of two voices fused into a single, poetic third. It is the name given to the joint authorship of Mark Laliberte and Jade Wallace — artists whose active solo practices, while differing radically, serve to complement one another. MA|DE’s work together is often exploratory in nature, formulating a set of shared visions, symbols and ciphers that invite the reader into their complex, continually-expanding internal universe. MA|DE’s writing has appeared in numerous journals and chapbooks, and they have delivered workshops on collaborative writing at several festivals, including VerseFest Ottawa. With the support of the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts, they completed their debut full-length collection, ZZOO (Palimpsest Press, 2025), and have now completed their next two collections, Alphabeticals and Detourism. Meanwhile, they are currently hard at work on two new, creatively divergent manuscripts: Twin Visible and Waste Not the Marrow.