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Poetry in Motion: Guy Elston + The Character Actor Convention
In his debut collection The Character Actor Convention (The Porcupine’s Quill), Guy Elston offers a playful, surreal chorus of voices—from a pumpkin that pens a letter to a sheep recalls a revolution—to explore shifting identities and the fluidity of authenticity.
Guy tells us more about his poetic style, with a nod to Emily Dickinson, and reads from his book.
I like to see my poetry primarily as storytelling. The Character Actor Convention is full of impossible or unexpected stories, encounters and voices: we meet a gargantuan pumpkin with daddy issues, a traitorous ant aesthete, an advocacy group of megalomaniacal microplastics, even a Twitter-addicted King Arthur. I get a real kick from these kind of micro-narratives and odd POVs, and hopefully you will too.
This is not to say that my psyche doesn’t fill the book. Each persona I adopt, or character I encounter, helps to unlock a fresh bunch of my own melodramas. I guess persona poems and the like are my way of incorporating Emily Dickinson’s famous “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant” into my practice. I approach the world (and myself) at a slant through these guises. Catriona Wright wrote that the book “delves slantwise into the absurdities of our present and the disasters and solaces of our imagined futures,” which is better than I can put it myself.
Guy reads two poems from The Character Actor Convention
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Guy Elston’s debut poetry collection is The Character Actor Convention (The Porcupine’s Quill, 2025). His poems have been included by The Literary Review of Canada, The Malahat Review, The Ex-Puritan, Grain, CV2, Geist and elsewhere. He lives in Toronto and is a member of the Meet the Presses Collective.
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The Character Actor Convention is available here or from your favourite indie bookstore.
