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Found You Magazine is an independent print publication showcasing inspired, unconventional work by emerging and established writers and artists. To support our work, visit foundyoumag.com.
Daisy Barker is an educator, writer, friend, and poly hobbyist who grew up and continues to live on unseated Coast Salish territories. She is interested in intersections, both literal and figurative, and all the activity they generate. Before we begin the interview, Daisy shares a brief excerpt from her story, There Are Whales Out There, featured in issue four. Please enjoy.
Speaker 2:When I swim in the ocean, it takes a lot of focus to not imagine a watery demise at the hands of creatures. It is not unfounded. Once kayaking in the same waters, I saw a mother jellyfish, the size of a small dog, self cloning and releasing thousands of tiny red babies into the deep. When I'm swimming between strokes my thoughts are on a short leash. I'm thinking only about what my hands look like as they cut through the dark turquoise water, how my kick is lopsided, how the sun has dipped behind that bank of clouds changing the color of everything.
Speaker 1:So you have three essays Mhmm. Published in issue four. The archives, opinions about motherhood, and there are whales out there. Mhmm. All the pieces that are in this issue came came into the issue in different ways.
Speaker 1:And for yours, they were all existing essays that you had written. Yes. And that I had read and really enjoyed and felt that there was a place for them in the issue. Yeah. And I guess, where are you starting when you when one of these essays begin?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I was thinking about that because we we spoke earlier about sort of what to expect and what to talk about and everything like that. And I was thinking about like the process of writing and how I approach it. And I don't know if I necessarily have as much of a practice as like it reaches a critical point in my head where I've just been mulling over the same things over and over and over and it's like, okay, this needs to be exercised. It's like a cramp or something.
Speaker 2:You need to like work it out, stretch. And so I think all of all of those pieces came from things that I find myself very preoccupied with. I come from a family of hoarders, so with the archives it was very much like tied to the idea of like having all this stuff and being around all my things and feeling this connection to them and this like duty of care to them, but also not really wanting to look it in the eye. And then for motherhood, I mean, I was warned that the biological clock would be at play at some point in my late twenties, early thirties, and the voices were correct. So I find myself noticing mothers more.
Speaker 2:And then with the whales piece, it was, yeah, I think the first line, like, I've been needing some soothing lately. I came up with this mantra when things were feeling really overwhelming in the fall, you know, in this big whole wide world and this big whole wide ocean, like, there's whales out there, like there's just whales out there swimming and it really grounded me. And so I don't think I even I wrote, I don't reference that in the piece itself, but it's sort of like a nod to myself in in the title. So, yeah. In a in a roundabout way, I I sit with these things for long enough that I feel as though they need to to exit and exist in a tangible way, and I think that's how those pieces all came to be.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's so nice. I mean, in a way, I sort of applied the the theme to these pieces of abundance. Yeah. But I'm wondering if you might, like, what's your take on how they fit?
Speaker 1:With abundance? Yeah. What is your take? I'm curious.
Speaker 2:Oh, interesting. I think Something that strikes me about, like, the process of writing is that you can so easily just, like, speak with your cohort and your friends and your your peers and anyone who will listen to you about the things that occupy your mind. But when you when you put, like, pen to paper or words to screen, it becomes like a tangible entity that you can revisit and have new thoughts about your your first wave of thoughts. And there's to me, there's that like layer of abundance when you're working with the written word. There's like the first iteration, like the first thought, the first seed, and then you plant it, you watch it grow and you can revisit it.
Speaker 2:You can prune, you can tailor, you can you can add. And I think for me, that's like the beauty and the abundance in writing is how many different paths one story can both like illuminate and also shroud and how you can negotiate that as like time goes on and revisiting your own writing, it can feel kind of self or not self flagellating, self just like you're really gassing yourself up. But it is it is enjoyable to go back and be like, what did I think about that when I wrote that? Mhmm. And a lot of the time it's very different.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Yeah. Well, it's when you speak about the idea of like pruning or trimming or or layering your ideas on, into a story, like, those those ideas feel very just that idea across all of your essays feels very relevant. They at times feel quite meta. You're you use a lot of like interjecting thoughts that kind of contrast what you're making your way through.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Which I find very interesting. It creates like a nice depth and like a human humanity to your writing as well which
Speaker 2:I I think is love thinking about thinking Mhmm. And like how much duality we can hold and like what's like the critical mass of that? Like, where does it become like, parsing out the meaning from like the overwhelming just like surge of information. Like, how can I hold multiple things at once without it sort of like diluting the the essence of what I'm trying to communicate?
Speaker 1:Yeah. What makes these works personal to you?
Speaker 2:How could they be impersonal?
Speaker 1:Yeah. They truly are.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What makes them personal to me is sort of like the reason behind writing them, like the the ethos. I wrote opinions about motherhood. I wrote most of it on the train in Toronto. I just remember watching this mom with her child and I was just, I mean, like the train is so long and it's just like a straight line and it's so loud.
Speaker 2:And I was just watching her and she was on the train for quite a while and I was like, I think there's something here. Like, I just am getting to like witness this person's life for this like twenty minutes of her day and here's all the things I think about her based on what she looks like and how she dresses and I mean, if I wasn't me, don't know if I'd think those things or someone else might see that person and have totally different interpretation of the situation, but So it's personal in that I want the thoughts out and I want to move on.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Speaking sort of zooming out a little bit, speaking more generally about your writing practice, what does your process usually look like? I guess we sort of spoke about this about like a turning point or something or a Yeah. Over saturation moment. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But do you want to speak more about your process whatever I'm way it
Speaker 2:I'm I'm trying to learn how flexible in my writing these days, I find. I'm often writing digitally. Big fan of an iPhone poem. And I journal. That's more so just like for my thoughts.
Speaker 2:But I think writing is such a muscle. Like, haven't written in a while and it I haven't felt sort of really called to. With the whales, I was also in a similar slump. Like, I had been traveling in the summer and I write these like dispatches that I send out and they're quite like long winded accounts of my day to day while I'm in a different country, and I think those kind of those drain me in a way that writing for myself doesn't. And so I wrote the whales piece and I was just like, it's just it's not gelling really.
Speaker 2:And then I there's a like a mention of a line that like today things changed. I don't even remember what day that was, but that was the day that I came back to that piece of writing and like flush it out and finished it and said, is like how I want it to exist and moved on from there. So I think, yeah, a new piece of my practice is knowing when to leave something and give myself space from it to come back with more vigor and honest engagement as opposed to just trying to like complete a task necessarily.
Speaker 1:Do you find that there are themes or like recurring questions that keep appearing throughout the pieces that you write?
Speaker 2:I've been told I have a really strong voice. So I think I just I lean on that. That's my crutch. Yeah.
Speaker 1:What do you find is, the hardest part about the creative process for you? Like, what what do you what do you find you constantly kind of like have to challenge or come up against when you're trying to finish a piece?
Speaker 2:Knowing which ideas to let go. Yeah. Yeah. I have a bad habit of just like deleting them and then they're gone.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow.
Speaker 2:You never have to deal with it again. I think like arguing with myself is a pretty big barrier to access, honestly, of of sort of having that, like, as much as I just talked about getting rid of the inner critic, having the inner critic that wants to make sure that you're presenting like the most, like, fulsome, thoughtful, rounded account of the thing that you've been sitting with in your head, whether or not that's true or accurate to the actual process of sitting with that thing and then putting it to paper. Like, maybe I wasn't thinking about, you know, the geopolitical climate at the time, but it feels important to reference it because it's such like a large part of our present existence. I think those are the parts where even when I go back and read those pieces, I'm like, is that, like, does that need to be there for this piece? Like, does that And it's not as though when I'm reading authors that I enjoy, I'm like, oh, well, you didn't reference the issues of your time and how dare you.
Speaker 1:That's a good point.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, it's, perhaps it's like more of a plight of like a modern digital age creative. Yeah. Having having the loom of others opinions so close by. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And how that impacts things.
Speaker 1:That's real.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It's a censorship in a way of I mean, it's self censorship, I think. I think we all Those who are cognizant of it do a really good job of self censoring and for the business of appearing a way that we want to be seen. Yeah.
Speaker 1:For better or worse. In encountering that idea, what what do you what are some things that you're hoping people are gathering from your work, like taking away from your work when they encounter it?
Speaker 2:Colton, don't think I've ever thought of that.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Let's think about it.
Speaker 2:Sometimes when I'm writing, do think of certain people reading it, and I think I just I wonder if they'll like it, I suppose. And that feels quite surface, though. I don't I don't know if I have I don't know if I've done much introspection as to whether or not my writing sticks around in other people's heads.
Speaker 1:What are you what are you hoping that they feel?
Speaker 2:Hoping. Feeling like perhaps the human condition isn't as mysterious as we make it out to be sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I think there's a lot of things that we can internalize as like, oh, only I'm experiencing this. Like, this darkness is one that only I carry alone. And at times that can be true, but I think for a lot of what I write, I'm hoping that people can feel understood, I suppose. Yeah. I don't know.
Speaker 2:Give him a laugh. Yeah. Saying the quiet parts out loud. Like, yeah, we've all got shit in packing cubes under our bed. Maybe we should look at that.
Speaker 2:Does that need to be there? I don't know.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I wanted to ask what has been something that's been significant to you as of late? Could be a book or a line of poetry or even like a moment.
Speaker 2:It could be anything. It's not a recent thing that I've been holding on to, but there's a line in a poem by Ida Limon, who I don't know if she's still the poet laureate of The United States. I don't know if they've cut that job. But she was doing an excellent job while she was in that role. I don't remember the name of the poem, but it's like in three there's like three parts to it, and one of the final lines is people have done this before but not us, And I think about that line a lot.
Speaker 2:I really love that line. That's pretty. Yeah. I'll send you the poem when I get home. It's in the book above my bed that I need to dig out and reread.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, I think that it just for me, it's really reassuring to know it's like, you know, there's been millions of people before me and there will be millions of people after me and it's like, we're not alone in this and we are all experiencing life in our in our ways and people have made their way through it. And even though it might be new to me, other people have negotiated and and gone forwards with confidence. I've also been reading a lot of really light hearted pulp fiction books. Nice. Because that's what I have space for.
Speaker 2:I've started the Alphabet Mysteries by Sue Grafton. They're written in the eighties. They're set in California. It's a wonderful place to escape to. My mom and my sister have been bugging me to read them for years.
Speaker 2:I finally caved. It's been great. And I read a really good short story recently that I shared with my students, and they didn't like it, which I take is a good sign because I But think it challenged it's called Say the Word by Jean Reistad. And, yeah, it's about a mother who is like, just yeah, worried for her son who's out fishing and he's shared like a deep fear of his and you go through her mind and learn her thoughts about all the different parts of how she's, you know, tried to raise him and shape him as a person and the inevitable letting go of control and power and knowing that people will do what they do and you can just hope for the best.
Speaker 1:Closing. Where can people find your work?
Speaker 2:My work is on the World Wide Web, on substack.com/pseudocommentary. Thank you for being such a facilitator of the arts in this peculiar little city of ours, Colton.
Speaker 1:Thanks, Daisy. Thanks for doing this.
Speaker 2:Of course.
Speaker 1:Found You Magazine is produced on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil Waututh Nations. Recording and audio engineering by Thomas Hoeller at Terrestrial Sound Studios. Produced by Natalie Ducek. Theme music by Jackson Brzezinski. Show art by Post Projects Inc.
Speaker 1:Found You Magazine is published by me, Colton Proctor. To support our work, visit foundyoumag.com. Thanks for listening.