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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.
Benjamin Lickerman writes speculations about housing in the city of Vancouver. His stories archive loss on a human scale and progress on an inhuman one. His work aims to operate in the space between the text and its context with particular attention toward the material history of language and how it is used. Science fiction is often the result. Before we begin the interview, Ben shares a brief excerpt from his story, 1 Dollar Man, featured in issue four.
Speaker 1:Please enjoy.
Speaker 2:A $1 bill drifts in the winds of this unreal city, high above lonely streets and suburbs zoned for departure, past construction sites of various towers on the rise, and the rotting ruin of a home burnt up in flames the other week, uninhabited now for it is only another tower to be. Now backfill for the adjacent development, mounded compost drawing all the still local green thumbs to attempt a community garden, but the ground turns out to be toxic from years of saturation, and thus the empty lot will remain that way for the next ninety nine years, nothing growing but in the raised beds, Limp leaf greens while the dollar bill drifts on up to the windows of a TV family. Last dollar spent. They could use this one, but they don't see it. Eyes glued to the screen.
Speaker 2:Thoughts runny like eggs. Infomercials around the clock, advertisements for real estate, developers walking backwards through open rooms lit impossibly bright, and hey. Wait a minute. Doesn't this look an awful lot like our floor plan?
Speaker 1:Nice. So good. That was good. Thank you for reading. Thanks for being here
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And for doing this. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:My pleasure. It's a privilege to be in the in the studio.
Speaker 1:I thought we would start by having you describe the piece that you made.
Speaker 2:I I read a story about housing in Vancouver and, you know, grappling, I guess, with the questions of the different trying to connect all of the different scales on which housing operates in my understanding of it. Obviously, lived experience of housing as a place to live, as shelter, as a necessity, as part of the life that sort of fades into the background until it doesn't. But then also housing in terms of you drive around the city and you see all of these boards that do all of the things that the story says they do. They promise a future, they promise towers, somehow that is also housing, even though it's just such a radically different experience, at least on on like the ground level. So I was trying to write a a story that just sort of connected all of those, and and I guess the the dollar bill sort of became the the sort of means by which they are all connected.
Speaker 2:And I was also I'm I I guess on a on a of selfish and or personal note, like, I've I've been curious about momentum in storytelling and the in particular, like, the relation of momentum of the story to the subject matter. And I was although maybe I am regretting it now after reading it, I I when writing this, I was very interested in, what would it mean to write a story with no sentence breaks? And and and use other sort of grammatical or or or sort of literary methods of Yeah. Of creating a rhythm and a flow. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Like, where did this piece begin for you? Like, why did you decide to start writing about this dollar bill flying around? I remember being at
Speaker 2:Oak Ridge before they closed it all down to construct the mega mall that's going up there right now. There was a Safeway there and I was just going shop. I just needed to get some groceries and pulled into the Safeway and it was like right at the like the stores in the mall were closing down one by one, and the Safeway was like halfway there. So I walked into the Safeway expecting to like buy some food, and like half of the shelves were completely empty. So that was a deeply unsettling experience in many ways, And I think that was where the character of 1 Dollar Man kind of came up as somebody who is perhaps a bit delusional, but in a way that like, I guess, living in this reality creates delusional feelings or sort of delusional takes on life.
Speaker 2:So in that sense, he's no different from anyone else. But as a character, he only sort of shows up at the end and even then just as like a maybe temporary occupation of a character by this figure rather than the character himself. But he's somebody who believes that in exchanging money for goods and or services, he's actually liberating those goods and services from their bondage in this cycle of of capital and continued value, which is a wild take. I I honestly can't claim like I I don't know where that that idea came from. That may just be one of those ones.
Speaker 2:There's a line right at the end called that says, like, emissive from the great paracosm, and and that may explain it Mhmm. As well. It's just, like, coming from the world of ideas.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. But yeah. Cool. Yeah. I was excited to include this piece in the issue because I feel like it really speaks to what many people are feeling living in Vancouver.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. But probably just in the world in general, which is that everything is feeling the stakes are really high and the the gap between those with money and those without is ever vastly widening.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:And that's what this piece for me really drives home and does very successfully. So I liked that interpretation of abundance in that way as well, sort of like an unsettling way. Yeah, for sure. I was wondering also like in what I have some theories, but in at what points in the story or what themes in the story are personal to you and your own experience with living in Vancouver or in the world in general?
Speaker 2:Personal to me. I mean, I think the story, and maybe this is just speaks to like my experience of of writing or or my approach to writing, but I think this story is is my attempt to grapple with all of this on a personal level as sort of futile as that task may be. Like, I'm not I'm not pretending to understand what it is to be somebody who can fly into Vancouver and, you know, put a few million dollars down on a suite of condos in the morning and then fly out. I don't know what that feels like. I also don't know what it feels like to be a labor subcontractor who doesn't have status in Canada.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of different viewpoints that I'm grappling with in the piece that are not my own. I guess to me, it feels like there's there's a cycle of precarity and and a cycle of, I guess, like demolition and development that comes up in the piece a couple of times. It happens sort of on the margins. I think you can sort of see this in a couple of different ways. The first is being from this point of view of community and the loss of community, almost from a sense of what is being lost.
Speaker 2:I've lived in houses and neighborhoods that have been in the ten years that I've been in Vancouver that I've seen be occupied by people that I know and love and visit them and live there myself and create community and do things like gardening. And I've seen those places also get I've seen people get evicted from those places and that those places get knocked down and turned into some of the speculative investments there. But I also think there's another side to it and a greater context, which I don't want to lose sight of, which is like, well, how do people like myself and how do people end up in those places and what sort of conditions of precarity are manufactured such that certain people can show up and be there. I'm thinking of university educated students, people who are not necessarily on a step ladder to success, like financial success in the way that the piece talks about, but are still of a certain means, bringing in certain generational or familial wealth with them or making it themselves as they're there. And in that sense you can kind of see that same sort of precarious cycle is also like cresting wave of something like gentrification, where the fact that somebody like myself can move into a house that I know is going to be demolished in five years and that I'm willing to enter into that agreement knowing that I'll have to look for housing again.
Speaker 2:It's like a lot of people who are trying to raise families, lot of people who've maybe been here for a lot longer than I have, that's not a situation they would willingly walk into. It may just be easier to move to Burnaby or Coquitlam and wait another fifteen to twenty years for this to hit there, whatever it is. So so I guess like seeing from the personal experience, trying to see that for for both sides of it as best I can. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Yeah. For sure. Moving more into, like, the broader your broader work in general, more about your your artistic practice. Mhmm. Like, what does the your process usually look like?
Speaker 1:Like, how do you come to an idea?
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Mhmm. Mhmm. I mean, a lot of it is I've been I've been going to this writers group. I'll I'll I'll use this opportunity to shout out the Gachet writers group, which I've been going to, yeah, pretty consistently for for a couple of years now.
Speaker 2:Like, this that was probably where I wrote the majority of this piece, at least the initial drafts from week to week, just sort of in little bits and pieces. Gachet Writers Group facilitated by local poet writer Bruce Ray. And one thing that Bruce does very well is he creates conditions for automatic writing that I think produce extremely grounded and extremely interesting results. Automatic writing, I guess, if anybody's not familiar, it's it is just the process of sitting down and and starting to write. I usually do long hand or just, like, by hand and just writing.
Speaker 2:And the the point the the only requirement of the exercise is that you don't stop until you're out of things to write, like, whatever it is. But, like, the idea is you just keep going, so whatever flows. So it's a lot of it's a lot of, like, discovering certain narrative lines and connections as as I am writing. This is now talking about my experience of it. But but I think the the point being, and this maybe is the direct answer to your question, is like letting the letting the ideas flow and and getting myself out of my own way, but doing so in circumstances that are certainly intentional.
Speaker 1:So once again, like, do you find there are themes that are reoccurring in your work? And whether you intend them to show up or not, and maybe what those are and where those come from. Definitely.
Speaker 2:The themes the themes that show up in my work, I think and and what I'll say, I'll I'll I'll sort of continue from the the the thread I was saying, which is that part of the the joy of automatic writing is that, like, those those themes are a discovery for me as I'm writing them, which allows me to engage with them or not based on how I how I feel. But sometimes it feels like these themes are coming up whether I want them to or not. It may not feel like it in the piece, but on a micro scale it is about housing, and it is a lot about what it means to live in a place and what requirements there are for living, what standards there are for living, and then putting that in direct juxtaposition with the financialization of real estate. But then I think you can start to unspool that a little bit and go a little bit wider. And in the case of Vancouver, in the case of unseated territory, really comes down to land.
Speaker 2:This relation that we have to land both as like, in my case, like a settler living and occupying space on unceded territory and interacting with it, whether I'm thinking about that or not. But then also from a much higher level, how land is bought and sold in a way that it has been since the late eighteen hundreds. And that is like a very contingent history, and that is a very present history, and and that is a history that has a lot of people writing about it from a lot of different angles beyond mine. And I just try to come to it from the the position of of like a person living inside of a home or trying to create a home in these contexts. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, what do you hope that people take away from your writing?
Speaker 2:I guess just a sense like that it is all connected. That these are not sort of distinct or separate forces in the world. Also in that same vein that just because something is perhaps beyond your ability to comprehend it as a coherent whole. Like for me, it's like the world of speculative investment and finance is like so far beyond what I can understand of it. That doesn't mean that like it is untouchable or it is it is it is anything like that is somehow fundamentally different from the way that you interact on a day to day basis with the world around you.
Speaker 2:It's just somebody else doing that from their perspective and their worldview. And, you know, using different apps on their phone than you do. But ultimately, like, you're still just looking at a screen Mhmm. As a as a little anecdote.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Mhmm. I like it. I wanted to ask you if there was some something significant to you as of late. What could that be?
Speaker 1:That could be a book, poetry, place,
Speaker 2:a moment. Yes. I'm reading I'm reading a book right now that that sort of intersects with with a lot of the same themes that I'm right this piece is is discussing. So it's easiest for me to just talk about the book that I'm currently reading. Anna Pitova Crosses a Bridge by Renee Gladman.
Speaker 2:And it's it's one of the books in her Rabbika series, which is sort of a sort of speculative fantasy fiction world in which it's a it's a city that it takes place in that is sort of undergoing constant change in in a a way that to me is like speaking very much to the condition in Vancouver, although that's not the context that she's writing from. She's writing from the context of, as best I understand it, the context of like San Francisco Bay Area in the '90s, '80s, '90s, which was also sort of a hotbed of speculative investment with Silicon Valley and that sort of thing. So I think there are some parallels to be made. But in particular, her focus there is how, at least in this book, is the relationship of architecture and space and infrastructure to language. In a very sort of cheeky self referential way, the language in which she writes the book is actively changing the city in which the book is written.
Speaker 2:And she speaks to it very clearly, very straightforwardly in a way that I find intimidating. But also one of the reasons why I think this is actually a good example of something that's been speaking to me recently is that Renee Gladman is a writer who I admire very much, take a lot of inspiration from both, like, in terms of subject matter, but also in terms of her orientation towards language and her use of language and her understanding that language is powerful and contains it's a material that contains its own sort of force inherently, and and when you use it, you are sort of working with the forces that are already present in language. And whether you're doing that intentionally, as in like writing a short story or a poem or whether you're doing that unintentionally as just like having a conversation, that power still works through language.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Love. Yeah. Great. Is there anywhere that people can go if they wanna read more of your work or connect with you?
Speaker 2:That's a good question. I don't like no. I don't
Speaker 1:Very loose? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, not by not intentionally, at least like at a certain level. Yeah. I need to get a website at some point. But you can wait for this demolition project thing to come out.
Speaker 1:Okay. A little preview. Yeah. Amazing. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Anything else you want to share as we wrap up?
Speaker 2:I don't think so.
Speaker 1:You want to share a little bit more about the demolition project at all?
Speaker 2:I'll I'll keep it under wraps for the most part. But just to say that, you know, when you were alluding to themes, not only in this piece, but other bits of writing is that like there's there's other collaborations going on, objects in print. Also, probably part of my reticence to have a website or to put time and energy into that is that I just have such a fixation on physical and printed matter. And so looking forward to hopefully getting more of my writing in that format Okay. With the the help of some incredible friends soon.
Speaker 2:Alright. Well, let's look forward to that
Speaker 1:in the future. Cool. Thank you so much for doing this. 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.
Speaker 1:Produced by Natalie Dussek. Theme music by Jackson Brzezinski. Show art by Post Projects Inc. Found You Magazine is published by me, Colton Proctor. To support our work, visit foundyoumag.com.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening.