Expansive Place: An Interview with Jade Wallace about Love Is A Place But You Cannot Live There
Sneha Subramanian Kanta: Congratulations on the publication of your debut full-length Love Is A Place But You Cannot Live There published by Guernica Editions. It was wonderful to have met you during one of your book tours. When you read from the collection, I traced a visceral reaction to your work— one which centers geography, landscape, and place. Though these terms are used interchangeably, I believe there are important distinctions. How did the idea of writing this book happen for you?
Jade Wallace: First of all—thank you! It was a pleasure to meet you and it’s a delight to be doing this interview now. I agree that there are important distinctions between geography, landscape, and place. For me, and for this collection, I was interested in all three concepts: geography in the sense of collective knowledge-building about particular spaces; landscape as perspectival, and connected to the way we see land through art, or a designated lookout point, or curated in some such way; and place as a more nebulous, all-encompassing sense of a particular local identity within space and time. Sometimes I find it strange how we talk about ‘a place,’ as if all of space were not constantly connected, as if it were separable into discrete individual segments. Though, phenomenologically, I also get it. ‘A place’ can be any expanse that evokes a sense of unity in your sense, your memory, your emotion.
As for the collection, I didn’t set out to write it per se. I was looking at the disorganized mess of what I had written over the course of my early to mid-twenties, and I noticed there were suites of poems about particular places, or trips through places—New York, New Brunswick, North York—and I thought they might read well together. I also realized I hadn’t yet written about the “Southern Ontario Gothic Tour,” as my travel companion and I liked to call it. The Southern Ontario Gothic Tour was a series of road trips my then-partner and I took to various haunted locations throughout south central and southwestern Ontario. Spoiler: we didn’t see a ghost. But they stood out for me as some of the most affecting trips I’ve been on, and I knew I needed to write a suite of poems about them, which I did in quite short order, and now it’s “Ghost Trip,” the opening section of Love Is A Place But You Cannot Live There. That’s how the collection was born.
Later I noticed I had another set of poems that were all more like portraits or character studies, but that focused on those characters in a place that defines who they are, and these portrait-poems became the closing section of the book, “Genius Loci,”a phrase which refers to the ‘spirit’ of a place, whether a guardian spirit or the atmospheric spirit of a particular location. So, more ghosts.
Sneha: The conventional definition of psychogeography is that of an exploration of a location, arbitrary or otherwise, and its relation to how we feel in that place. When reading your book, I realized that you are trying to bring another idea of what the word might entail. How do you perceive psychogeography?
Jade: Psychogeography has a fascinating history, which I won’t fully recount here, only to say that it was, early on, a favourite of radicals, social revolutionaries, and cultural theorists, and it has Marxist and anarchist influences in its genealogy. (More on that here.) I think it still, sometimes unconsciously, draws people with such sympathies. Or at least such was the case with me. I was “doing” psychogeography in my poems before I stumbled on the concept and thought, “Aha! That’s the word for what I’ve been up to.” In its simplest sense, psychogeography is about the relationship between mind and place, how psyche and geography are mutually constitutive. It’s also very interested in several related concepts and practices: wandering or “drifting” rather than purposive travel, defamiliarization of the ordinary, and a multifaceted sense of both what a place has been made by habit and what a place could be made into by desire. You can see how it lends itself to people who are constantly dreaming of other, and maybe better, societies.
Sneha: I want to bring attention to two poems from disparate sections in your book. These are “Dead Reckoning” from “Ghost Trip” and “The Edge of Everything” from “Northern Edge”. These poems are interwoven in their connectedness to leaving a place. In “Dead Reckoning”, the lines “I turn to you and ask: / What lie is our map telling now?” embody a sense of immediacy. Similarly, the stanza “Due south, the University of Toronto had / train tracks bordering it on three sides, / and we might have asked if we were not / old enough, or not good enough, / to have the same.” reflects a deep sense of melancholy. In what ways does this haunting show itself in our relationships with ourselves and each other?
Jade: I think everything is haunted. Figuratively, at the very least. I’m like one of those collectors with a hyperspecific fixation—you know, the type who, perhaps, amasses mugs and T-shirts and string lights and anything they can find with a flamingo motif, and you go to their house and every surface is stuffed with flamingo relics?—well that’s me with ghosts. I want to fill every poem with them and really have to stop myself from doing so. Some people would call it emotional baggage but I find the constant presence of the past to be much more ethereal than that.
When we go to a place we bring all of our ghosts, and we meet all of its ghosts, and we cannot do anything that is not clouded by a thousand kinds of memory. The irony is that psychogeography both acknowledges that fact and tries to outrun it, but existing in such a paradox feels very natural to me. I think there’s a particular, rather Romantic pleasure one can get from melancholy, which only grows more poignant the longer you stay in a place, and settles in you more immovably the harder you try to escape it.
Sneha: In conjunction with my previous question, what strategies do you utilize to bring these delicate balances in a poem? What is your process of beginning to write a poem about place?
Jade: I appreciate you calling them delicate. I am forever dogged by an early comment I got on some poems from this collection, which involved someone saying they seemed “rudimentary.” While no one has been quite so impolite about it since then, I do notice that they are rather polarizing poems, in the sense that some people see delicacy in them and some people see complete indelicacy. I suspect it’s a trap that can catch anyone trying to write ‘accessible’ poems. (Not all of my poems are ‘accessible,’ or try to be, but in this collection that was important to me.)
Several years ago at the Welland Public Library, I read a poem from the collection, “I Didn’t Know It Would Grow to Be Like This,” which is about a real-life bobblehead collector. It was one of the very few, maybe even the only, of my readings my grandfather has ever attended. My grandfather gave me a love of crossword puzzles, but he is not a reader. He laughed out loud at the bobblehead poem, and I still count that as one of my great literary successes.
I wanted there to be something immediately and obviously enjoyable in all of the poems in Love Is A Place But You Cannot Live There, like humour, or a moment of high emotion, but also something more subtly enjoyable, maybe something you would only catch on a second or third read, like wordplay, or an allusion. I always try to hide a couple of things in even the simplest of poems. For me poems such as these usually start quite impressionistically (I love Impressionist painting), with a scattering of various words and phrases on paper that for me gesture toward the overall feel of a place. Later I will try to give them some narrative flow—I try to make them move through the place, and lead us toward the next poem in the suite. Lastly I will add the smaller, nearly hidden, details, or occasionally I will discover that they were there all along.
Sneha: One of my favourite poems in this collection is “The Importance of Choosing Suitable Travel Companions” in the section “Cynic’s Guidebook”, entirely set in New York. You write about the tonality of opposite personalities. These nuances are brought out through subtle humor and contrast. What role does irony play in your work and would you share how you record these instances? Does it happen through memory, recording notes, both, or something different than these?
Jade: I like to read that one, which is about my mom and I, whenever my mom comes to one of my readings. I always preface it with “Let me just assure you that I really do love my mother…” because a listener could get the wrong idea. The poem gently mocks my mother (although it mocks me even more). Humour is one of the unacknowledged love languages, I think. My parents and I would affectionately insult each other when I was growing up; I often say to my partner that the only time he really, truly giggles is when I roast him a little bit. It works, in my opinion, because through a well-chosen insult we can show how well we know someone—that we know, and notice, their habits and idiosyncrasies, and also that we know how far to take the joke, enough that it surprises and amuses them and not so far that it upsets them—and also that we take genuine delight in their follies and their strangeness. I find that to be such a validating experience to share, and I like writing in that multi-tonal mode that combines sentimentality and cynicism.
When I was younger, I used to write down everything that seemed important to me as it happened. Now, I wait a while. If it keeps coming back to me for weeks after, then I’ll write it down. I guess I use memory like a sieve and whatever it holds eventually ends up on the page.
Sneha: In the section “Vanishing Beach”, there is a resurrect tenderness. In “Mawkish & Tender”, the lines “And your softness, I suspect, is like the soft, faraway grass that wavers / beside your house upon the harbour. / There is a softness in you asking / if I would ever go there with you. / Hearing it, I know I can be moved— / the only uncertainty is distance.” are fascinating. The natural elements in this section juxtapose interpersonal relationships against metaphors of ecology. How did you envision the poems which became a part of this section? What references did you utilize when writing about nature and connecting analogies?
Jade: I’ve heard it said that you can tell a lot about a person based on whether cats/dogs/insert your choice of pet here likes them. Well, I think you can tell even more about a person based on how they interact with plants, or rocks, or other things for which there are not necessarily any immediate consequences if one fails to act with due care. Legally, and socially, it’s often totally permissible to do damage to plants, which means you can tell a lot about someone’s deepest-held personal values and sense of their place in the world from how they treat plants, because personal ethics are nearly all that’s governing their choice of action. Reverence for a plant seems like one of the purest forms of tenderness, because there is virtually nothing else motivating such gentleness.
In this particular section, two people want to be tender with each other, and they are people evidently capable of tenderness, if you judge them based on the way they observe and interact with their local ecosystems, and yet something is preventing them from being tender with each other. I found that to be a very absorbing tension, and one I still don’t know how to account for, even though I tried to understand it, both in these poems and elsewhere, for years. I have given up now.
Sneha: You read “Heirloom Seeds” from the section “Genius Loci” at the event I attended. The poem extends a metaphor of burning away the past as a ritual to spatially mark moving into a new house. How does this mythmaking trace itself in your brilliant poem?
Jade: One of my particular fixations in my writing is home, and how impossible it is to find, and how even more impossible it is to return to, and how often what we have is not a sense of home but of hiraeth—a beautiful Welsh word that roughly refers to homesickness for a place that may no longer exist.
Many of the poems in Love Is A Place But You Cannot Live There are about travel, so they are inherently about being away from home, and several others, such as those in “Northern Edge,” are about struggling to create a replacement home. I wrote them in my twenties after I moved out and my parents sold my childhood house, so you can probably appreciate why notions of home were preoccupying me. The travels I describe were the briefest of interludes between my various efforts to find or make homes for myself, most of which efforts I considered to be failures, even if they were worthwhile experiences. And in some sense, the travel, too, was a subconscious effort to find a place, any place, that would feel like home again, though obviously it didn’t work either.
Among these efforts at establishing a home was an apartment I rented that had bed bugs, which reminded me of my dead grandmother, who used to sing me that famous nursery rhyme about bed bugs. I resented being chased out of a place that never felt like home to begin with, by an infestation that reminded me of a former home, once shared with a grandmother who no longer existed. At the same time, I was quite enraged by legislative and other choices being made in Ontario that drove up the costs of housing, both rented and bought, and made shelter increasingly a tenuous luxury for so many people.
In my head, a story started to form about a couple who moves ‘up’ out of a basement apartment into a real above-ground rented floor of a house, but who, in their own mundane version of a horror movie, are haunted by the spectre of bed bugs, which remind them how close they still are to their former poverty and precarity. They destroy the bugs but they cannot destroy what the bugs represent. Like all good horror movies, the end of the poem finds our protagonists temporarily victorious but doomed to be haunted.
Sneha: I admire our friendship, the support you extend to the larger literary community, and your attention to the changes we seek in the publishing industry. How would you describe your journey as a writer? What advice would you offer to those beginning their writing career?
Jade: Same to you!
I will admit I have quite ambivalent feelings about ‘community,’ both in literature and elsewhere. On the one hand, it would be foolish to think of ourselves as anything other than deeply interdependent creatures. As writers particularly, we are nothing without readership, and we would be nothing without the countless texts that have come before our own, and we must engage with these realities endlessly.
On the other hand, I often find it hard to connect with people, or at least hard to feel connected. I have difficulty trusting people, and difficulty discerning whether they like me or are just being polite. Dislike, or indifference, are often a much easier emotions to access.
But all of that just reminds me that it is crucial to put in the work to support the people I do appreciate, and to reciprocate the many kind things people have done for me over the years. And that, I repeat to myself often, is the stick you have to cling to, or you will get sucked into the quicksand of your own despair.
Jade Wallace (they/them) is a queer writer, editor, and critic, whose reviews have appeared in The Malahat Review, The Ampersand Review, CV2, This Magazine, CAROUSEL, and elsewhere. They are the author of two poetry collections, Love Is A Place But You Cannot Live There and The Work Is Done When We Are Dead (Guernica Editions 2023 and 2026), and a genderless novel ANOMIA (Palimpsest Press 2025). As part of the collaborative writing entity MA|DE, Wallace has co-authored two further poetry collections, ZZOO and DETOURISM (Palimpsest Press, 2025 and 2028). More: jadewallace.ca + ma-de.ca