me reading at maison kasini for the launch of my book ft. out-of-control french accent & inappropriate poem at 4:55.
‘I am a published author, also I own a small cat’ ft. hangover hair, copy of I am my own betrayal, baseball team shirt, small cat.
Guillaume Morissette at the book launch in Montreal for his debut book, I am my own betrayal, which I am currently reading. There is audio from the event here.
I was interviewed by Midnight Poutine
midnight poutine wrote about I am my own betrayal.
I am copy/pasting the full Q&A below, which was excerpted in the article.
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1. What do you enjoy most about writing?
It’s a way to hold real life ‘accountable’ I think, in that if you do nothing life just keeps going and your memories become less precise and then nothing at all. With text, you get the feeling that for any given experience, no matter how you tell that experience, there’s always something in there that’s going to elude you, so it becomes this kind of ‘fuck it’ where it doesn’t really matter if what you’re trying to express becomes fiction or nonfiction or an email to someone or some other thing. All that matters is that something that was intensely abstract and internal and personal is now a thing you can stare at.
Books are also pretty weird. We go to books to be entertained but also learn, so it’s like, ‘tell me joke, but make it meaningful.’ I like that a lot.
2. What got you interested in writing in general, as well as writing poetry specifically?
Therapy was getting me nowhere. I have always been writing in some capacity, but I only started taking it more seriously as a craft when I realized that what I was doing with my life was making me feel profoundly hollow as a human being and that literature was a really good outlet for my neuroses and experiences and anxieties and things.
My poetry isn’t very poetic as a whole, I actually feel alienated from a lot of poetry. There’s a quote by William Carlos Williams where he goes something like, ‘Poems aren’t made of thoughts, they’re made of words, like pigments on the canvas of a painting.’ I see the point he’s trying to make, but at the same time, for me, poems are made of thoughts. I also don’t like rhymes or classic forms, and I don’t think of language as ‘beautiful’ or something, I think of it as ‘functional.’
In the end, I use poems to express tiny units of awkward that might get lost if I were to place them in a story or elsewhere. To me, they feel like emails gone wrong or something.
3. Which authors have inspired you?
A nonfiction book called, ‘A History of Celibacy’, I forget the author. Also Mark Leyner, Clarice Lispector, recent stuff like Lidia Yuknavitch or Tao Lin or Blake Butler, Bill Bissett, canon stuff like Ann Beattie or Lorrie Moore or Lydia Davis or Amy Hempel, female authors like Joy Williams or Mary Robison, older stuff like Rene Daumal or Ikkyu or Fernando Pessoa, everyone I have on Twitter.
4. What in general inspires you?
Periods of prolonged boredom.
5. What do you find challenging about the writing process?
Enjoying it. There’s a theory, I can’t remember where I read that, but it goes something like, ‘Any system will end up reflecting the conditions in which it was made.’ In other words, if you’re bored while writing a novel or a short story or whatever, then the writing will reflect that in some way, and maybe won’t be as imaginative or off-the-wall or funny as it could have been. Writing isn’t the most exciting thing you could be doing as a human person, like it’s not a rollercoaster ride or shooting yourself out of a giant cannon or whatever, so it’s easy to fall into a lull with it sometimes where you’re just sitting there and doing it with as much energy as scrolling through Facebook and secretly loathing your own piece of writing.
6. How long did it take for you to write this book?
Two years.
7. How would you describe your writing style (devices, rhyming, word pairing…)?
Accessible, I think. I try to use mostly words that make sense to me and seem natural. I use humor a lot and want to be as shameless as possible, to not withhold anything even if that means people might think of me differently.
Early on, I had this problem where I was using too many metaphors and comparisons, which dragged down the pace of the stories a lot. People kept reacting negatively to that and I was like, ‘What is wrong with you people, the amount of metaphors is fine, what is this, you’re all on acid.’ Then I tried it their way and realized they were right. I ended up working that into one of the stories in the book, where one of the minor characters ‘hates metaphors’ and it comes back in the text like a kind of demented running gag.
8. What are your plans vis-a-vis writing in regards to the near future?
Tour, if possible. I’d like to read in Montreal but also beyond, at anything that will have me. Book launches, lit magazine launches, some band’s ep launch, open mics, loft parties, house parties, birthday parties, rap battles, company picnics, anything that has an audience.
Live readings aren’t always super popular, and all the time I attend readings where I stop paying attention to the person who is reading and just tune out and start thinking about robots and pudding and other stuff, but I honestly believe live readings can work as an accessible and affecting form of entertainment. I like readings where the crowd is allowed to be social and expressive as opposed to just sitting there quietly like it’s a funeral or a chess game or a tennis tournament or something.
9. What are your long-term goals?
Complete manuscript for maybe a novella based on a lot of shit, jesus, don’t even get me started, experience crippling and possibly extreme poverty while acquiring proper university degree, buy nothing, find inner acceptance about gradual loss of youth, avoid taking myself seriously, never go back to my hometown.
visual breakdown of the cover of I am my own betrayal
a visual breakdown of the cover/back of my book (published by maison kasini, 2012):
1. DEPRESSED POST-PARTY STREAMERS
the average life of a party streamer seems, to me, short, eventful and possibly ideal. party streamers rarely get to experience boredom, so as a useless experiment these stayed up for a while.
2. MY SISTERS AND ME AS LITTLE KIDS
a framed photo of my sisters and me as little kids. in the picture, we are terrified of the man taking pictures at sears but also posing for him a little. I am wearing a red bow tie and I appear to have ‘shaggy hair.’
3. FAMOUS ACTOR JAMES DEAN
I think I remember reading somewhere that james dean once dated the person who plays jerry’s mom on seinfeld, which is pretty weird to think about.
4. OWL PILLOW
kind of feels like I could write an entire mystery novel set in sweden about this owl pillow somehow being the source of all anxiety and also the secret to perpetual inner growth.
5. HUMAN FIGURINE
four seconds before we took the shot, I tried placing the human in a position that would suggest existential despair. looking at the end result now, I kind of feel like I’ve succeeded.
6. RACHEL
I have roommates, rachel is my favorite one.
this is an excerpt of an email from her to me:
‘I forgot to say I was in alabama. I can’t text anymore because I only have a dollar left and I have to save that for when I fuck up somehow. a lady from georgia is sitting beside me on the bus. I think she thinks I’m depressed. but she’s talking to me about the pecans that grow on trees there and telling me that god loves me and that everything will be ok. this must be what being cared for feels like.’
7. IMPORTANT COPING MECHANISM
hugging pillows longingly is a coping mechanism that seems, to me, to be underrepresented in popular culture. this pillow in particular has a horse galloping towards nothing on it and a good density/shape for grabbing/holding onto.
8. OUR DAUGHTER
for a while, we were referring to this painting found somewhere as, ‘our daughter’ and pretending to be proud of her and living through her accomplishments.
*book cover by celia spenard-ko.
I am my own betrayal by Guillaume Morissette // 24.05.2012
debut collection of stories & poems by me
published by maison kasini, 2012
anxiety, email relationships, owl people, awkwardness, facebook, humiliations, shortcomings, groundhogs, terrible personal decisions, videogames, coping, girly arms, cat seizures, etc.
‘one of our favorite writers,’
-kirsten mccrae, papirmasse
‘a unique voice, with striking details,’
-josip novakovich, author of three deaths
‘depressingly hopeful, like looking at yourself naked in the mirror,’
-lizy mostowski, soliloquies
you can get it here
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I AM MY OWN BETRAYAL
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. vaster emptiness achieved
2. I am on mdma let me give you life advice
3. when I was seven at summer camp I awoke in the middle of the night and shat on the beach by the moonlight
4. banhood (read here)
5. I don’t know what a poem is but it’s not preventing me from writing poems
6. poems are for no one, very long poems are for themselves
7. and how they all fell to and speedily devoured the muskallonge that had eaten the carp
8. I have girly arms and I mean it (read here)
9. I hate myself
10. my phone remembers all your excuses
11. on my heart there is a button I have pushed
12. I am someone’s dream husband (read here)
13. severely handicapped samosa
14. a synonym for ‘love’ is the word ‘escape.’
15. karpman drama triangle
“I had no girlfriend or love interest. I desired less and also masturbated less. I mentally classified most people that I met as either unattainable or suffering from a kind of sad, terminal inner artlessness. In my evaluation of people, there was no middle ground, only those two categories. I wasn’t being aggressively social because being social meant being underwhelmed.”
— how I failed at life in quebec city, a semi-long & semi-depressing personal essay by me on anorexia, anxiety, bleakness, claustrophobia, cities, videogames, lack of desire, crippling numbness, other things.
the gargoyle in toronto interviewed me re: things, this is a scan.
a quote I like:
in videogames, the creative process was compromise-based and impersonal and centered around the premise of making money. the reference points of people around me were, like, “the key in the dungeon” or, “cute blocks falling down.” with literature, my main reference point is probably, “dying alone.”
