Joanne Leow: One of the main effects that you do in the first part of the book is these poems of erasure; you take these anthropological writings and then you make them kind of your own—right? —through this process of erasure. What was that process like? Emotionally but also intellectually for you? What kind of desires did you find came out of that process for you, or kind of effects that were produced that you were like, “oh, this is surprising,” or not surprising? What was that process like? (0:24) Jordan Abel: Well, it was a process of intense frustration and catharsis. So, to explain that a little bit—before I’d written the book and before I understood what the book was going to be, I was intensely interested in Marius Barbeau’s book, Totem Poles, and my own position in relation to that book, and, and likewise my own position in relation to Nisga’a knowledge and worldviews and understandings. And I was very interested in finding a way to work with that book and my initial attempts to work with that material were, were through like, historic fiction, which didn’t really pan out, and also through creative nonfiction, which didn’t really pan out, and also (laughs) through lyric poetry, which didn’t really pan out. And it was a really intensely frustrating experience because there was something there that I really wanted to write about and talk about, but I wasn’t sure how to access that, and every attempt that I made fell short of actually addressing the complexity I was interested in addressing. So, it wasn’t until I just had this like really intense moment of frustration where I decided to start…you know, I felt like I’d exhausted every, every possible avenue that was available to me in terms of working with the book, and I, I just started erasing parts of Barbeau’s writing out of frustration. And I think that that moment led to erasures that were cathartic in certain ways, but also it led to moments where I started to see the thing that I was interested in actually start to come through. That’s, I guess, the core of that experience. (2:21) Joanne Leow: So it’s really interesting, so it’s almost like an act of destruction that came out of frustration that led to… Jordan Abel: Yeah. Joanne Leow: …that’s really fascinating. Obviously that whole postcolonial thing, how do you dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools, it’s like such an old quote, but not with the master’s tools, but just destroy it, just destroy it to make something new, that’s really cool. One of the things that, then, comes out of this act of not just manipulating Barbeau’s work, but manipulating English itself, the building blocks, the letters, everything, comes out, of course, towards the end of the text, in the very last section, with the use of photography, but also with this unreadable, unperformable set of poems. When I first taught that my students were just like, “but how are we supposed to encounter this text?” (Jordan laughs) I’m like, “you just got to take it in its own terms.” (3:06) Jordan Abel: That’s, that is my favourite question. How do we read this work (laughs), how do we read this art? And I think that’s really the thing that actually follows all of my work, all of my other book-length works, is this question of reading, or this question of readability or unreadability. And I think that the work in particular in that section asks the reader to read differently, or it asks the reader to not look for the same kinds of linear meanings that come out of other kinds of reading (laughs). (3:46) Joanne Leow: Like totem poles. (laughs) (3:48) Jordan Abel: Yeah. And, you know, I think that that’s one of the most interesting moments, to me, in, in this book, is where it becomes, the work itself, becomes unreadable, or, you know, it becomes illegible. But there is a certain kind of readability and legibility there that remains. (4:08) Joanne Leow: In terms of the visuality, definitely. You’re still kind of looking at recognizable signs, but then I notice in many cases, obviously—and I’m moving to that question about perspective and angle—you flip those photographs upside down, you unsettle this idea of this colonial gaze, really. Let’s look at these—let’s take photographs and Instagram shots (laughs) of these totem poles, right. I mean, the simple act of inversion. What were you thinking about in terms of, are we looking at this from the right angle, are we looking at this from the right perspective? (4:36) Jordan Abel: I think those are really productive questions. And I very often think, when I reflect on my own artistic practice, sometimes I feel like I’m a very like literal artist (laughs), so there’s moments in which there’s inversion, in particular with those photographs at the, at the end of The Place of Scraps. I think they’re parallel to questions about our perspectives on colonialism and Indigenous history. And I think there are similar moments that come up in my other works as well, in particular in my, my last book, Injun, there’s a moment where the text literally becomes inverted as well. That, I think, is also in parallel to those moments where it happens in The Place of Scraps.