We Who Are About To Die : Sacha Archer

Sacha Archer is a Canadian writer currently residing in Ontario. He was the recipient of the 2008 P.K. Page Irwin Prize for his poetry and visual art, and in 2010 he was chosen to participate in the Elise Partridge Mentor Program. His work has appeared in journals such as filling Station, ACTA Victoriana, h&, illiterature, NōD, and (parenthetical). He has work forthcoming in Experiment-O. He is the author of the chapbooks Dishwashing Event, Part One: Tianjin, China (no press, 2016), and Dishwashing Event, Part Two: Ontario (Puddles of Sky Press, 2016). His chapbooks Acceleration of the Arbitrary (Grey Borders) and Detour [D-1] (Spacecraft Press) are forthcoming.

Where are you now?

Ontario. Waterdown. I think I’ll be leaving this town soon. I certainly hope so. It’s near Hamilton (technically part of it), and near where I grew up, Dundas. Why do we come back home? I don’t recognize anybody who can confirm it is. The Bruce trail that winds through the escarpment into the Dundas valley and into Hamilton…is one reason.

What are you reading?

I just finished Anne Carson’s new collection, Float. Currently I’m in the middle of Quentin Bell’s biography of Virginia Woolf, and also Injun by Jordan Abel.

What have you discovered lately?

That it is suffering that unites us, and which is at the root of all our actions. It has made me much more comfortable. I was standing at Pearson Airport, looking around, and everyone suddenly could barely hide the wincing nerves just below the edifice.

Where do you write?

It depends on the project. I’ve been working on a lot of collage/ concrete poetry recently, and have found myself at the kitchen table or in the basement in my late grandfather’s office. My next project will likely find me somewhere else. And we’ll (my family) be moving soon, so. Some of my writing practices fail to resemble writing in its traditional form, and consequently where I write becomes unconventional. This past summer I was wandering through the woods (a return—I wrote in the woods as a boy) making rubbings under the sign of poetry. 

What are you working on?

Like I mentioned above, I’ve been doing some collage. There are two escapades. One focuses on excised speech bubbles from the funnies of various newspapers. The other project is—perhaps, not collage—using hole punched circles from various novels and manuals to create, at this point I know not what. Scores? There is a large project demanding my attention which I have had trouble starting. It begins with me reading Virginia Woolf’s The Waves underwater in a bathtub. It will begin very soon.

Have you anything forthcoming?

Grey Borders is publishing a chapbook of mine under the title Acceleration of the Arbitrary. It is the first third of a larger manuscript which imagines a future senseless brutal revolution (same old). Also, Spacecraft Press will be publishing my chapbook Detour [D-1], which is a conceptual translation of the Dao De Jing. Again, it is the first part of a larger project.

What would you rather be doing?

This “interview” in person. Slightly drunk.