I've been meaning to ask you (interviews)

I would like to send my love to other members of the 2SLGBTQ+ community, particularly trans people.

I've been meaning to ask Annick MacAskill

May 07, 2025

What is your first memory of existing?

My first true memory (a memory not based on something my parents told me later) is of playing hide-and-seek with my little sister. I was maybe 3 or 4, so she would have been 2 or 3 at the time. I became overwhelmed with fear while hiding from (or with, I can’t remember) her, to the point that eventually she had to console me (thanks, Maggie).

I have a line in a poem from my first book, No Meeting Without Body, that references this incident: “Though younger, he was the brave one” (the poem, “Tiller,” is ostensibly about Cain and Abel). That describes the way my sister was as a child to a T: teeny but fearless.

What is your first memory of being creative (writing, art making, etc.)?

Also with my sister—I remember us playing on a big bed, perhaps my mother’s, in another childhood home after our parents split. Post-separation, my mom rented a floor of an old Victorian house in Old South, a neighbourhood in my hometown (London, Ontario). The bed wasn’t a bed to us, but a wooden raft, the room, which seemed enormous, the rough seas, and the two of us were castaways. This storytelling is the earliest artistic creation I can recall. At this point, we were probably around the ages of 4 and 5.

What is the best or worst dream you ever had?

I have some very persistent recurring nightmares. One theme that has kept coming back over the decades is facing some kind of threat and not being able to speak up or make an audible sound. Over the past few years, I’ve woken up screaming from such dreams, which is alarming in some ways, but also reassuring—I’m relieved at the thought that I would be able to make a sound if I were under attack.

What do you cherish most about this world?

Most consistently? The birds.

Do you believe in ghosts? Why or why not?

I never gave much thought to ghosts until I moved to Nova Scotia almost a decade ago. This is a very haunted place. I believe in ghosts now for sure.

If you could send your love to anyone, who would it be and why?

I would like to send my love to other members of the 2SLGBTQ+ community, particularly trans people. There’s nothing wrong with the way we are. Natural variations in sex, gender, and sexuality are just that: natural. Queer and trans people have always been here—for some examples, see Leslie Feinberg’s seminal study, Transgender Warriors. I wish fascists would stop trying to use all of us—and again, particularly trans people—as scapegoats in their efforts to terrorize and control the general population.

Buy Votive

Publisher’s Description

Votive considers various forms of devotion and our often fraught attempts to respond to “our confusion, our curiosity.” These are poems concerned with the way we use stories, old and new, to connect our experiences, and the way we persist in our quest for love, hope and meaning when language falters—“What we couldn’t say we found in the skies.” MacAskill’s great gift resides in her facility for coaxing things evasive and intuitive into crisp form and language, in voicing what “so quickly I / knew and knew and knew.”

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