I would like us to look up to the world, not down on it.
I've been meaning to ask Michael V. Smith
I’ve been meaning to ask you is an interview series where Kathryn Mockler invites people to answer questions about being human.
What is your first memory of existing?
I have about two dozen or more memories from age three and younger. I think the earliest is standing in my playpen, wanting to be picked up.
The best one from that time is a water fight we had in and out of our basement apartment. I remember we climbed through the windows onto the grass. Someone must have helped me up.
What is your first memory of being creative (writing, art making, etc.)?
In grade five we were asked to write a story, and then anyone who finished would get help making it into a little book. I started writing mine on a typewriter but didn't get more than five lines. It was about a boy crush I had. I never finished. I remember two girls in the class finished, so they got little books produced. I felt humiliated by my failure. I was already sure that I was going to be a writer.
What is the best or worst dream you ever had?
The weirdest dream was a sex dream with an alien, when I was still a kid, about ten maybe, before I knew anything about sex. If you want details, you have to read my new book.
Do you have a preferred emotion to experience? What is it and why? Or is there an emotion that you detest having and why?
My favourite emotion is gratitude, because that leads to joy. Gratitude helps with grief too. I've had a heavy year of grief. Being grateful for the time we did have together, grateful that I'm still here to sing their praises and tell their stories. That helps.
Can you describe a strange or hilarious memory when something was the opposite of what you anticipated?
I have a weird story that's the inverse, a hilarious anticipation of a memory. While writing Soundtrack, I went looking in my journals to see if I could find the first song I ever danced to in a gay bar.
I have such clear memories of that night. How nonplussed I was. My first gay bar was just a dance club, like other dance clubs. The second bar was a little cruisier.
But in my journal I'd written all about my fear that gay people would be making out in the bar. How gross that was. Then talking about the second bar, I complained about the gay porn on TV sets. I was such a prude.
But I don't really remember any of that attitude. Like, I barely remember that person as me. I became such a slut in my 20s. It's like my superego wrote the original account, but my memory only recorded what I really thought, deeper down. My memory kept mostly the horny stuff.
What do you cherish most about this world?
My community, for sure. My husband, my big family of queer and original family, the little five-year-old kid that we're helping her mother raise, my creative and university communities, my students, all the kids in our life. I cherish kids and pets and gardens, all those things I can nurture.
What would you like to change about this world?
What we invest in, what we think is important and valuable, what we think gives us purpose. I would like us to look up to the world, not down on it.
What advice would you give to your younger self? Your younger self could be you at any age.
I'd tell my younger self how amazing he is, just for being alive, just as he is, in that genderqueer skin.
I do this little therapy trick where I'll invite my younger self into my life, and tour him around. I'm trying to show that young terrified kid that he can relax. There's a world in which he thrives, I've found friends like him. I'm living the dream of being queer around other queers.
Do you believe in ghosts? Why or why not?
I have definitely had the most trippy paranormal experience with a ghost in a hotel room in Lisbon. I shit you not. Weird, weird ghost story. There's no unknowing an experience like that.
If you could send your love to anyone, who would it be and why?
I'd send my love to all the powers that be who are leading the world to extinction. If you knew love, you wouldn't destroy the world that sustains it.
About Michael V. Smith
Michael V. Smith works across many creative genres. A writer, filmmaker and performer, he has been publishing books, doing drag, and making videopoems for over twenty-five years. A full professor in Creative Studies at UBC’s Okanagan campus, Smith teaches poetry, fiction, spoken word, editing and publishing, and writing with digital media. Smith lives on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded tm̓xʷúlaʔxʷ (land) of the syilx / Okanagan people.
Is a song enough
to hold all the truths we cannot bear
without it?
From award-winning writer Michael V. Smith comes a poetic memoir about growing up gay in the shadow of AIDS. Embodying an elusive part of queer history, these song and album-inspired poems capture the last three decades of the millenium and reveal how music has an uncanny ability to remind us not just where we were at a given moment in time but who we were.
With his signature humour and tenderness, and guided by the music of the era, Smith catalogues social prejudices, court rulings, and medical breakthroughs, alongside personal devastations, triumphs, and the search for community. From a first crush toting a Michael Jackson Thriller cassette, to falling in love to the music of Jane Siberry, to dancing at a gay bar to “Groove is in the Heart,” Soundtrack is a moving personal record of a man who survived the lost generation and a vital document of queer joy.
Praise for Soundtrack
“Michael V. Smith is at it again. Soundtrack gives us an arc we so rarely get, one in which all our preteen longings, our teenage mistakes, our frailties and traumas are just the first verse of a killer song, and it’s building to a delirious, cocky, ecstatic final chorus.” —Marcus McCann, author of Park Cruising
“Michael V. Smith’s Soundtrack is a songbook that thrums with heart, hilarity, and moments of brilliance so sharp, wise, and tender I’ll carry them with me forever. Soundtrack is a testament to the poetics of living and the power of music through Michael V. Smith’s essential kaleidoscope of lenses: queer artist, activist, writer, radical, drag diva, humourist, poet, documentarian, and personal DJ.” —Andrea Warner, author of We Oughta Know: How Céline, Shania, Alanis, and Sarah Ruled the ’90s and Changed Music
“Looking back in time through the prism of music Michael V. Smith crystallizes moments from life, homing in on the safe space music makes for a queer kid, enhancing details or bearing witness to trauma or just letting us live forever even during a plague. This collection is like pulling a well-loved vinyl record from the sleeve and knowing even before you drop the needle you are going deep.” —Brent Bambury, CBC broadcaster
Support Send My Love to Anyone
Support Send My Love to Anyone by signing up for a monthly or yearly subscription, liking this post, or sharing it
Big heartfelt thanks to all of the subscribers and contributors who make this project possible!
Connect
Bluesky | Instagram | Archive | Contributors | Subscribe | About SMLTA
 | A guest post by
|