EA Douglas
Hopping the Fence Podcast Transcript - #4, EA Douglas
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RC: Hello, I’m Rebecca Casalino, and this is Hopping the Fence, a podcast dedicated to talk to artists on the fringes on the Canadian art scene. EA Douglas is a writer and artist currently living in Vancouver, on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Her work explores the intersection of creativity and mental health.
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Our conversation is recorded in Tkaranto, on the traditional territories of the Haudenosaunee, Huron-Wendat, Anishinaabe, and Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nations.
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RC: Hi EA!
EA: Hi Rebecca!
RC: How are you doing today?
EA: I'm good.
RC: Do you want to tell everybody where you are right now?
EA: I'm in Vancouver. Very sunny and not as hot.
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RC: Ugh, I'm so jealous. I'm sitting in my 32-degree room right now in Toronto.
EA: Yeah, I heard that Toronto was a sauna.
RC: So do you want to describe your practice for listeners unfamiliar with all your work?
EA: Sure. So I am an artist and writer, and the way my work has come out in the last couple years has been through zines, both real life zine and a digital zine that I try to send out every couple of months. All that work is under the title Strange and Mysterious Creatures, 'cause in my mind it all comes from the same place and goes to the same place.
RC: Mhm.
EA: My work tends to explore the intersection of creativity and mental health.
RC: How did you come to speaking about mental health through this writing and visual practice?
RC: Umm, well I'm crazy. [Both laugh]. And I mean that in the nicest, most self-loving way possible. So I have major depressive disorder with psychotic features, which at the best of times is like I and very high functioning and people are always like, "I had no idea you were depressed!" And then at the worst of times, I'm in in-patient and getting the support I need from the medical community. So that's why I write about mental health, because it is my life.
RC: Yeah. As a person who does identify as Mad/Crip in this new mental health ecosystem we're in, how did you find channeling that in a public way? Because I struggle with that so much and I like looking to your work to see a format for how to talk about it in a public and really poetic way.
EA: I think it's just kind of come naturally. There's that really basic writing quote by Ernest Hemingway being like, "Write what you know." And for me, the thing that I feel I know the most is my experience with mental health. I feel like I can confidently talk about mental health because that's something I know, whereas I would feel less confident in other areas.
RC: Mhm. And when did you start your writing practice?
EA: Well, I've always kept a diary or a journal, which is like a foundational part of writing the zines that I release. It all comes out of my diary. But the first Strange and Mysterious Creatures zine came out in 2017, 12 months directly after I got out of the women's ward at CAMH. 2017 is when it all started.
RC: And what was the response to your work as you started putting out these zines?
EA: I don't know. I mean, I think that's one of the beautiful things about zines is that sometimes people are like, "Oh my god, this is amazing!" And then other times you just don't hear anything.
RC: Mhm.
EA: So I've only written 2 of the full-length zines...yeah. So the first one, I remember someone said that it was "zany." A couple months later, they came to the reading series that I was running and they were like, "Oh, I read your zine, it was really zany!" And I was so confused as to what that meant.
RC: [Laughs].
EA: I also I felt so happy that someone had read my work that I didn't ask any follow up questions. I was just like, "Aw, thank you!" I hope it was a compliment. And the second one was recently reviewed by Broken Pencil Magazine, and that review is glowing and made me cry within 5 seconds.
RC: Awww.
EA: That was nice.
RC: And how did you come into the zine community? Did you start out in Toronto?
EA: Actually, I have been reading [zines] since I was in grade 11.
RC: Wow.
EA: It amuses me as someone who tries to write and tries to make art and has never gone to school for either, that for me, zines, they feel like home. The zine community will always feel like a belonging place to me. I remember sitting in grade 11 under the stairs at my high school and reading copies of Doris. And it [laughs] amuses me it 'cause I was reading zines before I knew what a literary magazine was.
RC: [Laughs].
EA: So it's very interesting to come from this place of lower class white community in rural Ontario and zines we're very much a part of the teenage culture there. And then to Toronto, and finding out like, "Oh, zines are actually super cool!"
RC: What was your introduction to the zine scene in Toronto then?
EA: My connection to the zine community stems from my connection to my hometown.
RC: Mhm.
EA: Lindsay, Ontario, quite a few people who make zines are from Lindsay. One time I was at an Ottawa zine fair, and I ran into a person who had the Lindsay water tower tattooed on their thigh.
RC: Awesome.
EA: The water tower got pulled down when we were all in high school, so it was like a very... you had to, you know, grow up there to really understand that symbol.
RC: Mhm.
EA: But yeah. I think the like coming from Lindsay and then making a few friends in Toronto, and then that kind of all connected together at some point.
RC: Mhm. And how do you find the zine scene different in Vancouver? Or is it different?
EA: To be honest, I'm pretty home bodied. I'd say that moving to Vancouver has been the best thing to ever happen to me, and that's because I've grown creatively and I've become the healthiest version of myself here. And a lot of that has been a lack of social obligations.
RC: Mmmm.
EA: I find it hard to really connect but people here, which I've heard from a lot of people, it's just kind of the norm of the west coast.
RC: Yeah.
EA: I've done one zine fair since moving which was the Canzine Vancouver last fall, and that was run by Broken Pencil. And that was good, you know, I made a few new friends... seemingly, the thing that I've noticed about the Vancouver zine scene is that nobody solely focuses on zines. Maybe that's possibly also the same for Toronto. And the other thing is that it does feel like here, the word "zine" and "comic" is much more synonymous. And maybe, that's again me just reading into things. But I remember I was talking to someone and I was telling them that I made zines, and then they began to tell me about all of these other comic artists. There was like, a moment of processing, and I was like, "Oh no, I write a per zine." Different type of zine. They're both zines but like, different type.
RC: And how would you define a per zine for listeners?
EA: A per zine is a personal zine. And it's essentially written stories instead of being comics and visual.
RC: Mhm.
EA: Some comics are also per zines because all these things can overlap. But yeah, so it's like a personal zine. Yeah, I mean mine is always very heavy on the words and then I like to intermix a few collages to kind of break up the text and not have it just be like, a novel.
RC: Yeah. Do you want to talk about your collages a bit?
EA: So the concept is like a hag stone. So a hag stone is this mythical lore from the British Isles, it's a rock that has a hole in it. And if you look through it, you can see fairies and you can see witches. It's like a viewfinder to kind of clear yourself of curses and bad luck. And my grandmother is from London, she emigrated in the 40s...50s? And she has a rock with a hole in it on her bureau. Yeah, so that zine, Hag Stones of Lake Ontario is...like I understand why you associate it with Leslie Spit, but it was actually, those were rocks that I found along Sunnyside Beach. It was because at that time I was making a lot of trips to Sunnyside Beach just as a place of restoration and calmness. That's actually where I did my first zine launch is at Sunnyside Beach. Yeah, it's just like a very beautiful and calm greenspace that that summer I realized like no one really goes there in the afternoon, so...
RC: Mhm. So how did you put that zine together? Are those pictures that you took while you were around Lake Ontario?
EA: I have a habit of picking up rocks when I'm feeling emotional. It stems from being a grounding technique that I picked up in in-patient where they would let us hold ice cubes. I've found that when I need a grounding technique and I'm in a bar, that ice cubes work really effectively. Just like holding an ice cube is a way to ground one's self, and so that kind of transformed into holding rocks. If I'm upset and I'm walking, I'll pick up a random rock. And because of this I always have an abundance of stones on my desk or in my pockets. [Laughs]. So those rocks were like rock that I had collected and then I just took photos of them so I could return them to the beach.
RC: Mhm.
EA: Yeah, just through collaging and cut holes in the center and manipulated the images, usually using watercolour, but I think there might have been some papers that had been printed with acrylic paint.
RC: So you're old school, you don't use Photoshop or anything?
EA: I do not know how to use any Adobe program. [Both laugh]. Super funny that you bring this up because 2 weeks ago I was talking to my partner about how I would want to learn how to do these things and he was like, "Uhh, you have literally never shown any interest in this." Like, "where is this coming from?" But yeah, I make all of my zines on Google Slides. My process is very process-oriented and sometimes it'll take on a like, "Oh, I wanna do this final project," but for the most part I'm just messing about in my room or wherever I'm at and enjoying that time of being able to be present. They're all handmade, so I make the collages with exacto knife, glue stick, yada yada, yada, and then I scan them, and then I put them into Google Slides, which is like a free PowerPoint, because like, super easy to manipulate images and get it all sorted.
RC: Mhm.
EA: And if anybody ever wants help making zines, you can just DM me and I will send you my two... I have like two standard Google Slide projects that are like, "If you fold it this way, it comes out looking like this, and if you fold it that way, it'll look like this."
RC: So how did you come into this making practice, not coming from an art school background?
EA: I definitely did not ever go to art school. My family is make-y in the way that they make quilts and my grandmother knits. And when I was a kid they used to can their own vegetables and stuff on their farm. But I think for me, making things is much more like a good way to spend your time, or a pleasant way to spend my time than like goal-oriented. I did briefly consider applying to OCAD in 2013, but I ended up going back to school, I went to George Brown to become an ECE because when you grow up without money, the idea of going into debt for art school is just... it was like, that would be literally stupid.
RC: Mhm.
EA: You know, I have friends who have gone to art school and they've done the whole thing and they've been, you know, rather successful, but I don't know if I would do that, or I don't know if it would be worth it.
RC: Yeah. I think choosing to go into debt for something is like a huge choice. The only reason I could go to OCAD for my graduate studies was because of all the funding but undergrads? They're expensive.
EA: Oh yeah! I mean, just the university system. I mean, I can go down that tangent if you want.
RC: [Laughs].
EA: I have a very complex relationship with post-secondary education as a whole.
RC: Mhm.
EA: I mean, realistically, if you consider the fact that, you know, when you're in high school, you have to go there, and that is funded by the Ontario government. And then you're coached by these adults who are paid by the Ontario government to take out a loan from the Ontario government to go to a school that, you know, may not guarantee anything.
RC: Yeah.
EA: When I step back from it, it seems kind of like a con. Especially a con on the people who want something more significant than the community that they've been brought up in.
RC: Yeah. So you see post-secondary as this kind of pay to play community almost?
EA: Yeah, no, it is. It's totally an elitist like, if you have money you'll be fine and if you don’t... I went to U of T for 2 years, and in that time racked up $26,000 in debt. When I dropped out because it wasn't the right fit and I was like 19, and I didn't want to do the thing that I had decided I was going to do when I was 16... because those years you change so much.
RC: Yeah.
EA: It was only last year that I was finally able to pay off all that debt, and now I'm, you know, 30, and like, cool, what am I doing with my life now? I think that post-secondary and that story that people are told that we need to like go to school to be successful... it's like all of the people that I know who are rather successful in the arts, they're bartenders, you know?
RC: Yeah. Aww.
EA: You have your joe job and then you do your thing on the side, but very few of them were successful on the university or at the post-secondary level.
RC: Do you surround yourself with people who did go to art school and are kind of in these more art gallery spaces, or you're more in the zine community and writing community?
EA: There's like this thing that happens where people are like, "Do you go to art school?" It literally happened to me like three weeks ago when I was riding the C bus. Some guy stopped to ask me about the camera that I was wearing and then his follow up question was, "Oh, do you go to Emily Carr?" And I was like, "No." This is [inaudible] because people have been asking me if I go to OCAD for like, the last decade. I just find that, I guess these are just people that I am drawn to and I'm friends with. I think I like to live a creative life because it's inherently more interesting and more enjoyable.
RC: Mhm.
EA: Than an uncreative life. But yeah, I think I wade somewhere in the middle. I am of neither community really, I don't really feel like, you know, immersed in the writing community in Toronto despite running a reading series. And neither did I feel immersed in the visual art community despite living with lots of people who went to OCAD, you know?
RC: Yeah.
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RC: This week’s podcast recommendation is Better With Chocolate. Join host Kristen Dominique and as Honoré they explore art, love, mental wellness and Black excellence. Check out episode 19, The Art of the Uprising on Spotify, and follow the podcast on Instagram @ewcpodcast.
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EA: Yeah, I mean definitely since moving to Vancouver it's more challenging because [laughs], I don't really have any friends. Yeah. It's more challenging 'cause I think, yeah, I'm still just out here doing my own thing.
RC: Yeah. I find making adult friendships is so hard and really only through school or work are you forced to interact with other humans, so I find that's where a lot of my networks come from. Even working at coffee shops or bartending, I meet a lot of other artists.
EA: Exactly. Yeah, I mean, I work as a nanny so I don't really make friends that way. Maybe one. But yeah, it is definitely, as an adult, it's challenging. It's also, you know, I'm a Mad person, like I identify as a mentally ill person. I have to go to bed early in order to take care of myself sometimes and I struggle with interacting with people if I'm overstimulated. So there's just those other qualities that make it challenging to kind of really find a community.
RC: Mhm.
EA: [Inaudible].
RC: Yeah, I think it's a lifelong struggle to surround yourself with good people and it's ongoing.
EA: Oh yeah, and the other thing is that our relationships can evolve and change. Some people might be good for us sometimes and then not good for us other times.
RC: Yeah. I wanted to ask actually about your Polaroids. From our conversations we haven't talked about it as part of your art practice, but that was kind of the first thing that I noticed from you on Instagram. All of your travels documented by these really intimate polaroid pictures.
EA: Oh, yeah. So they're actually Instax. I cannot afford Polaroid.
RC: Instax, sorry.
EA: Yeah. I shoot Instax 'cause it's like half the price. Yeah. I did actually, I do have a zine finished, I've just never printed it because it's like, I would really love to do photo zines because they're just beautiful and if I was to fully go into visual art, I would totally go for lens-based media. But those zines never, they were never fully made because COVID hit. So I've been shooting them since 2017 I think is when I got my first instant camera. And I took photography in high school and I've always loved photography. I've always dated photographers. [Both laugh]. So I got a...impulse-bought a very expensive Instax camera. Last year I realized that it was just sitting in my closet and I was never using it and I felt kind of like, "Oh, I don't like that I spent $300 on this camera and I don't use it." So I made myself start using it, and that's when I was like, "Oh, I'm just gonna delete all my content from Instagram and re-do it all by posting the Instax pictures." And so that's what I've been doing. And then this February, maybe it was January 2020, I was on Craigslist in Vancouver looking for Instax film because sometimes I'll find someone's bought a bunch of it for like a party or a wedding or whatever and they have all these extra boxes and they don't want them anymore so they'll sell it for much cheaper.
RC: Sick.
EA: Yeah. Craigslist, it's a good place to get stuff. But I came across this guy who was selling a Lomo instant Square. So Lomography is a toy camera maker that was really popular for like 2014.
RC: Mhm.
EA: The Holga cameras, classic toy cameras. The whole thing is that they have an aesthetic involving light leaks and film. So Lomography did a Kickstarter campaign where they were like, "If you help us fund this project, we will make a Lomography camera that uses instant film." And so the cool thing about that camera which was also an absurd amount of money, even thought I got it off Craigslist, is that it has a tripod mount, self-timer, as well as a remote control. And a lot of my creative practice involves self portraits. So being able to do that with the instant camera was just like a game changer. Usually if I'm posting these days, then they're shot with the Lomo Instant Square.
RC: How did you come up with the title of your per zine, Strange and Mysterious Creatures?
EA: It's just this joke that I made to someone. It might have happened the first time in in-patient. It's just like me whenever I'm talking about how weird people are I'm like, "Oh, we're such strange and mysterious creatures." Because, you know, definitely living on wards you have some interactions with people that you're kind of like, "Well, this is a wild time." Like, "I didn't see this happening. But cool." You know, it's not good or bad, it's just odd...strange. Yeah.
RC: So it's kind of like a moniker for who you are or how you're processing the world?
EA: I think yeah, for definitely how I view the world. The first zine that I wrote is about getting sober and developing a creative practice. And the second zine is about surviving sexual assault and why I stayed with my abusive boyfriend for so long. In the terms of those two contexts, it's definitely like the lens that I'm viewing the world through.
RC: Do you feel like you're processing trauma with these zines? Because you cover such heavy and personal subjects.
EA: I think I'm always processing trauma.
RC: Mmm.
EA: I think anyone who is in a marginalized group is always processing trauma at some point. You know, I had an interaction yesterday morning before 8 a.m. that was incredibly triggering.
RC: Oh no!
EA: I mean, it's, you know...
RC: Mhm.
EA: Fine. It was a rough night but it's fine.
RC: Yeah.
EA: I got through. But it's just interesting when we're interacting with people we don't know what their processing in that time. And I think everything is kind of processing trauma. And yes, I definitely think that my work is about processing trauma. I think it's really important, on that note, to include content warnings on the things you're doing. Because you don't want to accidentally trigger someone.
RC: And how do you format your content warnings? This has been something that I've been thinking about a lot, especially with so much police violence going on. Just like the need for trigger warnings.
EA: I think it's like the first page of it, I just like kind of acknowledge what the zine is about in, you know, words that make sense to me, then I hope that they make sense. It's funny though because I did a zine swap with someone and they had some not great things to say about my work, which I took way too personally, which is also fun. But one of the comments that it is that they thought it was amusing that I had used the word... I think I had said like "dealing with sobriety" in my content warning and that like being sober wasn't something that could trigger people. And I was like, "Okay. I know that when I'm struggling with my sobriety, hearing about other people struggling with their sobriety is not great for me."
RC: Yeah.
EA: I definitely... I think that we're all trying our best and we can all do better and that when you're writing a trigger warning or content warning you have to think about what might upset people.
RC: Mhm.
EA: Or not upset, but like impact people.
RC: And when you're running reading circles or writing circles, how do you deal with topics like that? Or is that something that you've tackled in these in-person writing gatherings?
EA: You know, I don't think it ever came up in a writing group that I organized, but it definitely happened with the reading series that I ran with Nick McKinley, The Sophisticated Boom Boom. We had it come up a couple of times because the way that the reading series ran was that we'd have a feature reader and then the rest of it was an open mic, and people could read whatever they wanted as long as it was under 5 minutes. And there were a few other rules. One of the things is that we never told people specifically that they had to put content warnings. In retrospect, I think maybe we should have. Because I remember there was like a few nights where people... explicitly there were a few times where people were reading things about eating disorders and after the night had concluded, my Facebook inbox would be filled the next day with people who had been impacted. In the past, I don't know if I've always done a great job asking people to put content warnings on their work. I think it's definitely something that I as an artist take into my practice. If I'm doing my work as processing trauma, then I have to acknowledge that that might impact others.
RC: So your practice the way you're describing it since moving to Vancouver, it's been really solitary. How is that being during quarantine?
EA: Exactly the same. [Both laugh]. I am an introvert. And I got locked down for 10 days. I got a little bit sick. When they opened up testing to everybody in BC. I went and got tested and my test came back negative but I still got locked down because I had symptoms. So I couldn't leave my room for 10 days and I was perfectly content.
RC: [Laughs].
EA: I think I would go out to the kitchen to grab takeout but for the most part yeah, I just like being alone. One of the things that I've learned in the last couple weeks is that I need to push myself to engage with my community more because it is a privilege to be able to isolate myself in this way and to take that space and never leave my room.
RC: Mhm.
EA: So I've really been trying to do better on making connections and also supporting other people.
RC: Yeah. And what communities are you looking towards for support and to maybe get more involved in?
EA: I don't know if there's anything specific.
RC: Mhm.
EA: I do know that definitely the way that I connect the most with community at this time is through Instagram. And so a lot of my Instagram feed is still very much just people that I was friends with in Toronto. And so there's been like an active attempt on my part to search out artists in Vancouver and, you know, follow them and kind of engage more with the art scene here. Yeah, right now I'm working on a zine... I'm excited about it because it's a zine not about my life and not about mental health. It's very much my first experiment with researching and bringing together material from outside sources. So it's a collaborative zine that I'm making with my friend Rio. It's about Niagara Falls. It's about people who went over Niagara Falls intentionally, like not the suicides... like people who went over in barrels or on various craft. Rio's a designer so we're gonna collaborate. And this will be his first zine which is exciting for me. Rio and I were just hanging out one day and he told me that as a child he had gone to Niagara Falls and I just thought that was really interesting because he grew up in Nanaimo. And we had just made a joke about, "sure, this magazine about Niagara Falls." And then I kind of got into it and went down this rabbit hole and now I'm very excited by the material that I'm finding. And it's also just interesting to work on something that is not about me.
RC: Mhm.
EA: In some ways I feel like I shouldn't be writing other people's stories, but in other ways I'm like, "Well, I'm just collating information from newspapers from 1930 so..."
RC: So you are doing a lot of collaborative work already, [laughs].
EA: Yeah, I mean, I like collaboration. The thing I like about collaboration is that I feel like ideas always go further in a way that you don't... and you can be easily surprised.
RC: Mhm.
EA: But I think it's like, I'm collaborating with Rio but Rio is also my only friend in Vancouver, [laughs]. So I don't know. Collaboration is not the problem, it's like the community aspect that I'm currently struggling with. I had an idea earlier this year to start a Vancouver zine collective. And trying to make a tangible place for people to meet. But then the pandemic hit and it's kind of hard to start community initiative at this time, right?
RC: Yeah.
EA: It's really challenging to bring people together when we're not supposed to be bringing together. But I do think Community is a foundational part of both mental health and creativity.
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RC: Thanks for listening to Hopping the Fence, a podcast dedicated to the fringes of the Canadian art scene. If you have an artist that you would like to hear interviewed, would like to correct / fact check a past episode, or would like to chat, feel free to send me a message on Instagram @hoppingthefence, or by email at rebeccaecasalino@gmail.com. Thanks to OCAD University for their financial support, my project supervisor Amish Morrell for his advice and guidance, and Claudia Slogar Rick for all of her extra help. Original artwork for Hopping the Fence by Alex Gregory, original music by Jessica Price Eisner. Thank you so much, bye!
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