Kyla Jamieson : part one

Kyla Jamieson is a poet and editor who lives and relies on the unceded traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Her work placed third in the 2018 Metatron Prize for Rising Authors and was longlisted for the 2019 CBC Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Is Dead, Room Magazine, The Vault, GUTS, Peach Mag, The Maynard, Plenitude, The Account, and others. She is the author of Kind of Animal, a poetry chapbook about the aftermath of a disabling concussion. Body Count, her début collection of poems, is forthcoming with Nightwood Editions in Spring 2020. Find her on instagram as @airymeantime or on a rock next to a river.

Photo credit: Jeremy Andruschak

What are you working on?

I’m working through my editor’s notes on my first full-length collection of poems, Body Count, which is forthcoming with Nightwood Editions in Spring 2020. I spent years writing and editing the book, and feel like these final steps “should” be easy in comparison, but they’re not.

I’ve been feeling the inertia and anxiety of disability-amplified financial precarity (being sick & broke) more intensely than usual over the past four months, and it’s possible that everything is feeling more difficult than it otherwise would. Or maybe self-doubt is a normal part of the process? I’m trying to think of doubt the way Ocean Vuong described it in an instagram story: “it means u respect what ur trying to achieve.”