Intro and interview by Tony Martins  /  Photos by Rémi Thériault

Let's be blunt about this, with the aid of an appropriately phallic expression: though he is unquestionably a talented and newsworthy fellow, even in a time of widening tolerance the mainstream media wouldn't touch Marcus McCann with a ten-foot pole.

Why? First, at the tender age of 26, McCann is the youngest-ever editor of the successful gay newspaper Capital Xtra. Second, he is far from shy about declaring himself “pro-polyamory, pro-sex work, pro-BDSM, pro-casual sex, etc.” And third—if we even need a third—his clever word smithing and frequent bed hopping came together recently in Soft Where, McCann's virginal book of poetry published in April by Ottawa's Chaudiere Books.

If all that's not enough to marginalize him, McCann has been speaking out against the establishment types who are spoiling his fun: “I've been giving talks and interviews about how mainstream media has a hate-on for sex,” he wrote in a provocative note to Guerilla that led to this Q&A. “In my work life, I don't do stories that presuppose that sex is sacred or that you should be in love before you have it,” McCann continued. “Strangely, the mainstream press still doesn't get it.”

Thankfully, Chaudiere publisher rob mclennan gets McCann as a poet and sees a bright future for him, saying “I think the boy can only go up. There haven't been any reviews yet, but these things, if they happen at all, always take far too long.”

In the long wait for reviews, the young McCann has time on his side. As we learn in the following dialogue, chastity is not quite his forte but patience is certainly one of his virtues.

How did your Soft Where reading go at the Writers Festival back in April?

It was a tad sweaty, but no one fainted… I've done a lot of readings over the last three years and I've come to really enjoy them. Actually, I can be a bit of a ham. But this was my first time with a full-length trade collection with a proper spine and distribution, so I was a little more nervous than usual. It probably showed.

Did you pick up an admirer on that night and get lucky?

Yes, I picked up an admirer. I've got a very loving boyfriend, Mark. He and my dad were being competitively proud about the whole book launch. Seriously. My boyfriend is sexy and brilliant, a [cough] Rhodes scholar [cough] and just a generous soul. I went home with him that night, and my dad and cousin stayed at my place.

In a column at Capital Xtra, I described myself as a "slut in a loving, non-monogamous relationship," a term that I know raised some eyebrows at the time. Mark and I have a very secure, communicative relationship, so we're not scared off by the full spectrum of other folks that are in our lives. There are friends we care deeply about where there's no sexual relationship, like my roommate Hayley. With other folks there's both a sexual and a filial component, like Kevin, and still others where maybe there's less of an emotional connection but simply a physical or intellectual one.

Speaking of Capital Xtra, you became editor in July of last year. What kind of changes have you made to the publication?

Well, I made the bigger changes when I was news editor, actually, so that the paper was in pretty much the condition I wanted it to be as of the first of July. And of course, the best laid plans... I've been a little hamstrung by the recession in terms of big, expensive, public projects with Capital Xtra. But that's okay, we're chugging along, and we're doing better than most media in this country.

I'm really proud of the longer essays we've done in the last couple of years on history, federal politics, urban development, harm reduction... and of course social and sexual relations, with features on sex positivity, age of consent, polyamoury, alternative conceptions of family, the criminalization of HIV, and so on.

Why do you think the mainstream media is so anal retentive when it comes to dealing with gay culture?

Oh god. Who knows? The image of two men in a loving embrace or a sexualized scenario still makes some people foam at the mouth, and not in a good way.

Mainstream newspapers are inherently conservative, I guess, since they must appeal to the broadest demographic, and in that way they must reinforce the dominant realities as most people see them. If you told stories from any other point of view, you risk alienating potential consumers.

I don't think that the big daily newspapers and the TV news shows are doing a very good job at modelling a positive attitude about sex in general. It's extremely rare in mainstream media to see depictions of sex where it's anything other than a problem.

As a writer, do you ever consider moving to, say, San Francisco, where you would have more opportunity for sexual expression?

There's actually a lot of sexy stuff going on in Ottawa. Look at the work that Patricia McCarthy is doing, look at the work Matthew Firth is doing, or Amanda Earl, or Megan Butcher, or Luna Allison—writers writing frankly and, I think, beautifully, about what real sex lives (and real fantasies) are like—as opposed to reproducing what's normal. Just this past year, some students at Carleton started up a magazine dedicated to literature and sex called The Moose and Pussy. Fantastic. We need more of that.

Maybe I'm stubborn and I just don't want to give up on this city. There are things that are happening right now on Bank Street and on Rideau and on Sparks that are going to help: big, tall, residential complexes downtown. That's actually what I'm holding out for. More urban density will mean more urban culture: uninhibited, bohemian, lively. We're not missing the parties in Ottawa, we're missing the crowds. The the urban density problem is going to take 20 years to solve, we're just way, way behind the eight ball on it, so the question becomes, how patient
are you?

Chaudiere Books publisher rob mclennan said "I love the quick movement of his writing, the acoustic of it, nearly gymnastic element" ... Can you identify with any of this? Are you a quick-moving, musical gymnast?

Oh god. Well, in the literal sense, I'm neither quick-moving nor musical.

As for the work, it's meant to achieve a certain syntactic and phonetic density. On the one hand, I tried, where I could, to be adventurous with the grammar. An example of that from "Alexial":

Had I meant
untethered or

unhatched when I said thatched chest?
is a puzzle that doesn't absorb
a picture taker.

So that's a phrasal subject (stop me if I'm geeking out too much)—the subject of the sentence is itself a full sentence, in this case a question.

rob also said: "He's fearless, which is becoming a rare thing these days in writing." Do you feel fearless? If so, where'd that feeling come from?

I'm way more afraid of sounding mannered—the dead poet voice—than I am of taking risks or trying something new. It's like anything, I guess, in that if you feel like you're firmly rooted, then you're more comfortable taking risks.

In terms of the subject matter, I write a lot about sex and also about technology. I think a lot of writers write about the trepidation they feel around sex and technology, rather than writing joyfully about them. Writing your fears and your anxieties is an interesting exercise, but it's not one that grabs me.

In our culture, we're terrified of sex. It's scary. I mean, we love it, but it scares the crap out of us. I guess I'm not scared of sex and not scared of writing about it. That's not to say that I don't get nervous about sex ever, I'm just saying I don't really dwell on those anxieties and it doesn't fuel my writing.

For me, many of the poems in Soft Where read like sex stories told to a buddy but put to verse and elevated to literary heights. Is there a "sex story" root in the work? Is there a "story" root in all poetry?

Well, there's a compliment buried in there somewhere, and I'll take it where I can get it.

There's definitely an art to the buddy sex story swap. There's etiquette. A couple of years ago, I came back from a sex romp out of town—we stayed at a hotel but didn't stray too far—and I started telling the anecdotal version. At the heart of it was a ginormous welt on my lower back from getting fucked in the hotel sink.

Telling a sex story is an act of confidence, of confiding, and in that sense you may be on to something. However, it would be dreadful if the work were only that: strictly a proclamation, the telling of a secret, a confession. Perhaps that's what you mean by the "literary heights" bit.
 

The title Soft Where ... is that a reference to Ottawa's high-tech industry?

The title comes from a poem in the back half of the book called "Can I stop taking my medication if I feel better?" The poem was inspired by homesickness and the title was the title of a pharma spam. It's also about a Welsh porn star and on a reality TV show. It was written in Halifax. The relevant part is:

In the soft where,
we'll be helicopters, looking
down on everything. Until then,
call my cell.

Obviously, the immediate play is on "software," as a play on technology and location. I like the idea of virtual space, of soft space, that your location isn't entirely determined by geography. That's sort of the gist of the line in context.

Out of the context of the poem, it takes on other layers of meaning. It's got a bit of sexual connotation, as in, the soft places on the body. It's also got a bit of an emotional piece, as in, the places where you're soft, where you are a softie.

Your poetry is playful, experimental, and uninhibited ... doesn't that also describe your approach to sex?

Playful? I guess it depends on who I'm playing with. I laugh a lot during sex, tell jokes, make puns. I think it must be hard to go to bed with a word nerd ... I have trouble with Super Serious Sex, as in "lovemaking" in its most cliché manifestation. Yeah, I usually prefer the mood to be light and friendly rather than grave and passionate. Does that come across in the work? Ha!

I would hate for all my discussion of threesomes, public sex, one night stands, the whole gay thing, whatever—I would hate for that to be read as a condemnation of more straight-laced people and how they live. On the other hand, I do see a lot of people—from foot fetishists to Internet-daters—who express their sexuality in a particular way but have a lot of shame about it. My intention is not to be all holier-than-thou about my own sex life—I'm not trying to tell anyone what to do, but I hope by talking about things like casual sex, I can get some people to feel less guilty about what they're already doing. Because there's nothing worse than a self-hating slut.

You are still a young chap. Do you have any kind of sense right now about how your poetry is going to evolve as you get older?

I've written a bunch of work since the Soft Where manuscript, but it's staying locked up in my apartment until the book gets a fair airing. It's only been out six weeks! Sheesh!

For more on Soft Where and Marcus McCann, visit his web site.