An interview with Connor Lafortune & Lindsay Mayhew
Connor Lafortune (left) and Lindsay Mayhew (right) hold their co-edited anthology, A Thousand Tiny Awakenings.
What's the Idea: Thanks for meeting to talk about your anthology, A Thousand Tiny Awakenings.
Lindsay Mayhew: We’re happy to be here.
Connor Lafortune: Thanks so much for having us.
What's the Idea: What idea or ideas inspired you to put this anthology together?
Lindsay Mayhew: It started as an inspiration to support and uplift emerging young voices. Connor and I were both really passionate about advocacy and activism, and so we wanted to incorporate those two streams together. How young people are making the world their own and seeking to dismantle a lot of the oppressive systems that are still in our society and infiltrate our daily lives, our bodies, and how we have relationships with people. So our call out when we were asking for submissions for the book was breaking boundaries. We got a lot of beautiful submissions based on that.
What's the Idea: Was there an age range for the authors allowed to submit?
Lindsay Mayhew: It was 18 to 30, which is young people generally but a broad sense of youth.
What's the Idea: When did you send out your call for submissions?
Connor Lafortune: That was about a year and a half ago, at least. We started talking about the anthology itself over two years ago, trying to piece together what we wanted to do. It started with trying to figure out what we wanted to hear from, who we wanted to hear from, and then once the call came out, just receiving those submissions and sorting through them. It was quite a lengthy process, which was surprising to me as someone who was publishing for the first time, but it was a really beautiful process of stretching that time in between and being able to sit with every piece really sentimentally.
What's the Idea: Were you looking at submissions throughout the incoming process or did you wait until the end to finally take a look?
Connor Lafortune: We waited until we had a big amount of them. I know that we did ask for other submissions afterwards, but mostly it was about sorting through them together. What was really important to us was to tell a complete story, not just to have pieces of different stories, but to have a throughline and to be able to sort something more out of the meaning of the order or the way that they were put together.
So after going through the submissions, it was really about finding those stories, which is quite difficult when you're editing an anthology because there's so many pieces you want to include. Ideally we would have wanted to include every voice but some of them didn't fit with the story that we're trying to tell. It was quite difficult to say no to some beautiful pieces but we were able to sort through them together.
What's the Idea: Was the story that you wanted to tell an idea that you had right at the beginning? Was it the advocacy that Lindsay previously mentioned or was it a more specific idea?
Lindsay Mayhew: As we started reading our submissions, it became a little more clear what the outline of the anthology was going to be. We did have a basic idea and a theme that tied all of these pieces together, but in terms of the flow and the progression that a reader would go through as they read the anthology, that sort of unfolded as we were reading the submissions and as we started to pick our pieces.
The book is very cyclical in how you could read it. It starts very bold and ends very bold. And we also wanted to end on this theme of home and community and coming back together, which is something that a lot of the authors wrote about, which was a nice surprise. So that came after the fact when we saw how many people had written on this theme of home and belonging.
What's the Idea: The collection is remarkable for its diversity of themes but they work together and build on each other. Each piece was remarkably different, making it feel like you’re seeing certain ideas from different lenses.
Lindsay Mayhew: It was also difficult to balance all of these different perspectives and themes as well. We wanted to make sure that each one was held and honoured in the whole world that it's speaking to, and then making space for the next poem. It definitely took some time to put together and think through.
“It was just about expanding that definition of what poetry is and kind of challenging ourselves as well to write a little bit more through prose or through a short story form to have those stories come together.”
What's the Idea: The anthology has a unique structure of having poetry, non-fiction, and fiction, not just poems. What inspired that choice?
Connor Lafortune: It's important for us to see how these themes naturally come up for authors. As poets mainly, we love to share our thoughts and emotions and our crises about the world through poetry, but that's not everybody's experience. And so we wanted to leave room for folks to express themselves in a way that felt natural. Sometimes it can feel very jarring for folks who aren't poets to be like, you have to write a poem about this, this is the criteria. So, it was just about expanding that definition of what poetry is and kind of challenging ourselves as well to write a little bit more through prose or through a short story form to have those stories come together.
Like Lindsay was saying, it's important for them to be held and not just thrown out into this world, like this is your poem alone and then this is your short story alone. It’s important to expand voice. I think poetry sometimes, for certain folks, can be quite jarring, so to have that pause where there's a little bit more narrative can be really nice as a reader. I think it invites a lot more people to come and listen, or if you're really into poetry and you're not getting into prose then you're like okay, here's a step into that world. So it was really just about placing less barriers for the writers that are submitting.
What's the Idea: That lines up with the goal to break down those barriers and bring people in. What about this idea was important to you? Do you have backgrounds personally in this type of work?
Lindsay Mayhew: I am an academic as well. Connor and I both recently finished our master's degree so I would say both of us, but I'll speak for myself, are interested in our academic writing as well. We write a lot about these subjects and obviously our own pieces are in the anthology. I am very passionate about advocacy, activism, and women's issues so I wanted to see these things come to life. It's definitely something that I'm passionate about and I have written about and I hope to write more of.
Connor Lafortune: Like Lindsay said, we like to merge that academic writing with poetry. That's how I wrote my entire thesis. The result section is entirely through poetry. And so exploring these themes very sincerely and also accurately is beautiful as is having to merge experience and history. I speak a lot about colonization and the history of Indigenous people but also querness and la francophonie, so I am trying to put myself on the page through this lens of academia but also of personal prose.
As for our experience with editing, Lindsay is a phenomenal editor. I've had her edit my collections. Just beautiful work. And being able to merge that into a collection is really beautiful. The experience of the anthology was to highlight those voices that we're hearing in our environments but not really seeing in literature, which continues to be important right now.
What's the Idea: How did your partnership start? Was it through grad school?
Connor Lafortune: No, actually. We both went to Laurentian [University] but at different times and we did our grad school at different places. But our friendship started in 2019 when we both started doing slam poetry in Sudbury. It blossomed from there. We worked passively side by side on a few different occasions and obviously we saw each other in community, but this is really the first opportunity that we've had to actively work on a project where we were the guiding force. It's definitely something that we want to do again, especially when we talk about the last piece, which we co-wrote. That was such an interesting experience for me. It was the first time I co-wrote poetry and having it be done with someone who really understands what we're trying to do and there's no fighting, there's no ego, this is just the poem we want to write and this is where it's headed. So, yeah, we started in the slam scene and we continue to support each other in that as well.
What's the Idea: How did you actually go about writing that co-written poem, “In the Aftermath of Apocalypse?”
Connor Lafortune: We were trying to figure out where we wanted to end the book. We knew we wanted to write something together for the end, because it felt like a beautiful close to the chapter. One of the things we were also trying to do was take the metaphors that had previously been used and use them in our piece to either subvert them or use them in a similar way as a nod to the beauty that was written in the pieces. We had a live document and we would write pieces at a time. Lindsay would start with something and I started to write the opposite of what she was saying, and then we would go back and forth with that and really find what it's trying to say, letting it guide us.
It was a process of this back and forth collaboration, mostly not in person. I think we're both writers that work better in this kind of solitary world, but it was about saying what do we want to end this with? We are leaving folks with some dread but also some hope. It's really what you take from it. It could be something that is incredibly dreadful and unencouraging to promote change. And then you could also read it through the lens of “and yet we continue and yet we strive and yet we are resilient.” And we need to be resilient. I think it's the piece that ties more closely to the cover of the book as well, which is of a flower growing through death, growing through something, and how necessary that death is for that life to come.
What's the Idea: Connor, you spoke about how personal the anthology was and how you brought yourself into the works. Was there a conversation about how personal to make this collection?
Connor Lafortune: What was important for us is we collected all of the pieces and we hadn't decided where our pieces would go or which of our pieces would go. Ours were written as well, except for the last piece. First, it was about matching the tone and the energy of what people were giving. It felt unfair to have people write about these personal experiences where they're really giving themselves to the page and riting something that was more broad or general felt like it was dishonouring their voices. So when we started to formulate those themes and the story that was coming through the other pieces, we started to see where our voices could be the bridges in between, merging themes [and] experiences. So we each came to the table with a few poems where that could work and then tried to see which actually did [work] in each section.
I used to write a lot more broadly about colonization and about experiences and Indigenous people and more a historical account of things with a little bit of emotion but less so about my story. But in the last few years, I've really started to see the beauty in bridging a very personal story into it. I think especially when we're talking about revolution, when we're talking about overcoming, you have to bring that personal lens or else it feels it falls short of your message.
So for me, it was about really bridging what am I trying to say, what am I experiencing, and how do I want people to change from reading the story?
What's the Idea: You referenced Billy-Ray Belcourt at the beginning of the book. For me, he's one of the most remarkable poets working today for the vulnerability and honesty in his work. Was he a big inspiration?
Connor Lafortune: Yeah. He's an inspiration to both Lindsay and I. I think we have fallen in love with his work from the very beginning and everything that we do is just like okay, how can we get this to Billy? I think that is our goal. So yeah, it's really about being like, you could be vulnerable on the page and it can be beautiful and it can be gut wrenching. And I teach a lot through poetry in the different work that I do in mental health. I think there's something beautiful that transcends through that lens of poetry where you could really touch people and have them experience the story even having never experienced the things that you're speaking about.
What's the Idea: Lindsay, how did your poem “Cruci(pre)fix” develop? The language in the poem was so inspired.
Lindsay Mayhew: It started when I took a class in digital humanities and [was] looking at how the human language and poetry and art is adapting to a digital age. We talked a lot about how digital spaces are now being utilized for the capacity to perhaps expand our language or break free of the restrictions that the English language has had on us in the past. And so I bridge these themes of English and thinking of the body in a particular way and English being kind of a cage that we need to break free from.
So that was the beginning of it. I try to bridge these worlds together and simultaneously use one to suggest how we might continue to think of new ways to express how to be in a body and think of language or a lack of language that might allow us to exist in our skin a little more comfortably.
“There is this fierce pride and comfort with revolution, with resistance... I’m seeing them just be so unapologetic about learning, about being, about existing as Indigenous people.”
What's the Idea: Connor, in your poem, “The Sharpest Tongue,” one of the images that stood out to me was the image of speaking in tongues against the contrast of your grandmother's silence. And the ending of the poem was so tender. How did that poem develop?
Connor Lafortune: So, I'm bilingual. French is my first language and then I learned English and then I'm learning my traditional language, which is Anishinaabemowin, which is translated throughout the poem. It began as a poem depicting a time when I was in a meeting and we were talking about queerness and Indigeneity in the French language. We were speaking in French but to me, all of those things lived in English because that's the community I have around me. I felt very uncomfortable and I didn't know why. And so, I started writing actually about that. And then as I wrote and wrote, it became a poem about my grandmother.
In my community of Dokis, we traditionally spoke Anishinaabemowin, and then we started speaking French when settlers arrived and then we spoke English when day schools arrived, so we were a trilingual people. With the introduction of residential schools and day schools, it quickly changed from a trilingual people to only speaking English. So I'm trying to transmit that type of story of my grandmother, this metaphor of wanting to assimilate to either English or French, but to stick with those languages and my inability to only be confined within those languages in wanting to learn my traditional language and wanting to connect with culture and trying to be gentle with holding her story as well, knowing that she doesn't have to restrict herself to that story.
It's not just a story about my grandmother. It's about community and it's about her parents and all of those things. I was trying to tie in those metaphors of this generation being allowed to speak, being allowed to be loud and proud and to learn and to push those boundaries. It was this experience of trying to figure out why there's so much discomfort in other languages. Why I never felt like I could fit into a box even though it was presented so beautifully to me. And ultimately, forgiving the people around me for only having the box to give me, essentially.
What's the Idea: Is there something about today or the current generation that you think is unique or that explains why you're able to push back and resist in that way?
Connor Lafortune: I think right now, especially in Anishinabek territory or Indigenous communities, the youth just really don't care. There is this fierce pride and comfort with revolution, with resistance. Especially even my younger cousins, I'm seeing them just be so unapologetic about learning, about being, about existing as Indigenous people. I have little nieces and nephews that speak their Anishinaabe language better than I think I could ever dream to speak it.
There's something right now in the air where people are tired of sitting still and there's always a revolution around the corner. I think that spreads to many different communities but I experience it more prominently with Indigenous communities.
What's the Idea: Who is teaching you these traditional languages and who would be teaching your nieces, nephews, and so on?
Connor Lafortune: In my community, there's not many language speakers. I travel a lot for work to different Anishinabek communities. So I learned a lot on the road, which is something that is a theme in a lot of my poems. I have a lot of dictionaries but mostly I am in community asking questions, being able to listen and piece together some things. I do some learning on my own and then also there are some speakers in my community that I can learn from that I can understand.
There are some cousins that grew up from different first nations or different things and they have more access to language speakers. For my niece, her mom in her community is very prominent and she has language speakers around her. So I would say it's pieces of different things. but mostly through orality and community and ceremony where you're just listening in. You're being like, what did you say there? I heard the first and second word but I'm just missing that last one. You’re continuously just trying to seek it.
What's the Idea: Lindsay, did you have a similar experience with language?
Lindsay Mayhew: No, I grew up very English. That's all I have ever spoken. I was at one point serviceable in French, but I have since lost it completely. Because I've only ever spoken English, that is pretty much all I know. And so the words that we have in this language are kind of all that I have to think about the body or life or the world.
What's the Idea: When you had the idea for the anthology and started the call for submissions, did you have a publisher?
Lindsay Mayhew: Yeah. I worked for Latitude 46 Publishing, which is in Sudbury. I was doing some of their publicity at the time. It actually started with a conversation with the publisher. Our publisher wanted, like us, to uplift young voices and so both myself and then Connor got asked onto the project as the editors. So that's how we got involved with a publisher, which I think we were really fortunate in that we didn't have to go through a submission process and the long wait to hear back from a publishing house.
What's the Idea: Approximately how long was your submission window open for?
Lindsay Mayhew: It was about six months.
What's the Idea: What was the review process like, and how did it did a develop or change at all from what your original idea for the anthology?
Lindsay Mayhew: Connor and I made a shared document to go through all of the pieces and we jotted down the themes in each piece and what all of their strengths were. We made our decisions based on how well these things fit together. Which pieces are really, really strong? Which pieces do we absolutely want in the anthology? And then from there, we chose our immediate yesses.
That formulated the rough shape of the anthology and the themes that were going to be in it. And then from that point, we went back to our submissions and kept going through them in that way and adding to the story and filling it out.
“We also wanted to shed light on Turtle Island and on the Canadian state, and of being able to go this isn’t always home and free and beauty and all of those things, to remove that curtain a little bit.”
What's the Idea: What were the themes that you decided on for the final poem?
Connor Lafortune: I think the final piece was really about merging destruction with beauty. My thesis is on this perceived idea of the apocalypse and the ongoing apocalypse in Indigenous communities. And so that's something that's always ruminating in my mind. We really wanted to use these metaphors of destruction and devastation and pain to mean something more.
We also wanted to shed light on Turtle Island and on the Canadian state, and of being able to go this isn't always home and free and beauty and all of those things, to remove that curtain a little bit. That's something that's been happening especially in the last five years, but really to put it on paper that this is a country of lies and this is a country of deceit, of pain, of hardship, and we can't talk about all the beautiful things if we don't first acknowledge those pieces.
And so I think I view it a lot as well as a zooming out of Lindsay's poem on the place that we live right now in Sudbury and being able to go, these exist on a micro level and here are the structures that put that in place, that allow it to live and grow. So yes, to dream of revolution but also to say you need to understand the history before you go to the future.
What's the Idea: I thought it had a lot for Canadians to think about and to reckon with, like the notion of settler ignorance. There was also the quote, "Canada is a prime example of how to get away with To be murdered again and never get away. I was born in a country exempt from accountability” is a powerful statement. I feel like those quotes really summed up that it's kind of a chosen ignorance. If you even just start to get below the surface, the answers are right there.
Lindsay Mayhew: Yeah, a single Google search would give you some idea into things.
What's the Idea: I feel like this must have informed the name of the anthology, A Thousand Tiny Awakenings. How did you choose that name?
Lindsay Mayhew: We had a few ideas that we were bouncing back and forth. I think at that time we had received some of our submissions and we were seeing how broad the themes were and how it was going to be a book with a lot of different perspectives, and so we had to bring that together and to culminate quite a few different perspectives and small awakenings and small revolutions in each poem. So it did work in that way but it was also partly inspired by Elizabeth Grosz’s A Thousand Tiny Sexes. She's a feminist theorist. She talks a lot about language as well and breaking language barriers, so it kind of fits in that sense as a theoretical underground, but it also kind of works bringing together all of these different perspectives and voices.
What's the Idea: Does the anthology as published reflect what you wanted to accomplish?
Connor Lafortune: I would say yes. I think one reflection that we kept having throughout the process was what would people be writing about now? If we had the submission open now, what else would we have gotten? It's so beautiful and perfect as is. But I think there's always a part of our mind where it's just like, what else could be said? How much more could we go into this? What could we build from these awakenings?
I think so far it has accomplished that and I think the theme of tiny awakenings also, for me, emphasizes the fact that we are just giving you a glimpse. We encourage folks to say I actually don't know about the issue that they're talking about, then look it up [and] deepen your understanding of these awakenings, of these revolutions, and continue to educate. I think the book itself stands as a beautiful manual on how to start this conversation. But as the reader, you need to take your part in learning more and in doing more, ultimately.
What's the Idea: Is there any chance for a sequel anthology, something like A Thousand More Awakenings?
Lindsay Mayhew: Maybe. Hopefully!
“I think being an editor can be hard because there’s a balance between making a suggestion and enforcing your opinion. And that’s something that really was outlined to me. How important it is to honour the unique knowledge and experience of the person that you’re working with.”
What's the Idea: Was there anything that you each personally learned from completing this project?
Lindsay Mayhew: I learned so much. I think being an editor can be hard because there's a balance between making a suggestion and enforcing your opinion. And that's something that really was outlined to me. How important it is to honour the unique knowledge and experience of the person that you're working with. And it's not about qualifications because I can have qualifications and that person can have qualifications but ultimately this is their story, especially working with such deeply personal stories that we have.
I'm really excited to think more about the ethical situations that may arise when editing and I'm definitely very motivated to continue editing and continue working with authors. I learned that I love seeing people's stories come together and come to life and how we can collaborate in that way because it is like, this is their story but it's also a collaboration. How can I make my voice quiet and be unseen when collaborating with them? It was just really cool to see how a book comes together, see how an anthology comes into place because I love reading them and now I have experience making them.
Connor Lafortune: I echo everything that Lindsay said, but the thing that I first had in mind when you said that was restoring my faith in collaboration. As a poet, I mostly work alone. I love spending time alone just creating. I make a lot of multimedia things and it is difficult for me to want to invite someone into that conversation, invite someone into that really safe space that I've created. This project ultimately showed me the beauty that collaboration brings, especially working with someone like Lindsay who is absolutely phenomenal both personally and also in her craft.
When I look at the last poem, what I can think of is just like, I never could have written that alone. And Lindsay never could have written that alone either. And the only thing that stood in our way was just having a conversation and putting something on paper to create one of my favorite poems. So restoring that has been really healing as a writer. There's a lot of ego in the arts world, and it's so nice when we can just come together with our experience, with our craft, with our qualifications, and just put that aside and be like, what do we want to say and how are we going to achieve that goal? That’s mostly what I was learning.
What's the Idea: That’s really beautiful. I'm really glad to hear you had that experience. So what are you working on next? Are you doing something similar in future works?
Connor Lafortune: I have quite a few projects. I'm terrible at sitting still. I submitted my thesis poems and so I extracted the research and am submitting that as a collection, Another Dream of Revolution. I'm also working on another personal collection where I explore existence as a queer Indigenous person and going through all the journeys of existence.
I am also working on a short film that will hopefully be shown in fall of this year called Can You Feel It Now? in collaboration with Isak Vaillancourt and Ra'anaa Ekundayo where we explore about Black and Indigenous resilience and reimagine first contact between our peoples as something voluntary through a poetic narrative and a bunch of other random things. I love doing that and I'm starting to do a lot more collaborations. So, it's really been something that's pushing me to continue.
Lindsay Mayhew: I don't know how Connor keeps so many projects on the go while traveling, too. I've put some of my writing on hold just for a little bit while I travel to do some spoken word. I recently was in Vancouver for the Canadian Nationals. I'm also going to Southern Ontario just to do a little mini book tour. I'm going to be checking out Guelph and Toronto and St. Catherine's. I'm really excited for that. And then after that ends, I'm hoping to do more writing of my own and get a leeway on my first collection.
What's the Idea: Thanks for sharing all that. I'd love to hear more about those works in the future when they're ready. Thank you also for meeting today.
Lindsay Mayhew: Thank you for having us.
Please purchase A Thousand Tiny Awakenings directly from Latitude 46 Publishing or support your local bookstore.
The interview was recorded using Google Meet in May 2025.
Written and edited by Matthew Long