Interview with Jacob Alvarado

Khayrun Gure: What authors did you dislike at first but grew into?

Jacob Alvarado: There's a poet named Kaie Kellough, and one of his books is called Magnetic Equator and is full of poems that are very dense and full of images. All the lines in his poems are mostly run on sentences. It's very difficult to read but very rich and I remember reading it for the first time and thinking it was garbage and not worth my time. I had to read his book for a school project and couldn’t get out of it. I kept rereading the story, and it started my interest in poetry.

KG: Where did your idea come from? What was your inspiration when writing your novel?

JA: I wrote a group of four poems for the anthology called Hallways. It’s basically meant to chronicle my experience going to college. Each poem depicts what I went through in years one, two, three, and four. In terms of how I thought of the idea, it started as an assignment. I needed a few poems, and I was trying to think of something that would make sense for a group of four and meet the requirement. After, I thought of how impactful my college years were, and I wanted to memorialize that.

KG: What is your favourite underappreciated novel?

JA: There’s this poetry book called Shadow Blight by Annick MacAskill. I guess in Canada it's gotten some appreciation but I feel like outside of Canada it probably hasn’t. It kind of starts with re-imagining some different Greek myths but quickly turns into the author reflecting on their experience with miscarriage. It really helped me understand and gave me a new perspective on how traumatizing a miscarriage can be and what that might feel like. In a way that I've never really thought of before because I’m a man and I’ll obviously never know exactly what that feels like.