Award-winning author and performer Ivan Coyote has spent decades on the road, telling stories to audiences. From these experiences came letters — lots of them. For years, Ivan held onto those special communications, and when the pandemic cancelled tours worldwide, they had the opportunity to actually answer them. Their latest book, Care Of: Letters, Connections, and Cures, is a love letter to human connection. Listen in to hear Ivan’s poignant thoughts on the reciprocal nature of mentorship, the importance of having many trans narratives, the fallacy of vulnerability, and what it means to be a community leader.
Award-winning author and performer Ivan Coyote has spent decades on the road, telling stories to audiences. From these experiences came letters — lots of them. For years, Ivan held onto those special communications, and when the pandemic cancelled tours worldwide, they had the opportunity to actually answer them. Their latest book, Care Of: Letters, Connections, and Cures, is a love letter to human connection. Listen in to hear Ivan’s poignant thoughts on the reciprocal nature of mentorship, the importance of having many trans narratives, the fallacy of vulnerability, and what it means to be a community leader.
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Heather Reisman:
Hi, I'm Heather Reisman and this is Well Said, a podcast on the art and science of living well. This podcast is brought to you by Indigo. Today's episode is hosted by Shivani Persad, a wonderfully curious journalist and a fellow booklover.
Shivani Persad:
Hi, I'm Shivani Persad, and I'm thrilled to introduce today's guest, Ivan Coyote. Ivan is a Canadian performer, award-winning author, artist, and activist. They are known for their powerful, emotional, and intimate reflections on gender identity, class, sexuality, and social justice. Ivan's latest book is Care of: Letters, Connections, and Cures. Ivan has received a flood of letters and correspondences over the years and kept note of the most special messages they've received during the sudden slowing down of their life during the first waves of the COVID-19 pandemic. They began responding to these special letters. Care Of is a collection of letters and responses, an anthology of love, grief, trans and non-binary identity, and the beauty of human connection. I'm delighted to welcome Ivan Coyote to Well Said. So, my first question is that you have lived and identified as a travelling storyteller for much of your life, how did you get into that work?
Ivan Coyote:
I started out doing live shows before I published. It's kind of a weird story that I don't tell a lot of writers, actually, because they sort of want to stab me in the eye with a fork after they hear this. But in the mid-’90s, I should tell you that I'm old, very old. So in the mid-’90s, I started a storytelling troupe with Anna Cammalleri Zodiacal and Linda Montgomery called Taste This, and we started doing these live shows. And Linda was a fiddle player … Anna was a poet and a writer, and I was definitely like a traditional storyteller. And we just started doing these live gigs in East Vancouver. We just kept doing shows, a lot of live shows. And then I started doing like cabaret nights and different poetry readings. Even though I'm not a poet, I just always had this life, I always felt compelled to be onstage. Performing live to the book publishing thing was kind of an offshoot of that. And then it just kind of became a machine that fed the machine, you know what I mean? Like, the more I published, the more live gigs I got in, the more live gigs I did, the more, you know, stories I wrote. Because some writers just are recluses in that way. And they just, you know, although I'm really working on being a recluse at the moment.
Shivani Persad:
Like you said, and you sort of have always had that live aspect of your work and then you're getting published and things like that. But all of that, I would assume, with your touring and everything was suddenly interrupted with the pandemic and everyone has to stay home. So how did that change your life and your sense of identity?
Ivan Coyote:
I think I was pretty entrenched in my sense of identity as a performer. That's been something that I've been doing, like I said, since the mid-’90s, like everybody I mean, that all sort of ground to a terrible halt. I remember saying, like, this could last for weeks. weeks. So I just started to try to work on this mystery novel that I was working on. I was stymied. I just didn't know what to write. I didn't know how to write about what the here and now would be. I was like, “Do I write this post-pandemic? What do I write? Do I just pretend to set the present day in November 2019 and just pretend like we don't know what's happening and just like write it like in a world I understand?” And then I ended up just getting a bit, I don't know, overthinking about it. I was like, “I'm just going to answer my mail.” I'm always trying to keep up with correspondence … Then my house burned down in 2006 and I kind of got off of it for a while. And then in 2009, I started again saving a special file of letters and I just started going back through them. And that's where—so I wrote the whole manuscript for Care Of and I called it … Care Of because when I first started writing my column at Extra W in around 2000, it was a monthly column and at the time, print, newspaper and online, I used to get a lot of snail mail care of Extra W, and I always liked this idea of that. You would write someone and it would be care of …
And then I just liked the idea of care of and then in care of or that's where the kind of book came from. And I was just answering mail at first. And then at the end of March 2020, I did an online queer memoirs panel and at the end the host, Cameron Esposito, they asked how to support the writers. It was all these bigwigs from the states, Alexander Chee … Samira Habib, who had just won the Canada reads with her fantastic memoir. And at the end the host was asking us all like, where can we buy your book? And I was like, “Yeah, buy my book if you want to buy my book, but write me a letter.” I mention all this mail and it's really making me feel connected to people like in a way that the stage used to do or like live gigs used to do. So just write me a letter and then I got an email a couple of days later from an editor at Penguin, David Ross, and he was like, “What are you doing with these letters? Would they make you good manuscript?” And I was already talking to … a subsidiary of Penguin Random House, Canada. And so my fabulous agent, Rachel Kotowski, she turned it into a two-book deal that I signed in like May or something of 2020. So the first was the letters and the second was this mystery novel that I'm currently working on.
So maybe there's a quote. We love to bring quotes up. It just makes us feel so much closer to the work. I never set out to be a clear author. I now know in retrospect that I was feeding and watering a vast and hollow space inside of myself for queer or marginalized communities.
Shivani Persad:
Can you talk a bit about how storytelling has been a healing and connective tool? And like, how has storytelling helped you build community in your own life? And you sort of already touched on it when you said, you know, it’s been helping me feel connected to people. But can you elaborate a little bit?
Ivan Coyote:
I guess I'll just speak from a trans perspective. Any kind of access to, like, trans content was vetted. Created. Marketed and mostly viewed by cisgender people, just like any other marginalized community that you want to mention, one does come out. There is a trans sort of character in some show, then everybody heaps on it like it doesn't represent them. Right? … There isn't one trans story. So I guess from an early, early time in this, I realized that the best thing to do is to have like one million thousand trans narratives. But to do that, all I can do really is put my own one into the mix and then uplift and try to signal, boost, or support others. But that's a hard thing to do in a marginalized community. It's a hard thing to do in a community that's rooted in a lot of trauma. Trans people don't trust each other as much as we need to. Like old, I think marginalized communities, there's a lot of lateral violence. It's not as easy to help each other out as I'd like it to be. You got to pick the right people to work with. And again, I don't mean to sound ageist, but a lot of like younger trans authors, they're like, “I want this. I want that.” And I'm like, “Yeah, that's great. Don't forget the part where you work for 27 years.”
Shivani Persad:
Right. So that's interesting that you bring that up because I really wanted to ask you, you do talk a lot about generational divide in the book as well and sort of in these queer spaces and within familial relationships. But as you continue to grow on your journey as a storyteller and a community leader, how have your relationships to both youth and elder folks in your life changed?
Ivan Coyote:
Let's talk about community leader, though. Let's break that down. Like I never ran for anything. I wasn't selected. I didn't volunteer. I don't even necessarily consent just because I'm the oldest person in the room doesn't make me the leader of that group. By default. It shouldn't. It couldn't. And I don't want to lead everyone. I want to be more selective of that. And we talk a lot about mentorship and mentees and mentors and —but you know what? The rules are always like a good mentor does this, a good mentor never does this … OK, what's a good mentee? Name me one thing. Because I'm not interested in a relationship that's completely one sided, and I don't think if we only approach community and our elders and I'm speaking of me to my elders, if I only approach them to take. How is that sustainable for my elder? What is the give and what is the take? And we don't have those discussions very often. I'm just expected to step up or I'm the oldest one in the room. You're the leader, you're the career elder. You're here to pass on all your skills. And I'm like, “No, I'm not. I'm just actually passing through.”
Shivani Persad:
Not always for your energy to be taken.
Ivan Coyote:
No. And there's a lot of that, which is fantastic. It's what I fought for. It's what I wanted. I wanted one thousand million trans narratives. I wanted so many more artists. I wanted them to be more diverse. I wanted them to not all be trans masculine folks. I wanted all these things. This is what we all fought for and worked for. And what what's going to benefit the community now? It's like, OK, so what does this generational sharing or like how is it reciprocal? Right. The way we're used to, like we just don't know the queer elders and the queer elders, like I’ve been here all along.
Shivani Persad:
Can you tell us some of the common threads you wove between your own lived experience and those of the letter writers?
Ivan Coyote:
What I did was I read the letters probably 20 or 30 times, and I would think about them for days and I'd think about what I thought they were looking for or asking about or the questions that they asked me. And I would pick a story from my own experience that I felt was most shook loose by whatever their letter brought to the table. I would work that story back into the letter. I didn't really think about shared experience because we don't truly have shared experiences. We have approximations of shared experiences. We all see things and experience things so differently. So what one person sees and what another person might take to the exact same event are so vastly different that I don't really think about … But how can I possibly expect that a 22-year-old is going to experience the same, even if they experience the same thing at the same age? If they're 22 now and I'm 52, the world they experienced it in is so vastly different that it can't possibly be a shared experience.
Shivani Persad:
That's a great answer. I've never heard it explained like that. In your other work, you explore the nuances of navigating space as a queer and trans person and the cumulative stress … you write how many micro aggressions are there. Speaking to how pain and stress builds up within another person's body and heart, how does sharing these experiences with your readers and your letter writers affect you?
Ivan Coyote:
Hmm? How does it affect me? Well, there's definitely a catharsis to some degree. You know, like all things. I mean, that book was very carefully edited. I do have to do a shout out-to Jared Plant, who I feel made that book twice as good as it would have been, just on its own with just me. There was lots of times where I kind of wrote stuff that I took out, actually. So I got the catharsis. But it didn't make it into the final draft of stuff in keeping with this idea of a considered conversation and a considered response, because some of those letters I sent off right away and then as the letters turned into a manuscript, then that process became more intentional. And sometimes I didn't send a letter back to someone until I'd gone over it all with Jared. And there was one case where I actually ran a letter, passed a friend of mine who does a lot of suicide counseling because there was some difficult stuff in there. So like for care of myself and care of the letter writer as well, I wanted to make sure that I was managing that their disclosure and my response were responsible. Accountable, you know what I mean by changed a lot, writing this book, writing this book changed me for the better, I think so. I'm a different person after I wrote this book than I was when I started it. And I wrote pretty much the whole manuscript over this period of six months. And I feel like I'm fundamentally changed in a way that I don't want to return to the old me.
Shivani Persad:
You've been touring for so, so many years and you're also quite candid about how exhausting and raw touring is and that writing work is often the same. So how do you find your own care when your own work is so vulnerable?
Ivan Coyote:
Vulnerable is a complicated word. It actually means open to attack. And I don't think being onstage or having emotions or doing the kind of work that I do, I think it's actually a very powerful place to operate from. But there is an emotional cost to it or an emotional toll to it that for years I just put aside until 2019, there was a series of things going down in my personal life and I got basically harassed online … by a super uber right wing conservative group. Brett Kavanaugh was their poster boy on their Instagram page. My self-care is going out of the pandemic anyways, I'm not going to tour like I did. I'm not, I don't think I’m going to do many in-person high school shows anymore. I'm going to make space part of being a good mentor, and a good elder is knowing when it's time to step back. So that's one of the things I'm going to do. And, you know, I just don't want to tour that much anymore. And so I'm just adjusting my standard of living a little bit and I'm just going to make different choices because I was heading for medical burnout before the pandemic.
Shivani Persad:
Is there one central message you would like or that you hope that readers would take away from reading?
Ivan Coyote:
I want people to understand the importance of, and embrace more what I call the long conversation ... We're so quick in how we work out conflict or how we, you know, and everybody's going for the quick take, you know, and I like it, too, like I like going on Twitter and [social media]. Something's happening in the news, but we need to come back to radical deep listening of each other.
Shivani Persad:
That's definitely what I got from the book. And I think the reason is because these conversations have to be long, because things are complex. And if there's anything I learned from reading the book as well, it's like this experience is not a monolithic experience, much like the experience, like you said, of any marginalized community. So I'm going to ask you some fun questions now, if you are ready, I'm ready. What are you reading right now?
Ivan Coyote:
I'm reading Richard Van Camp's beautiful book about storytelling called Gather. He's an Indigenous storyteller from Fort Smith, Northwest Territories. He's also a very dear friend of mine. I read a lot over the winter and a lot over the pandemic, but Gather is on my list, on my bedside table. What else am I reading? I'm following a lot of different conversations online about different things as well. Yeah, so I'm reading a lot of articles. I just read a … great article on who gets to call themselves a family. That was a great one.
Shivani Persad:
My last question is what brings you joy?
Ivan Coyote:
Swimming, swimming in the lake, swimming in a river, swimming in the ocean, swimming in a puddle, swimming in a pool in a backyard. Finally this summer, I don't give a shit who sees my top surgery scars. I don't care who sees my gut. I don't care who sees my pasty Irish legs that never see the … I'm like a Never Nude. If you ever watched Arrested Development, I'm kind of like that. And yet at the same time, I love skinny dipping. So it's not like I just don't want anyone to see me, but I don't care anymore. I know that the feeling of being in the water trumps every other thing that I could feel. So every bit of like body shame that I have or a concern like, “Oh, someone's going to see a trans body before us.” I don't care anymore. And it's like I just want to swim. Swimming brings me joy. Chopping kindling brings me joy. Having a fire brings me joy. Watching the sunset brings me joy. Sunrise brings me joy.
Shivani Persad:
Well, I want to thank you so much for this conversation. It was amazing. I'm so grateful for that. Thank you so much. It was such a great conversation.
Ivan Coyote:
Thank you. Thanks for taking the time to read the book so well.
Heather Reisman:
For more ideas to help you live, well, including the book featured in this episode, visit indigo.ca/podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating on Apple podcasts. You can follow us wherever you listen to your podcasts. Well Said was produced for Indigo Inc by Vocal Fry Studios and is hosted by me Heather Reisman.
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