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The Spaces Between with Maz Hedgehog (Season Finale)
5.5k Plays2 years ago
Happy season 5 finale! We finally got to chat with Maz Hedgehog (they/them), a UK-based bisexual writer, poet, and performer working in the spaces between real and unreal, poetry and theatre, self and other. We chatted about Maz’s bisexual journey, how they realized they were agender and what that means for them, why Maz identifies as a “bisexual dyke” (like Shiri Eisner!), and how their gender and sexuality inform their artistic work, like their recent solo show, “Let Me Count the Ways”. We also discussed the challenges of getting queer art published & produced, how to deal with rejection and failure, how fashion is a form of speech that communicates who we are, and the value of collaboration and imperfection. Also fairies!
Thanks for listening to season 5! Rob will be taking an extended hiatus before season 6 to work on his oral history book, “Bisexual Married Men: Stories of Relationships, Acceptance, and Authenticity”, to be published by Routledge. Stay tuned for info and updates as well as some bonus content and surprises. And please take a moment to rate and review this podcast, and tell your friends -- thanks!
Visit Maz’s website: https://www.mazhedgehog.com/
Buy Maz’s books: https://www.mazhedgehog.com/shop
Follow Maz on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MazHedgehog
Follow Maz on IG: https://www.instagram.com/mazhedgehog/
“Fat, Black, and Myself: Fashion in the Pandemic”: https://azmagazine.co.uk/fat-black-and-myself-fashion-in-the-pandemic/
“Let Me Count the Ways” music composed by Alpha Twang. Follow them on IG: https://www.instagram.com/alpha_twang/
Two Bi Guys is produced and edited by Rob Cohen
Created by Rob Cohen and Alex Boyd
Logo art by Kaitlin Weinman
Music by Ross Mintzer
We are supported by The Gotham
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We're going on a Bi+ trip to Maine in June 2023! Join the email list to get all the info: https://my.trovatrip.com/public/l/survey/rob-cohen
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Transcript
Season Finale Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
🎵
00:00:12
Speaker
Hello everybody, this is Rob. Welcome to the season finale of season 5 of 2 bye guys. Wow, can you believe it? I almost cannot. But thank you all for listening to this season. We've had some truly amazing guests who I've been privileged to speak with.
00:00:30
Speaker
including an interview today that I'm so excited to
Meet Maz Hedgehog
00:00:33
Speaker
share with you. It's with Maz Hedgehog, an awesome artist, creator, poet living in the UK. I've been waiting to have Maz on for a long time. We finally made it happen. That's basically everyone at this point that I'm interviewing has been on my list for a while. It's a long list.
Rob's Upcoming Projects
00:00:50
Speaker
Speaking of, I do plan to continue this podcast after this season. I want to get to the rest of that list. I am enjoying having these conversations and sharing them with you.
00:01:00
Speaker
But after this episode, I will be going on a bit of an extended hiatus. That's because of the book I'm writing. I'm going to take some time off to really focus on the book. If you haven't heard in another episode, I'm writing a book about bisexual men who are married to women. It's an oral history of that experience. So I've been interviewing a lot of these men for a couple years now. About 85% of my men end up
00:01:26
Speaker
married to a woman or in a committed relationship with a woman. And there are lots of unique things about that experience that I want to share with the world and that these men have been sharing with me. How do you express your sexuality when you're in a partnership like that? When do you tell your wife if you didn't tell her before you got married? Or what's it like if you did tell her before you got married? How does that play out?
00:01:48
Speaker
all sorts of different experiences in this book. So I'm going to be working on that for the next few months. That'll be my top priority. But then I do want to get back to this podcast. I am thinking in my head around June, like around Pride time, we'll have season six.
00:02:04
Speaker
but it's a little bit up in the air, so stay tuned. I also may have some bonus episodes between now and then. I actually have a couple banks that I'm sitting on. I also am working on a web series, a very bisexual web series. It's about a closeted bisexual rabbi who reconnects with his crush from high school, who has since transitioned female to male.
00:02:27
Speaker
I'm writing a lot about Judaism and queerness and gender fluidity, all the stuff we talk about on this podcast. I will actually be doing a fundraising campaign, a crowdfunding campaign at some point in the next few months. I think it's the kind of project that many of you would like to support, and I would love to have the support of this community. Stay tuned for that. I'm going to come to you with that soon. What else? I don't know what else. What else did I want to say?
00:02:55
Speaker
I guess that's it. So without further ado, here is my interview with Maz Hedgehog. Enjoy!
Maz's Artistic Journey
00:03:07
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Two Bye Guys, probably the season finale. I think it will be. You know, we record ahead of time, but I think this is our season finale. I'll cut this if it isn't. And I'm so excited for my guests today. They are somebody that I have been wanting to have on this podcast for a very long time. This is a very special finale episode. I'm mostly familiar with them from Twitter, which may or may not exist by the time this episode comes out.
00:03:37
Speaker
But I'm really become quite interested in their work and got to view some of it before this episode began. So my guest today is a UK-based writer, poet, and performer working in the spaces between real and unreal, poetry and theater, self and other. We love those spaces between things.
00:04:01
Speaker
Their writing can be found online at Lucy Writers Network, AZ Magazine, among other places, and their new book, The Body in Its Seasons, is available now from Burning Eye Books. They are a founding member of Ink & Curtain Theatre Company and an associate artist at Oldham Coliseum.
00:04:20
Speaker
Their performance work has found its way onto stages and behind mics from Edinburgh to Brighton, including their solo show, Let Me Count the Ways, which was performed at the Hope Mill Theatre in 2021. Please welcome one of my favorite voices on my Twitter, Maz Hedgehog. Thank you. Hearing my own bio back is always a bit weird. But yeah, it's cool. It's cool.
00:04:47
Speaker
Cool. Well, I love it. So you've been on my radar ever since we interviewed Shiri Eisner on this show. I think I cut it out at the interview, but at the end, I asked them, who are some other bi voices I should interview? And you were like her first choice. You were like, you have to interview Maz. And so you've been on my list for like a year now. It's quite a long list, but I'm very glad we've gotten there.
00:05:15
Speaker
That is really cool. I mean, I've been following Shiri's work for years and years, from way back in by Tumblr days. So that will be brought 10 odd years ago now. So yeah, I'm always like, by now, you know, I know Shiri and we chat every now and again. But it's always weird that
00:05:39
Speaker
she thinks of me because I guess in my head, they're still very much like my community, not like older sibling or elder or like professor, just somebody that I learned from, but doesn't necessarily know why I'm here. So the fact that she does always surprises me.
Bi Activism & Identity
00:06:05
Speaker
It always does.
00:06:07
Speaker
Yeah, I know. I mean, I was like a little starstruck having Shiri on the podcast because like the book she wrote was so influential for me at a key moment. And then, yeah, to be like part of this by activism community is still a little surreal sometimes that like I'm having conversations with people on Twitter that are like, these are real people in this space doing big things. Like I get the feeling.
00:06:36
Speaker
Yeah, cool. Okay, so you probably know how we always start this podcast. But I will start with you and I want to hear all about your, your queer journey. But we'll start with what pronouns do you use and how do you identify on whatever spectrums are important to you? Cool. So I use they then pronouns. And I am obviously my sexual agenda.
00:07:03
Speaker
um fat and black specifically black british even more specifically british nigerian and yeah i think that about covers it cool this is our uk season of the podcast i mean we've always had a few but i feel like half of this season has been uh across the pond there's a lot of bisexuality over there it seems like yeah there is i mean um i guess kind of for me has always been a bit a surprise how
00:07:31
Speaker
small that my community can feel elsewhere. Because in the UK, you throw a stone and you hit five of us, which is quite a beautiful thing. It comes with its own issues, as every community does, but it is a beautiful thing. I mean, nothing that dramatic, just the standard interpersonal nonsense you get with any community.
00:07:53
Speaker
Yeah. Well, and when things grow larger and become more mainstream and diverse, then there's going to be conflicts that we have to work through and deal with. But that makes sense. I've experienced that in body groups over here, too. I hope that the UK is just a little bit ahead of other places, and we're going to see a person of stones throw away in lots of places soon. But yeah, you guys seem a little bit ahead of the curve.
00:08:23
Speaker
It's nice to be ahead of the curve in something. The UK is so far behind the curve in so, so many ways.
00:08:34
Speaker
How do you mean? Okay. How long do you have? Let's talk about the monarchy. Okay, so tell us a little more about your bi identity, how that intersects with your other identities as fat black British person, but like really, you know, when did you start to realize these things about your gender? Also, what was the sort of trajectory?
00:09:01
Speaker
So I was very Catholic growing up, which is relevant because I probably first figured out that I was not only attracted to men in my very early teens, but
00:09:18
Speaker
So I did what any good Catholic would do and I immediately went to confession. At which point the priest told me that it's okay, I'm a teenager. It is normal for you to be a bit confused with asexuality. Just pray on it, you know, say a rosary every week and ask the Lord to remove this burden from you and you'll be fine.
00:09:41
Speaker
So I was like, great. Awesome. Fantastic. I went hell for leather. Um, I prayed a lot. I prayed a great deal and it did not help, um, shockingly. So I think it was by the time I got to about 17, I think, so you know, 18, um, it was, I remember actually, I'm quite distinctly, it was watching Janelle Monae's tightrope video and I had some feelings and
00:10:10
Speaker
it was like, okay, this isn't going to go away. Like if the praying thing was gonna work, it would have worked by now, because I was super into it. And it was kind of where I could either keep hating myself with the mental health toll that that was taking. And also by extension, keep hating
00:10:34
Speaker
to most of my dearest friends. You know, people that, like, kind of other queer people that I knew that I loved and I very much. And I could either keep hating that thing about them or I could just accept that this is part of me and this is a thing. So yeah, I came out when I was 18 slash 19 and threw myself into the online bi community, which is how I found my Tumblr.
00:11:00
Speaker
which a lot of ways I think saved me because I was a proper state. You don't undo that much self-loathing with a single music video, no matter how good. So I was not a happy camper, but finding by Tumblr and finding this by community of people who understood
00:11:26
Speaker
that my coming up process was different. And my process of acceptance was different from that of like lesbians or gay men. Gender stuff happened as I was hanging out with other queers, especially with queers that are really involved like in the goth and kink communities who were doing weird and wonderful gender stuff.
00:11:51
Speaker
And also getting deeper into queer theory and learning more about gender as a concept. And then I was like, oh, some people do actually have a really strong connection
00:12:10
Speaker
to gender. Some people actually really feel the gender deep down inside. Whereas me, I felt like a woman was very much something that I performed and that I learned how to do to like fit in. You know, it was a costume I could put on. And when I realized that it was a costume, I immediately hated the costume. It immediately felt heavy and weird and wrong.
00:12:37
Speaker
And so I came across agender as a concept and I was like, yeah, that awesome, got it sorted. Again, not quite that simple, not quite that quick. It has been a many year process. But I think one thing about, by a community that I find great, is that I have spoken with virtually some lesbians who have had come out as non-binary or had other conflict relationships with gender.
00:13:05
Speaker
that have then made them question their identity as lesbians. Right. And they have, they've come to the process and some of them said they've raised lesbians, some don't, and that's absolutely fine either way. But I feel quite blessed in that my sexuality, even when my gender was a question, my sexuality never was. Yeah. And nobody that I spoke to within my community ever acted like it would ever be a question.
00:13:35
Speaker
And if it changes, that's cool, that's fine, that's awesome, you do you. But there was never, oh, are you really bisexual then? So that in a sense made this part of my journey a lot easier. And for me, my intersections between gender and sexuality and race and fatness
00:13:58
Speaker
really complicated. It would take me a month of Sundays talking through. But they do feel very bound up and very interlinked. And if I wasn't moving through the world as a fat black person, I don't know that I would be a gender. I don't know that I would be bisexual.
00:14:22
Speaker
And that is a really weird thing that I still don't quite know how to explain. It just is. Interesting. Okay, I want to ask about that. But yeah, it, well, first of all, I can't believe that praying the gay away didn't work. That usually works for people. I mean, it seems shocking. Even if a treatment has a 99%
00:14:47
Speaker
effectiveness rate, or is that 1% that will slip through? I mean, it's unfortunate, but it's true. But I do think your story highlights this nice thing about gender exploration and fluidity within bi identities because the fluidity of bi-ness kind of opens up that
00:15:10
Speaker
that fluidity of gender or figuring out where you are without necessarily having to go back and change your sexuality, which I think I've seen a lot of gay men and lesbian women lately and some even straight people struggling with like, well, if I feel fluid in gender, what does that make my sexuality? And so, I don't know, it sounds like there was a nice freedom in the bi identity. I guess my question is,
00:15:36
Speaker
Did you feel a shift in terms of your other identities when you started coming out as bi and agender? Or did you start thinking of your Black identity or your fat identity differently when you were more open about your sexuality and gender?
00:15:58
Speaker
So I feel like a lot of this can kind of happen around the same time because I guess because I came to by identity as a thing for myself in my late teens, you know, I was going off to university. I was figuring out who I was in a lot of ways. You know, it took me once I came to fat as an identity, actually a fair bit later.
00:16:19
Speaker
Um, partially because I've gotten bigger as I've gotten older, but also because I've got to, I learned more about fat politics a little bit later on. Um, but I guess for me with my, the way that I've experienced blackness is
00:16:35
Speaker
having been one of the only black kids, one of the only family people of colour in my schools. And so I very much felt apart from the rest of the people around me and not of ways. And then also when I was in black community spaces, when I drew up civic and Nigerian community spaces, I felt apart a number of ways. And I think one thing that I realised is that part of what was keeping me apart was this queerness that I didn't know how to name.
00:17:07
Speaker
And this thing, this bisexuality, this agender nurse that I didn't know how to articulate, that did set me apart and meant that I didn't, I had to learn the rules of engagement. I had to learn, like I had to learn how to wear girl and woman as a costume. I had to learn how to do that. I didn't just,
00:17:34
Speaker
come to me naturally or it wasn't something that ever felt exactly comfortable or easy. I think when I learn that, oh, this is what's going on, this is what I'm experiencing, it's not that I'm just don't belong anywhere, it's just that these spaces that aren't, there is not room for these specific parts of me.
00:17:59
Speaker
And once I figured that bit out, I was then able to just relax into being black and shed some of the baggage and also unpick some of quite a lot of the anti-blackness that I had learned that I'd internalized.
00:18:14
Speaker
so that I could also then be in community with other Black people better and more effectively and more compassionately and more fully rather than trying to hold them at arm's length because I didn't feel like I truly belonged.
00:18:39
Speaker
I saw somewhere on the internet, you had described yourself as a, quote, bisexual dyke. And I don't know if you still identify that way, but can you explain what that means? Um, so for me, I don't advise bisexual dyke very much actually inspired by Shira Esner, um, because her handle on Tumblr way back when was by dyke and,
00:19:04
Speaker
Whilst I'm not a woman, I have always had identified with queered womanhood, with the way that lesbians and bisexual women and trans women and even feminine gay men have interacted with femininity, interacted with womanhood as a concept.
00:19:26
Speaker
and have undermined it and messed with it and really made it their own. And I feel like that sense of transgression and that sense of rebellion is very much encapsulated for me in the word dyke.
00:19:46
Speaker
But I'm also very aware that if I just call myself a dyke, then people will think I'm a lesbian, not a bad thing. Lesbians are awesome, but that's not who I am. And also there is this long and vital history of bisexual women in queer women's movements and bisexual dykes as part of the wider dyke movement. And I want to place myself as part of that. I think also it is a
00:20:16
Speaker
I hope a pretty neat way to encapsulate the way that I approach queerness for myself.
00:20:22
Speaker
I actually have one last question about your personal life before we get into your work, which I want to. But I'm curious, in your personal life, how has your bi identity or your agender identity evolved over time, or if it has? Has it changed who you're dating or the way you approach relationships or friendships or other kinds of community?
00:20:48
Speaker
So I think for me what being bisexual and being agender specifically has given me a framework for is in creating relationships and creating dynamics that just work for me rather than trying to adhere to a script.
00:21:07
Speaker
Um, so in part, you know, I, um, polyamorous at the moment, I have one partner. Um, but that won't stop me necessarily from dating other people if I ever have the free time. Um, but knowing that, you know, the kind of cishet womanhood that I was taught was my destiny.
00:21:35
Speaker
That ain't me. So it means that all of that I can pick up what serves me and ignore what doesn't. And I can negotiate my relationships on a case by case basis.
00:21:48
Speaker
with everyone I interact with, rather than reaching for an automatic description or an automatic reflex. It means it ends up being harder work because I have to think about my relationships more carefully. But I think it means that I am able to be more honest and I'm able to
00:22:12
Speaker
you know, love people more honestly and more completely. And although to actually be more vulnerable, because I have to genuinely think about what I want, what I need, what could heal me and what could hurt me, rather than just doing what I'm supposed to.
00:22:28
Speaker
Yeah, I identify with that so hard, everything you just said. I mean, it is like a lot more work. Sometimes I'm like, oh my God, this is too much work. I didn't used to have to do this work, but it really is for an amazing benefit of just being more your authentic self with people and then having more real connections with people.
00:22:58
Speaker
I love smoothies. This is true. I really love a smoothie with some peanut butter in it, maybe some banana, maybe a little chocolate, some oat milk.
00:23:06
Speaker
maybe even spinach. That's my favorite one. But they're pretty expensive at the smoothie place, and at home, you know the big bulky blender? It's just like too much to use and clean to just make one smoothie. That's why I was excited recently to try the BlendJet 2. BlendJet 2 is portable so you can blend up a smoothie at work, a protein shake at the gym, or even a margarita right on the beach. It's small enough to fit in a cup holder, but powerful enough to blast through tough ingredients like ice and frozen fruit with ease,
00:23:35
Speaker
The Blendjet 2 is also whisper quiet so you can make your morning smoothie without waking up the whole house, and it lasts for 15 or more blends and recharges quickly with USB-C. Best of all, Blendjet 2 cleans itself. Just blend water with a drop of soap and you're good to go. It also comes in over 30 color options. I chose kind of an aqua blue one. I'm pretty basic, but there's lots of cool choices. There was some camo.
00:24:02
Speaker
There were some bi-color marble ones like blue, pink, purple things. Get a bisexual blender. Why not? What are you waiting for? Go to blendjet.com and grab yours today. Be sure to use promo code 2BIGUYS12 to get 12% off your order and free two-day shipping. No other portable blender on the market comes close to the quality, power, and innovation of the BlendJet 2. They guarantee you'll love it or your money back. Shop today and get the best deal ever.
00:24:36
Speaker
Okay, let's talk about your work and your career.
The Role of Poetry in Maz's Life
00:24:40
Speaker
Tell us a little about how you got started. Like, did you always know you wanted to be an artist, a writer, a performer, or like, how did it develop naturally? And were you always kind of focused on queerness, or did that come in to your work later? So I have always written, and I've always written poetry specifically,
00:25:04
Speaker
Growing up, my parents were always really keen for us to have poetry books in the house. And they would encourage me and my siblings to read stories and read poetry to each other. So I've been, you know, reading like Keats and Robert Louis Stevenson since I was like six, seven years old.
00:25:27
Speaker
But I never thought that I could actually make a living out of it. Me and my siblings, when I was little, we would joke.
00:25:37
Speaker
that artists was a synonym for unemployed. And all of us, because I have three siblings and all four of us have quite artistic spirits in our own ways. But none of us ever thought that it could actually be a career. None of us ever dreamed that it could actually be a way to make a living. So, you know, I did youth theatre when I was a teenager, kind of for socialising, for self-confidence, to get over my stammer.
00:26:06
Speaker
Um, but I left it when it came to do my GCSEs when I was 16. Um, you know, I kept writing. I had a poetry blog for a minute on Tumblr. It was not good, but I tried. Um, and then when I got to university, um, I went to my very first poetry open mic, um, decided that, you know, I may as well get up on stage, um, with the creative writing society.
00:26:33
Speaker
And it was like, oh no, I'm doing this. And again, I never thought that it would be a career and I've thought it could be a job, but I thought this is a great hobby for me to have and a great thing for me to do. And then I graduated and I thought, I'll just write a little chat book. Nothing serious, a little poetry collection. How hard could it be? The answer is very. And then by the time that I'd finished it with all that blood, sweat and tears,
00:27:02
Speaker
it was because of, okay, well, I've put in all this work, now I need to get it published. And, you know, people that I'd met open miking and doing poetry nights, people that I'd met, you know, online and on Twitter and on Instagram, you know, all of these little connections that I built and that I developed meant that I kind of fell from one thing to another, and I happened to do another thing.
00:27:29
Speaker
And then I went out to do another thing. And then before I knew it, I had built this like little career for myself and it still doesn't quite pay the bills. I do have to, I still got to work three days a week. I was going to ask that question. Like every artist, I have two jobs, but I'm fortunate now that I only need to work part time.
00:27:58
Speaker
make ends meet rather than working full-time and sitting exams and trying to do what at the same time. I don't know how I managed it to be honest. And it has been a case of a mixture of just banging my head against doors until they opened.
00:28:14
Speaker
but then also just pure serendipity. You know, there have been gigs that I've gotten, especially over the past year, year and a half, that have almost fallen in my lap because somebody had worked with me before or had seen my work and was like, do you want to do this other thing? And me being like, sure, I don't know how, but I'll figure out how hard could it be? The answer was always very, but can thus far, I've managed to always figure it out.
00:28:43
Speaker
Yeah. I was going to ask, is it a stable living? How do you feel now about making a living as an artist? Because it is hard. I go back and forth. I think for me, I hope one day I'll be able to make a proper living out of it and do it full time. But also the case where even if almost every artist I know
00:29:08
Speaker
you know, I'm working a day job and then doing art, you know, in the moments that I can find it, then I'll be quite content with that. Especially because right now I'm quite fortunate that I don't hate my day job. For like the first time in my adult life, I'm in no rush to leave it. So it's a case that, you know, if my life was like this,
00:29:34
Speaker
for the next 10 years, I wouldn't be mad about it. Cool. Yeah, I mean, we're in slightly different fields, although in the same kind of art, performance art world. And people often ask me, how do you break into it? And the truth is, there is no one way. I mean, there is a standard path. But if you go after it, it's almost certainly not going to happen. And it's going to happen some other way.
00:30:03
Speaker
I tell people it's like you have to throw the spaghetti on the wall and see what sticks and do everything. You have to be doing everything, and that's the only way those random things will come and actually work out. I think your story exemplifies that. It may feel serendipitous, but it's because you were planting a lot of seeds for a long time and doing everything.
00:30:32
Speaker
I'm working in theatre now.
00:30:36
Speaker
I know a lot of actors and a lot of them are drama school graduates. And for the shows that I've been in, the cast that I've been in, being around people who have this incredible training where the things that they know, the theories they understand, the way they're able to approach acting and performing,
00:31:03
Speaker
I find to be a little bit of witchcraft, because I am some guy who has just been doing this and trundling along, and I've kind of ended up here almost by accident. Not by accident, but almost by accident. And it's, I think on one level, the imposter syndrome is strong, but on another level, I think it's a sign of the different ways that people do come to this industry.
00:31:31
Speaker
and the different ways that people
00:31:36
Speaker
can learn the skills you need to succeed in this industry. Cause not everybody's going to do great at drama school. You know, everyone's going to do great in film school, but that doesn't mean that you can't be an actor or you can't be a filmmaker. It just meant that your path is a bit different. Cause Lord knows I would have not done one at drama school at all. I listened to people talk about it and it's like, I was a very shy teenager.
00:32:03
Speaker
If at 19 you'd thrown me into a room full of people for some of the workshops that they did. Oh, I would have crumbled immediately. So I'm quite glad I've come at it and I've come at this side of things now that I'm a bit older and a bit more sure of myself.
00:32:25
Speaker
cool. Yeah, I mean, I often feel like to do stuff that's really unique and new and different is gonna almost by definition, get you a lot of rejection because especially from mainstream places and you know, big companies like they're looking for what works and what's known. And if you I think a lot of your work is kind of
00:32:51
Speaker
very fresh and new and in this unknown territory. And that's kind of stuff I like to try to do too, but there's so much rejection. I forget which piece I was reading, but I was reading something about you or that you wrote where you're
00:33:06
Speaker
I mean, I think you mentioned this briefly, but I think it was your first book of poetry you had written and were trying to get it published and heard a lot of nos until you won a contest of some sort. How do you deal with that? How do you cultivate the strengths of think this is worthwhile and this is good, even in the face of a bunch of nos?
00:33:32
Speaker
My dad was always very much, you have to see this through person. Sometimes infuriatingly, like dad is not that serious. But it means that I do very much have this feeling that I need to see things through.
00:33:52
Speaker
And I need to know that I gave it my best shot so that if it doesn't work out, at least I can look back and say, you know what, I tried. And neither the arts, many what ifs. But in practice, that meant that when I was submitting that first book and getting nowhere, and that being the first lot of rejections that I'd really experienced, spent a lot of time crying on the phone at my mum.
00:34:21
Speaker
Um, she did not fully understand why I was so upset. Um, she didn't really get why I was going, well, putting myself through all that pain for like no money, like, okay, well, how much money's in this? And I was like, Oh, none. And she's like, okay, so you will torture yourself for nothing. He's like, not for nothing, just for no money. Um, right.
00:34:44
Speaker
but she would listen and she'd go, you know what, it's okay, you'll get there, you'll make it, saying all the nice things. And so then when it came to getting that one, yes, winning this public chat book contest, it was like, okay, cool. So I know now that if I stick with it and if I keep going,
00:35:07
Speaker
And if I take the rejections on the chin, then I will get there eventually. And that's not to say that I don't still occasionally quit on the phone with my mum. I do. I live with my eldest sister and sometimes I will sit and rant at her in our living room about a thing that I didn't get or has gone wrong and we'll have a proper bitch in a moment together. But it does mean that
00:35:37
Speaker
I know that I can stick it out. And I also have learned that it's not personal, that almost every rejection, like it might be that you were the wrong fit. It might be that you are the wrong balance. It might be the person reading your application was in a bad mood that day. And it's almost never has anything to do with you as in your ability as an artist. It is a bit of a crapshoot and it's a numbers game.
00:36:07
Speaker
And you kind of just have to stick with it. For so long as it's worth it to anything, that's a thing. Like for me, all the no's are worth it for the one yes. For some people, it's not. And that's genuinely fine. I don't think anyone should torture themselves for this industry if the payoff isn't worth it for you emotionally. Yeah. Yep. Couldn't agree more.
Theater and Audience Connection
00:36:37
Speaker
So I watched your show, a recording of your show, Let Me Count the Ways. And before we get into that specifically, I was describing it to my partner as this really interesting blend of theater and poetry. And then later, preparing for this, I read your bio and you said you like to operate in the space between theater and poetry. So can you talk a little about that intersection and
00:37:01
Speaker
Why does that work for the kinds of stories you want to tell? Why is that the right medium for your message? I think it's because it's what comes naturally. I spent years and years just doing performance poetry, doing spoken word, often creating these quite character-driven, quite narrative poems
00:37:25
Speaker
that were three, four, five minutes long. And like I said, I'd been in youth theater as a teenager and I still loved theater and I wanted to do theater. And so I decided one day I'm gonna do a solo show. I'd seen a few, some I liked, some I didn't, some just blew me away and have lived my brain ever since. And so I was like, you know what, I want to do that. How do I do that? I can't write
00:37:54
Speaker
like straight up plays but I can write poems and I know that I can build a narrative and a mood in poems because I did that in my chat book. So let me look back through, I kind of put you there written, I write a lot about love and boundaries at the moment
00:38:11
Speaker
I'm going to do a show about love and boundaries, because then I wouldn't have to write much more new material. It was a very calculated path of resistance kind of move. And of course, it was still incredibly difficult. Somehow, even after all these years, I still forget that stuff is really hard. I just kind of go into it being like, oh, it'll be fine.
00:38:36
Speaker
and then realise that I've given myself a shed load of work to do and no roadmap to follow. But then, as I was battling my way through this, I realised that having, because poetry is itself often quite an ambiguous medium, it's one that encourages you to read meaning into it.
00:39:03
Speaker
I feel I kind of felt like then I could have a really reciprocal relationship with the audience where kind of I'm making an offer to them and encouraging them to read meaning into it. And then I can offer more and they can be more meaning and they're gonna be this rather than them just kind of as passively watching something.
00:39:31
Speaker
encourage them kind of to lean in a little bit and to really engage and then hopefully then to get more out of it. And there's one thing that kind of even when I am trying to write slightly more conventional plays because eventually I will need to make money. A poetic theatre is beautiful but it's not a money spinner. Even then
00:39:55
Speaker
I still want to have that element of the ambiguous and the unknowable and the poetic in my writing because that's what I love to do. But also I think that the theatre that I've seen that has stayed with me
00:40:11
Speaker
and has like lived in my brain and lived in my soul. It's like, it's just changed me. It's been because there's been something undefinable and unknowable about it that I've had to pick up and chew on and think about for days and days and be like, oh, I think I understand what's happening here. And ideally, that's the experience that I would want audiences to have with my writing.
00:40:38
Speaker
Fascinating. I love it. I think there is so much value in just like as an artist figuring out what does come naturally to you and what lives in your brain that other people are doing and like it's different for everyone and you don't have to sort of follow
00:40:54
Speaker
the model. Okay, tell us a little more about Let Me Count the Ways. And like, was that the show you were when you decided I want to do a solo show? Is that what it evolved into? And, and like, so the show focuses on queerness, mental health, womanhood, blackness, beauty standards, among other things. Like, how did that project evolve? So yeah, when I decided to write social, I was like, okay, I write about love and relationships and boundaries a lot.
00:41:24
Speaker
So let's do that. And I was looking back through my back catalog and putting out the things that I, the kind of pieces that I loved performing the most. And then I was trying to kind of, you know, string them together into an emotional arc, into almost kind of a meta narrative. And then I realized that a lot of my favorite things had to go, like they just weren't going to work. And some things had to be just completely rewritten.
00:41:53
Speaker
But I think one want to come to be like, okay, the core question I guess of it is, how do we heal and how do we heal together? And trying to create the kind of like community vibe in a one person show. I'm not sure what I was thinking. But I think I like to be ambitious in my work, give myself problems. But I think what I came out with in the end is this,
00:42:22
Speaker
I think for me, I see it as kind of a meditation on the way we are affected by the people we interact with and the, you know, the ways that the relationships that we form or choose not to form or choose to break apart, how that then influences who we are, how we see ourselves, our relationships with ourselves and the relationships that we form later down the line.
00:42:52
Speaker
um so it's not autobiographical because I find my own life story quite uninteresting as artistic material but I guess for me it's like a love letter to the people that I've known um and a
00:43:12
Speaker
almost like, for me, a sample roadmap for healing and for growth. And it's like, okay, if I could plot the ideal healing journey in poetry, what would it look like? And let me count the way the journey is unfinished at the end, that is on purpose, because the journey is always unfinished.
00:43:38
Speaker
but I think for me it's kind of it is that okay what is like what would a dark night of the soul look like a nightmare sequence but then how do you get up out of that and how and how do you recover from that and how do you figure out what your next steps are and who helps you to do that
00:44:00
Speaker
fascinating. That's really providing a lot of interesting content for what I watch. Yeah, I have a couple questions about that. So you mentioned the Dark Knight of the Soul thing. That's an interesting way of thinking about it. I was really struck by the opening of this piece. I don't know if that's the Dark Knight of the Soul part or if it's the middle part or the whole thing.
00:44:23
Speaker
But the opening is there's no words for a while just to describe it to people. And it begins with this kind of asynchronous offbeat music. I actually checked my computer to make sure the file was like I didn't do something wrong. I was like, is this really what it sounds like? And then
00:44:43
Speaker
And then it was, and I was like, oh, okay, this is making me feel some things already. And then you're a lot of conflict listening to that. Maybe I'll play a little clip in here.
00:45:17
Speaker
And then we see you typing at a computer. And then I would look at it as some kind of panic attack. I don't know if that's what you're going for, but you became overwhelmed and it built and rose to this climax. And then I think it went black. And then we move into the spoken word portion after that.
00:45:44
Speaker
But I was just fascinated by it. I mean, I felt like you conveyed so much without any words right away. And I was so immediately engaging. Can you talk about opening the piece like that and what it was about? Yeah, that was my director's idea. Oh, wow. Interesting. Yeah. So when I finished the script, I had no idea what to do with it. And so the person I run Ink and Curtain with, Fay Draper,
00:46:12
Speaker
She is a theatre maker based in Liverpool. We've been friends for way too long, about, oh, 17 years now, I think. And I was like, okay, I need somebody to help me bring this to life. And she knows me like almost nobody else does. And I trust her judgment implicitly.
00:46:38
Speaker
And so I was like, okay, Fay, would you like to direct this? I haven't got much money, but I promise that I will feed you. And so she was like, okay, right. We need, we need a setting. What's the setting of this piece? And I'm like, I don't know what the setting is. She was like, okay, cool. Went away, came back. I was like, okay, right. So this is going to be in a bedroom and it's going to open with, with the cold open, going to open with a panic attack to just to grab people by the balls.
00:47:08
Speaker
And I was like, okay, I guess.
00:47:16
Speaker
And then we brought in a sound designer, another friend of mine, Obby, who goes by Alpha Twang on Instagram, who is this incredible non-binary noise musician. And I sent them the script again, it's like, you know what, just do whatever makes sense to you with this. And then they came and like, okay, give me notes. I gave the most unhelpful notes
00:47:41
Speaker
in the world. Like this needs to be crunchy but light. Or I'm thinking like a more like almost umami mouthfeel. Somehow they took that and made sense of it and created this stunning soundscape. And so I think to witness the visual language of the piece is orfeh. Um, you know,
00:48:09
Speaker
she just created the context for my words to exist in. And then the soundscape is all alpha-twine, down to the ground. They created just this beautiful, just like musical backdrop for me to work in. And so I think it's kind of, for me, let me call you very much a testament to the fact that even a solo show that is performed by the writer
00:48:37
Speaker
is every, it's still very much a group effort and very much a team effort. And I definitely could not have done it without Fae and without Afitwan.
00:48:46
Speaker
Yeah, that's fascinating that that came out of the collaboration because it really, I thought, did give some context and frame the rest of the piece in a really interesting way and just kind of set me up to focus on certain things and the value of collaboration in art. Yeah.
00:49:07
Speaker
I also really loved what you started with when you started speaking, and I thought that was really engaging. And you mentioned community and wanting to sort of do a piece about that. I couldn't see the audience in that camera angle, but I felt them there, and I felt you talking to them and bringing me into it.
00:49:30
Speaker
you open the show by talking about how you're imperfect, and you'll hold space for the audience's imperfection too. And I think later in the show you talked about, or I wrote down a quote, I don't know what to do with perfection. Nothing capable of real love can be perfect. I thought that was kind of a really fascinating message to come back to and to start with and then come back to.
00:49:58
Speaker
Can you talk about that and this idea of holding space and the relationship between you and the viewers? Yeah, so as a performer, I'm really interested in audience, especially because I mostly do live performance. And so I spend a lot of time talking to an audience directly or indirectly. And so I think for me with this solo show, I was like, okay, this would be really weird if it's just me on stage.
00:50:27
Speaker
acting as though I'm talking to myself. I needed to acknowledge that the audience is there. And then, okay, so that means that I have a moment here to almost present my mission statement. Like, this is what I'm here to do. This is what you're here for. And this is what I hope we can create together.
00:50:47
Speaker
And when it comes to embracing imperfection, I am something of a perfectionist by nature. You know, I want things to be just so, you know, I want things to be right. And learning to let go of that and letting things be good enough has been a large part also of my journey in terms of mental health and wellbeing. And my self love and self acceptance is in accepting that
00:51:16
Speaker
perfection is impossible and that it is in the imperfections, it is in the deviations, it is in the problems that we find beauty and we find love because if love is seeing the best in someone and wanting the best for someone, even when they don't necessarily deserve it,
00:51:43
Speaker
If someone is perfect, if somebody has no flaws, there's no growing left to do, there is nothing they struggle with, it's very difficult then to love that because you can't give them hope when they're down because they're never going to be down. And you can't help them figure out a problem because they'll have no problems.
00:52:06
Speaker
And you can't breathe for them in difficult moments because there will be no difficult moments. And I firmly believe that it is in the moments of difficulty and of trial and of imperfection that we learn to love and that love finds its home. And so I wanted that to be part of the show because the show itself was also about imperfection and about being messy and wrong and messing things up and trying again.
00:52:34
Speaker
Yeah, I really love that. It really spoke to me. And it just seems like there's something a little bit queer about that kind of a message of like, for me, I felt that perfectionism for a long time in my life. I mean, it's still hard to unlearn, but
00:52:52
Speaker
But being queer helped me sort of see that we don't have to follow these models. The idea of perfectionism is a myth. It's just what somebody said is perfect. And actually, all of these things that make us unique are not imperfections. They're actually your strength and your power and where really interesting relationship dynamics come from by embracing your, quote, imperfections.
00:53:22
Speaker
Yeah, I think kind of for me, when I first accepted the fact that I am bisexual and that that's the way that I experienced sexuality, and then when I first came to accept the fact that I am a gender and that I don't experience gender very much internally, it felt like a failure. Like I'd been trying really, really hard to be cisgender and trying really, really hard to be straight, and I'd failed at it.
00:53:52
Speaker
And then it was either I can let that feeling of failure consume me or I can kind of own it and embrace it. I'm like, okay, I failed. But in that failure, I've managed to find and create something else and maybe even something better and definitely better for me. And so kind of imperfection and failure being the way that we grow and create
00:54:21
Speaker
and find new things is something that I am really interested in, something that I believe in firmly, and that I think put into a lot of my work, whether that be intentionally, whether that be when we count the ways, or completely accidentally, as with some other stuff that I've written and gone back to and gone, oh, okay.
Embracing Imperfection & Physicality
00:54:49
Speaker
I want to talk about body image in the show and maybe how that intersects with your black and queer identities also. In the show, you end up with less clothing on than when you start the show. And there was something I wrote down that I thought was so fascinating. You said in the show, I don't much care for decency. My body is a work of art, and I won't hide it behind a kind of modesty that chokes it. And then just a little bit later,
00:55:16
Speaker
you said, I am saying this matters. I think this referred to your body, your physicality, your person. So tell us about that and this concept of decency and how you learned to embrace this. I think for me that very much came from queerness and then fatness almost like in that order. So it's like if I
00:55:46
Speaker
you know, have failed at head of sexuality and I've failed at being cisgender and I've been rejected into this, you know, cast off pile that I've decided to embrace and embrace being a part of, then why should I care about cisgender and head of sexual standards of decency?
00:56:06
Speaker
why should I care about death and of the modesty? And then as I came into fat politics, it was like, okay, so this shame that I feel about my body isn't mine. It didn't come from me. It didn't happen by accident. It was created and enforced in order to oppress me and in order to control the behavior of other people. And so
00:56:33
Speaker
then if the sole reason for its being is to hurt and to harm and to oppress and to destroy, why should I pay it any mind? Why should it be something that I take home? Why should I be ashamed that I continue to carry? And it's been a hell of a process unpicking that and unwinding that and finding
00:57:00
Speaker
ways to love and embrace my body and bodies like mine and bodies bigger than mine. A lot of that has been like, if my body is indecent, then I will be indecent. And that indecency matters. And it's important because it is in the indecent that we, you know, find new ways of being.
00:57:25
Speaker
And that was actually a point in the show that I wrote, I think in the rehearsal room, because again, the idea of ending up with less clothes on, Fay came up with that, because she saw the other thing of writing and being like, there is something, there is an unveiling here of some kind, we need it to be visual, take your clothes off. If we hadn't been friends for so long, I might have taken Umbridge, but okay, cool, so then we need,
00:57:55
Speaker
a something within the text to reflect that. So that's when I wrote that little speech. Also, frankly, that was a transition that I was struggling with, the transition from the nightmare sequence into that, you know, the relationship in the lipstick stains
00:58:13
Speaker
I didn't know how to make, I knew that it had to happen in that order, but didn't know how to get from A to B. And it was when Faye was like, it's an unveiling, let's unveil. Now I was like, okay, cool, I know what to write now.
00:58:25
Speaker
fascinating. Yeah, I mean, it was a really good visual representation of an unveiling and of you sort of bearing your soul in these other ways, and that was a visual version of it. I thought that worked really well and helped make that point that like, you know, I was like, fuck decency, this is a work of art, and like, you know, that's what it's about.
00:58:47
Speaker
I also feel like, personally, I used to not care about how I dressed or I would dress just to fit in and to kind of blend in and that was my shtick. And then after coming out, I kind of learned that what I wear is a big choice every day and it actually does affect how I present to the world and how people treat me and what I want to convey.
00:59:11
Speaker
And I was reading something you wrote online. It's an essay called Fat, Black, and Myself, Fashion in the Pandemic. I really connected with this and hadn't really thought about it this way, but you wrote, style is a kind of speech. Long before I opened my loud mouth, my physicality speaks volumes. My blackness reads as mammy and savage. My fatness reads misery and gluttony. My clothes sit alongside these, allowing me to speak for myself.
00:59:40
Speaker
So I dress deliberately to communicate who I am and what matters to me. I don't know. I kind of thought about it that way of your fashion as speech. I also hadn't seen the Devil Wears Prada until recently, and that helped me connect all these things. But can you talk about that and how you've learned that? Yeah.
01:00:02
Speaker
My family is Nigerian and anybody who knows Nigerians know that we are often quite image focused.
01:00:12
Speaker
culturally, you know, we have the beautiful fabrics, the galet, the head wrap, you know, jewellery and patterns and colours and sequins. And I grew up around that, you know, when I was little, my mum was very careful to make sure that all of us looked impeccable when we left the house.
01:00:35
Speaker
And then as I got older and as my body began to feel a bit more foreign, I left a lot of that behind. I was like, you know what, I'll dress to fit in as an emo kid. I'll dress for convenience, I'll dress for comfort.
01:00:51
Speaker
And it wasn't until I realised how miserable that made me that again at university I started to experiment a little bit. I had a rockabilly phase, as it feels like every fat feminine person has a rockabilly phase. It's like a rite of passage.
01:01:07
Speaker
you know then I entered the corporate world and once again I was very stifled very restricted in what I could wear and the way I could present and I was also very influenced by my blackness as well because it was like if I change my hair and come in with a set of box braids it would invite confused or disapproving looks and it was exhausting and so it wasn't until I reached
01:01:32
Speaker
lockdowns and until I had this moment to myself that I could really dig into what clothing fashion style genuinely means to me and the way that I want to interact with it and
01:01:48
Speaker
Like over that 18 months, two years, I basically completely revamped my wardrobe. So that now I can say that my wardrobe feels like mine and what I didn't think ever has before. And I'm quite fortunate in that the job that I have now, I can basically dress how I want.
01:02:06
Speaker
And nobody cares. Cool. Awesome. Okay, last couple questions. I want to ask a little more about your poetry. So your debut poetry collection is called Vivat Regina.
Maz's Poetry Collections
01:02:21
Speaker
Is that right? Yes. And it is inspired by the world of fairies. And you wrote about why. You wrote, fairies are a little wild, a lot strange, and almost entirely unknowable.
01:02:32
Speaker
And I thought that reminds me a lot of the bi and queer communities. So I'm just curious, what are fairies about for you? Why did you choose to write about that? And what was it like exploring that world? So I've always loved fairy tales. All of the books my parents had, along with poetry collections, had collections of fairy tales and folk laws and folklore and myth.
01:02:58
Speaker
And the fairy tales that I loved were the ones that were a bit dark, a bit gruesome, a bit strange. Stories of like, you know, fairies kidnapping children, changelings, entering a fairy glen and emerging three days later in front of that 100 years has passed. And I find that kind of that living
01:03:22
Speaker
in between living on the edge of the margins, being almost a symbol of a bygone era in some ways, and a symbol of the wild places, the places that we can't control or corral, that has interested me as a storyteller, as a writer, as a poet for years and years and years, and that way of thinking about stories even influences my writing, even though that I'm not writing about fairies explicitly all the time.
01:03:53
Speaker
And so when it came to writing my first poetry collection, it was like, okay, so what do I know? Fairies. What fairy story have I been interested in for ages? The Rise and Fall of the Fairy Queen. It's something that me and one of my sisters had been chatting about for years beforehand.
01:04:16
Speaker
And so when it came to writing a decade, there's someone that I already have a really strong sense of, so it should make things easier. It didn't. I did not make it easy, but it was a way in for me.
01:04:30
Speaker
Awesome. It sounds very interesting. And so I also regret to say I've not read your new book, The Body and Its Seasons. I'm very interested. But can you just tell us a little bit about what that's about and what inspired it for listeners who may be interested to pick it up? So The Body and Its Seasons is a very experimental approach collection.
01:04:53
Speaker
It tells the story of a quarter-life crisis. The protagonist Maddie discovers this legend that I made up of the body, a semi-mythical creature.
01:05:17
Speaker
And Maddie becomes obsessed with it, quits their job, sells their flat, and goes hunting for a legend. And along the way, it's also then a story about queerness and about growth and about also about projecting your problems onto other people and turning other people into characters rather than respect to them as people. And then
01:05:44
Speaker
in the way that I do, when Maddy Frye does find healing, it is through community and by meeting queer people and not knowing what that means and not knowing what that entails. And at no point in the text does Maddy call themselves queer and no point of attack does Maddy have an epiphany and come out because it's not about that. It is very much about this internal process of wrestling with self.
01:06:11
Speaker
and the fact that the end of the book is probably the beginning of Maddie's actual journey of self-discovery rather than avoiding it via obsession. And so there are poems about like fairies and death and relationships and sex and bodies and all these things that are annotated with footnotes. And there are I think about a hundred odd footnotes in the collection
01:06:39
Speaker
with each of them being an, you know, an addendum to, or an observation on the poems themselves. Cool. Awesome. We'll put it in the show notes for people who want to check it out and we'll put your website in the show notes too. Check that out. And last question, what's, what's next? What kind of stuff are you working on or what areas are you exploring?
Future Theater Endeavors
01:07:04
Speaker
So last year, me and Fe started Ink and Curtain.
01:07:07
Speaker
We took a show to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival called Closure.
01:07:11
Speaker
that is a just gruesome and viciously funny rape revenge story. So I should be doing that again in January at home in Manchester. Home is like a theatre, cinema, art gallery, not just like in my house. So doing that in January, alongside that I am associated with Oldham Coliseum, so
01:07:38
Speaker
And then actually, I'm currently writing a play based on Vivint Regina. We'll see how that goes because I've not written to that scale before. So we'll see. And yeah, just kind of developing Inking Curtain as a company. And to hopefully take our specific brand of, often quite vicious, often kind of funny, always very classic contemporary theatre.
01:08:06
Speaker
as far and as wide as we can. Awesome. That's great. Wishing you the best of luck or breaking all the legs. And congrats on all this success so far and on putting out such beautiful queer work into the world. Thank you. And on Twitter for however long it lasts. If you know what, I'll be tweeting as Elon Burns. But no, it's been an absolute pleasure. And thank you so much for having me on.
01:08:37
Speaker
Well, that's it for Season 5. Thank you all for listening. Thank you especially to Maz Hedgehog for coming on. I will be back with more info and updates and maybe a bonus episode or two in the next few months. But in the meantime, happy holidays, happy new year. Go out, be by, do crimes. Alright, see you soon. Bye.
01:09:02
Speaker
2 by Guys is produced and edited by me, Rob Cohen, and it was created by me and Alex Boyd. Our logo art is by Caitlin Weinman, our music is by Ross Mincer, we are supported by the Gotham, and we are part of the Zencaster Creator Network. Use promo code 2 by Guys to get 30% off your first three months of Zencaster. Thanks for listening to 2 by Guys.