you're just locking the doors and no one is gonna take you seriously and

I thought that

That's fine because no one is taking me seriously anyway

So I wanted to start with a crazy statistic that I read which was a study that was done in 2015, which said that

6.7 percent of Americans have barely read one poem in the last year and it just kind of occurred to me that

someone reading one of your poems on the Instagram could mark the advent of their first interaction with a home which is

kind of amazing and

incredible so congratulations on everything that you've done and

you are just about to embark on this huge American tour and

How does that?

It feels amazing and I'm really grateful and I feel really blessed I

Think it's like always a difficult

It's difficult to answer that question because for me in my life

poetry's always been such a consistent part of it and

so

Now everybody's like oh my god poetry is like everywhere

It says crazy things and I haven't been able to really see that shift because it's always been around me

but I think it's so important and I think it's important because

poetry allows you to process emotion and it allows you to express it and it it's crazy that

such a low percentage of people actually use it as a tool to heal and as a tool to share and

So I think it's great that we're at a time now where so many more people are reading and using it. Yeah, I completely agree

That was really how I felt reading your book that it was just incredibly healing and also I loved it as a shorthand for

Ideas that I found really difficult to express myself, I could refer someone to this poem

I could just send them a screenshot of the you thing and

I felt so lucky to have that as a tool in my arsenal that I could kind of draw on and

Be like this is what it feels like, you know here

So that's incredible. You're giving people more words more language credit. Thank you

you're a poet in you know the day and age of

You post something on your Instagram account and you get instant feedback

so you you know most most writers will put a book out into the world and maybe they'll read a review or maybe they'll

Meet someone that's read their work has an opinion but you have to come and face to face with people's

Responses and feelings to your work on a daily basis in droves and I'm just I'm curious does that affect your writing does that affect?

Yeah, you know it does it does two things. The feedback is always reassuring in that

Oh, there's people here that want to read this. I'll keep writing it

But I'm also very self aware of the fact that I don't want

What other people think to change how I write and what I write about and I remember very early on this was probably

milk, and honey was first self-published and at the end of 2014 and when it came out all of my friends were like

Okay, so we were like taking a look at your Instagram and we realized that the poems about love and heartbreak get the most amount

Of love and you know your other pieces about like sexual abuse and all that, okay

Maybe you want to like chill on those because there's not that much interaction and I remember for a month

I was like, you know, you're right. I should be doing everything that I can to get this book into as many hands as possible

But it didn't feel right and what I felt was this magic?

there was some sort of magic going away and I realized it was because

Writing for me and I explained it as like a romantic relationship with like a partner. It's

Is a romantic relationship

it's a spiritual connection that I have and it's when I feel closest to myself and

You wouldn't let a third party enter your romantic relationship and their opinions shouldn't affect how you feel about the person that you love so

Why would I let hundreds and thousands of people?

and their opinions affect how I write and what I write about and so I'm very aware of

really letting that feedback change

So I'm very like okay, I don't read refuse but and I hardly read comments

And that's usually how I do it. I think it's about honesty and just sharing that

Yeah, that's amazing. That's such a good analogy

and I mean, yeah, I relate I think the discipline the self discipline it takes

To not allow a third party opinion into your psyche and your creative space is is key

It's hard when it's about you. It must be really it's so personal

so everybody around me is like it's okay, like, you know, this person isn't criticizing you they're just criticizing the work and I'm like

But the poetry is literally me. Yeah

Not about me, you know

This is poems about my life poems about my experiences and the people that I love so it's very difficult

And even though I am so self aware and I do try to like, you know, not let it affect him affect me

I'm sure that at a level it has affected, you know

The way that I write and that has for sure some part of it has gone into like how I've written the second book

Yeah, yeah. Well, that's what's so beautiful

And one of the other things I wanted to talk to you about was how incredibly there's a there's a lack of self-consciousness there

that's so beautiful is like a such an innocence and unlike a purity to the way that you did that and

how old we when you post it the

now really famous picture of you

With menstrual blood a sheet think I was 22 or 23

that's amazing to me because I remember I mean I I had I had more confidence at that age, but still yeah, but I still

I like I wonder I

Was just it was so fearless. It was so brave. I'm I had no idea

What like I agree with you. I was so much more confident in so much more raw

And I just didn't care about anyone in anything. I was like, I'm gonna do what I want how I want to do it and

It's good

It allowed me to get into some trouble with that photograph

and you know

I was very naive about the internet because I'd written about periods before there's a poem about them in milk and honey

And so I thought that this photograph wouldn't be a big deal. It was a part of a school project

And you know the class loved it and it was going well

And so I thought it's fine. Like my readers know that this is how I feel about this topic

Yeah initially though

My readers were like they embrace it the initial response was like, oh my god like we love this

This is amazing

But when it got out of those circles and when it went into other circles

That's when the trouble sort of came and I feel like the experience brought this anxiety

of

People having so much access I remember

thousands and thousands and thousands of comments coming in by the hour and

Figuring out a young age how to manage that anything that really took that naive video way and now I'm a lot more

Careful, and there's I wouldn't call it self censorship

but I think that

the more that you grow and the more

that you realize that this is how many people have access to this the more that you think am I ready to share this or

Not yeah. Yeah. Yeah

your caption your response to that the patriarchy is leaking was just it was so brilliant and

I I don't think women it occurs to women how much they're being censored

Yeah, how much being a woman isn't a sense it exactly

I had the worst dinner with a friend the night before last and the words came out of her mouth

You don't realize how much the world hates women

Until you are breastfeeding and I'm like that is just no one should ever say that those are words

That should never come out of a woman's mouth. Um, it made me so sad but I until you'll

until it's out there or you you engage in some way and as you say you

Stumble on I posted this picture and actually yeah, I realized it was a huge deal. It usually wasn't. Okay exactly

Even the patriarchy is leaking. Like I feel like I didn't even write those words because it was in the heat of the moment

When those photos were taken down

Me realizing like I realized in that moment how much censorship there is of women because I had so many

Groups of women popping up around me that were like no. No. No, you don't understand. How wrong this is because

You have all of these other accounts that are able to pose like pornography and all these

Images and all this media that actually objectify is us and so you need to really do something about it

And I remember in the heat and the passion of that moment. I was like the patriarchy is leaking

You self-published I did your work was originally rejected which is crazy as so many great writers work is

At the very beginning tell me what what does that mean for a writer to be?

Self-published. What does that? I think traditionally it's not a very good thing

It's kind of saying that hey and that's what my professors were like

The first thing I did was go to my professors and say hey, you know

I write poetry and I think I want to publish a book because my readers are asking for it

So what should I do and I didn't know anyone I was a student I was in so much debt

And so I wasn't gonna spend an exorbitant amount of money getting it

Sent anywhere and my professor said, you know, try magazines try literary journals and anthologies

And everybody faces a lot of rejection before they get there. So it's fine. Let's keep going

And so I took her advice

I took this book and I started to strip it and I

grouped together pieces of like five poems three poems seven poems and I started to send them out and

It just wasn't working and I kind of understood why

because these anthologies and these journals were about

The Canada and the literary landscape were like Canada's where I'm from and so it was a very specific

Sort of like themed pieces and house poems about like body hair and sexual abuse really gonna fit into all of that and I self-published

The day that I realized that my poetry is for me milk and honey is one large poem

It's one continuous poem from the front to the back and I was cheating, you know, like it's like a body of work

But I what I was doing was like taking eyelashes and fingertips and limbs and just throwing them and trying to make it work

when really I had to take the responsibility of putting the whole thing together and then being like here it is and

So everyone was like, this is a bad idea the moment you self-publish, you know

you're just locking the doors and no one is gonna take you seriously and

I thought that

That's fine because no one is taking me seriously. Anyway, I don't even know these people that aren't even gonna like me

So who cares and so then I did that and although at the moment

Everybody told me it was the worst decision

I could have made it's turned out to be the best and I think it's timing is one thing

it's I did it at a time when the internet was really changing the face of publishing and so it was

Just the perfect circumstance circumstances coming together. Yeah

That's amazing. So it's such a great story. It's so inspiring. I know you have 2.8 million followers like something crazy

Let's wake up in the morning. Go. Wow

Yeah, I don't believe it's real. Yeah, I'm hundred percent. I'm like there is somebody out there buying these followers

I'm asleep, you know. Yeah, and it's hard to grasp thee. It's just pixels on the screen

mmm, so it comes to life only when

It's real life and you're like two people are sitting together. We're hugging and we're actually having a conversation

That's what I'm like it takes my breath away. Yeah, yeah

How this work has been received

in India and here in your home country versus how it's been received because you know

What is mad to me is that your work is considered radical for Western culture?

So what blows me away is crazy that it's radical

Yeah, I don't feel like it's even remotely yeah, everything awake. I'm like, I need to get some edge like yes, let's do this

But you know, but I mean it's crazy but it it is why I guess you've already answered the question in a way

Did you realize what you were doing was going to be so

Disruptive radical transgressive did you?

Talk to your parents before you started writing poems like these. I'm putting them out. Did you I mean with a

Conversation none Wow, it was well

the only really conversations I ever had so I started performing like doing spoken word and going to like

poetry slams and open mikes about nine years ago and

my parents had no understanding of what that meant and

They were very look I have immigrant parents and my mum

States at home with the kids. I have three younger siblings and my dad is a truck driver

So he's like listen girl. You need to study 28 hours in the day eight days a week

I don't know you're gonna make it happen and you're gonna become a doctor or lawyer or something because you will not

like work your body to the bone like I had to and

So when I would ask them. Hey, you like drop me off to this thing. I'm gonna be performing in my dad's mind

He's like, what does that even mean?

I know you're not going there and so because I got such a negative response from them early on I didn't tell them

That I was sharing my work online

Or I didn't even tell them I was gonna self publish and I and I used to have nightmares

when I first started to share my work online that

There was pieces that are about like sexuality and exploring that and that's not something that we talk about at home

So I would have nightmares at somebody like some ex-boyfriend. He's gonna print this stuff out and

just hand it over to them and

Luckily that never happened

but I remember that when the book came out I went home and

I was like I have to tell them and so I kind of dropped it off