Writing as an Organ of Accessibility: An Interview with Rob Macaisa Colgate

Contributor Rob Macaisa Colgate highlights the significance of collection, reflection, and accessibility to the process of creating their debut. Rob’s poem “The Body Is Not An Apology Except For Mine Sometimes” appears in issue 74.1-2.

1. Can you tell me the story of Hardly Creatures: When did you start working on it? What were some of your preoccupations as you were writing it? How did you know when you had a complete collection on your hands?

Hardly Creatures is my first book, but it’s far from my first book length project. I spent quite a few years writing poems aimlessly, letting them accumulate, collecting them, and then walking away from the collection. It was awesome, to care so little. It felt important to not rush the first book, to inhabit myself as a poet before an author, to develop the craft of collecting as much as the craft of writing.

When I moved to Toronto on a fellowship, I knew I was going to write a book, I just didn’t know what book. So I spent the first year steeping in community, accumulating scraps of language and experience and logging them in a spreadsheet, letting my understanding of disability and poetry soften and stretch. I kept circling back to collective care and access intimacy. How do we take care of each other, how do we create those networks and structures, and what does it feel like when those needs are met? At the same time, I was falling in love. It sounds quite sentimental, but I do think the simultaneity of everything helped me unlock a new understanding of intimacy.

The actual writing of the book was very unsexy. I took my year of percolating and my spreadsheet of fragmented ideas and wrote the entire collection in three weeks at a residency. It felt like a year of mental drafting and then a deep, sudden sprint of revision. I knew what I wanted to say, I knew the forms I wanted to embody, and I knew how long I wanted to take to do all this. None of this makes it seem like a particularly organic book, but this is just how my organs work.

2. In your interview with Malahat Review, you describe this collection as “tak[ing] the form of an accessible art gallery.” How did you see this form take shape as you put together the book and how do you think it lends itself to the messaging of your writing? Why is this accessibility so important
(to you personally and at large)?

I’m a fan of poems over poetics, but I also recognized that for a disability poetics to truly move past language and into concept, there needed to be more to the collected poems than individual linguistic components. What are poems about disability on a topical level if they don’t also find a way to engage disabled forms? I was working at Tangled Art + Disability in Toronto, and there were ASL interpretations of our didactic panels. There were closed captioned art films about amputation and tactile-friendly sculptures of pill bottles. Visual art became the most obvious analogical avenue for me to find poems that were both disabled in content and accessible in experience.

Access isn’t limited to disability. Everyone has access needs. Some people need a train to get to work, some people need a wheelchair. Some people need darkness to sleep and others need antipsychotics. I think access needs are just needs. And over years I slowly became aware of how literature sometimes failed to meet the needs of myself and my loved ones. Getting tired, bored, put off, or ignored by the book. It doesn’t feel too radical to ask a book to meet your needs. You’re already meeting its needs by reading it. I love equity.

3. This is an exciting summer for you, as you have not just one but two books set to be released. What was it like experimenting with mediums, including poetry and verse drama? Did you approach the writing process differently for each?

If Hardly Creatures is a community project, My Love is Water is a personal excavation. I wrote the verse drama because I was sick of my own shit, lol. I know nothing about playwriting, I am rarely at the theatre, and I don’t particularly care to learn. I just knew I needed a more dramatic form than poetry alone to mirror how overwrought my own emotions felt. It felt like form could get me there more than language alone.

The play came scene by scene, each relatively isolated, really only setting and character threading them together. I set it at a party to help make the fragmented, anecdotal plot cohere a bit more: you can say anything you want whenever you want at a party. There was no accumulation and sprint like with Hardly Creatures, just the steady tumble of verse over the course of a devastated season. The whole thing started at mini-residency I carved for myself at my aunt’s tiny cold island home. And it finished when Ugly Duckling’s enthusiasm and care convinced me not to shelve it.

I’ve been thinking about my books in relation to Lorde’s albums. My Love is Water carries Pure Heroine’s generosity toward the spirit of young emotion, while Hardly Creatures feels like an arrival to my truest voice in the vein of Melodrama. And what I’m writing now feels like as big of a pivot as Solar Power.

4. Is there a passage/poem/image/quote you feel is a good representative of the book as a whole, or do you have a current favorite? Can you give us a taste of something you’re especially proud of?

No one has asked me this before! I think “Self-Portrait and Tactile Replica as Living Ghost” is maybe the most summative poem—it gets at accessible forms, artwork, the personal lyric. I’m not sure about a favorite line. I will say that writing the line “he sings the lullaby out of order so I might understand the words” ended up being a locative experience. There was both a balance and a freedom in that line, a permission to get granular with disability while speaking softly, directly, without pretense.

5. I’m curious about some logistics: How did you come up with the title? What about the cover art? What was it like working with Tin House on publishing this project?

The title is the only thing I wrote for the book before arriving in Toronto. It was some scrap line from a liminal summer. And I was really open to it growing and changing—the person I was and the book I was planning kept changing. But somehow the book came back around to its title. I rewrote the title poem maybe a dozen times, painfully waiting in between each draft to become someone different so the poem could too.

Tin House was deeply generous and thoughtful when bringing me on board, especially as I navigate a couple different offers. One part (of many) of what pulled me to Tin House was their fabulous covers. I could not be more obsessed with my cover art. I love it so much that we made matching custom KN95s to go along with the book for special packages and readings. Tin House has a brilliant in-house artist, Beth, who does all the covers after reading each book and consulting closely with the author, the editor, and our marketing and publicity team. I was definitely a bit of a diva about the whole thing, trying to find a cover that sparked an immediate sense of identity upon viewing, and Tin House was nothing but patient with me as we made our way there. I knew I wanted a salamander pulled from the titular poem, and I knew I wanted it to be instantly visual recognizable from a distance. And pink. I asked for so much pink in working on this book, and I was delivered so much pink, so fabulously.

6. Have you been able to tour or do any events—or do you have any plans to travel and promote? What’s been your favorite moment in terms of connecting with readers?

I’m in the midst of a tour right now, as of June 2025 when I’m writing this. Tin House and Ugly Duckling have both been fabulous in helping me pull events together, and I’ve been so fortunate to be hosted by all sorts of incredible indie bookstores. I could not believe how utterly moved I was to return to Austin and have a double launch at the bookstore where I attended events all throughout grad school. There was this caution I held about Austin nostalgia, something about trying not to regress and attempt to relive my best days, to not confuse a love for the city with a love for the very specific circumstances of going to grad school in my early twenties. But I love Austin. I love my family there. I love the awful, painful heat. I’ve moved around enough that, for the first time, I’m starting to recognize the difference between a fondness for memory and a fondness for material. And there is no material as beautifully textured as a Texas dive bar with my beloveds.

7. Anything special you’re working on now or next? Where/what moments have you felt yourself drawing inspiration from recently?

The more I put into promoting these books, the more I feel a desperation to withdraw from the public side of things and dig myself into the dirt of the page, to actually write. I am much more a poet than an author, so I’m always sneaking in writing amidst the promo, even if it’s just snatches of language on my phone. Last week I counted fifty-one ads from different GLP-1 companies in a single nine-minute stretch on Instagram. I’m curious about the surge in popularity of personal famine. In my new work, I’m spending a lot of time observing what happens when eating disorders are positioned in a disability framework, when we acknowledge the disabling power of social forces rather than blaming individual weakness.