🎙️ Tyler Lee

Read Tyler's story, How to Paint a Prairie Ghost Train, now!

Given it’s a ghost train, I’m dying to know if the paint will still be there when the train returns the next week…

That’s a great question! I hope so, but even as the writer of the story, I can’t tell you that for sure. I think one of the things that’s really special about graffiti (whether ghost-infused or not) is that it’s ephemeral and unpredictable. You could throw a tag on a wall Friday night and it might be painted over by Monday afternoon, or it might still be there a decade later. I think some of this comes across in the story (I hope) but one of the things I love about graffiti is that it’s an art where so much of the value seems to be in the doing – in the process of creation itself – rather than in the outcome of that production. It’s not really about making something that you can hold in your hand forever. You know there’s a shelf-life, but you don’t often know exactly how long that will be. When you think about trains, too, even if a train comes by every week, the cars attached to that train could be totally different ones. I live a few blocks away from a train yard and sometimes I’ll see them switching cars out and I wonder where that specific car is going, where it’s been before. You never know for sure.     

What’s your own experience with street art, if any?

As a teenager I would say I “dabbled” with graffiti, but I want to make it very clear that I was never even the slightest bit actually good at it. Back alley stuff either out with a friend or, more often, alone on my bike, basically. Sharpie tags mostly, or else a friend would find some cheap hardware store spray-paint in his uncle’s shed or something like that, and we’d paint dumb stuff on the back wall of the corner store or some person’s garage door. Typical bored delinquent kid stuff, really. I think I wanted to be good at it, but I’ve never had a knack for that sort of fine motor control. Even my regular handwriting is atrocious. I stopped that when I reached the level of awareness needed to be embarrassed by my output, haha. 

Then, when I was more in my 20s, I started doing this thing where I’d carry around Sharpies and label paper in my backpack everywhere, and then when I was sitting on the bus or whatever, or really whenever an idea hit me, I’d take out the label paper and write short, immediate poems on them. A few lines, or a few words, or an image or idea that hit me. Every now and then, I’d cut all the ones I’d written recently out, and then wander around town sticking them up on things. I don’t think many of them survived the weather all that long, but I like to think at least a few people saw them and thought about them for a second or two. 

But being part of the hip-hop community, I’m always around graffiti. I see my homies flipping through their blackbooks, see pieces they benched on their IG feeds, hear them talk about stuff. There’s an incredible festival in Saskatoon (my hometown) called Summer Fling, where artists from all over the world come into town to do pieces. I go hang out every year, listen to music, talk to people, and watch them paint. So I guess the tl-dr version of this essay is, I have a little experience, but I also feel like I have an amount of distance from it to where graff still feels like some kind of impossible magic to me. I think a lot of that comes through in the story. 

How does your music, fiction, and street art for you?

Hip-hop is really a story-telling genre at its core. I’m basically baby-deer fresh to writing prose fiction, but I think some of those story-telling instincts have followed me over from the song-writing. I’d say the biggest difference between the two (in terms of my approach, personally) is that the audience for a short story arrives expecting fiction, and all that entails – some kind of narrator, some kind of point-of-view, the possibility of fantastical things happening. In a hip-hop song I think the audience’s default assumption is usually that the material will be realistic and at least semi-autobiographical, so you have to do a little bit of table-setting to create that distinction between “me” the writer of the song, and “me” the narrator of the song if you are going to do something outright fictional. Most of my prose writing is “weird” in one way or another – there’s some kind of fantastical, speculative, or surreal element, or just an absurd energy to them – whereas my instinct with song-writing is almost always to play things relatively straight and earnest. Another thing that I think connects both of these artistic practices (along with poetry/spoken word, which I also dabble in) is just the musicality of words. I love really satisfying phonetics, rhythmic, flowing sentences, alliteration, rhyme – all that good stuff – and while those sorts of devices are certainly more prominent in the music and the poetry, I try to imbue a bit of that musical energy into my prose, too. Still very much a work in progress, but a skill that I’m trying to nurture and develop right now. 

You mentioned to me you originally wrote this for a class—was there a prompt or theme or device you were tasked with utilizing?

There was no particular prompt or instruction for this assignment, beyond writing a complete story. For myself, I’d set a bit of a personal goal of blending the magical with the local. I feel like Saskatchewan is not a place that most people know much about, or think about very often, but I’ve lived almost my entire life here. It can be a deceptively strange place beneath the surface. I wrote four pieces in fairly quick succession that are all sort of dream-like ruminations on the history, politics, identity, and landscape (both physical and psychological) of this place. “Good Bones” was published with Neon & Smoke recently. Another will be published in Spring Magazine (which is a publication local to Saskatchewan, run by the Saskatchewan Writer’s Guild) in April, while the last (my favourite of the four, actually) is still out on submission. 

If I’m not mistaken, this will be your third published story, following Good Bones at Neon & Smoke, and Memory Revisions at Radon Journal… what has your experience been getting started in this world and what litmags were you reading that eventually led you to try your hand at writing and submitting?

To give the readers a bit of context, as I’m typing it’s just past midnight, February 5^th. My Neon & Smoke publication came out on January 21^st, while the Radon Journal issue launched on February 1^st, so this is all very very new to me. I will admit when I first started submitting things I was only really familiar with a few litmags, all of which are Canadian, aside from like The New Yorker. Grain Magazine is a journal that’s local to Saskatchewan, but is well-known in CanLit circles, and I’ve been reading it off-and-on since high school after a favourite teacher introduced me to it. Augur is another Canadian magazine that I love.Basically the story is this: I was downsized from my long-time job during the pandemic and decided to go to online school and get an undergraduate degree in English.

After a couple of semesters of introductory courses, I was able to start taking creative writing classes. I kind of figured I was a “good” writer, but I thought I was like “good” for someone who isn’t really a writer, if that makes any sense. Like, you could be cracking the hell out of the ball in the batting cages after work, and having a lot of fun doing it, but that doesn’t mean you belong at the plate against even a single-A level pitcher. I kind of figured that was what I was – pretty good for the batting cages, but please keep him off the diamond. It was one of my creative writing professors who really encouraged me to start submitting my pieces for publication, though. At first I was very hesitant and reserved – I made just a few submissions here and there, assumed nothing would come from it, but still got disheartened at the rejections anyway haha. But then I got a few almost-successes. A hold here, a personal rejection there. Enough to keep me going at least, if only at the snail’s pace I was comfortable with at the time.

The acceptances from Neon & Smoke and Radon Journal happened in very quick succession – I think there might have been less than a week pass between the two emails. Neon & Smoke hadn’t published anything yet when I submitted to them, and I think I found them through an algorithmic advertisement on Instagram. Radon I discovered because I was specifically looking for anarchist-leaning spec fic to read, and they popped up in my search. The Radon acceptance was a game-changer, though, because (as you know, but maybe the readers don’t) Radon runs an incredible Discord server. I’ve learned so much just through seeing the conversations the veterans are having – interesting markets, tools to use, submission strategies, all sorts of things.

There’s also just a level of irreverence and camaraderie that helped melt away a lot of my rejection anxiety and has made me a lot more willing to yeet stuff out and see what happens. I discovered foofaraw through the Radon Discord, too, and you’ve fast become one of my favourite outlets to read.  

It feels like Jake reaches some catharsis through tagging the ghost train and going from “HERE” to “GONE” and not needing the a copy of the photos, but externally, not much has changed… Am I reading too much into this or is this cathartic feeling intentional, and if so, what do you think it is about this specific tag that achieves this?

Yes, very much intentional. I hope my explanation won’t be too scrambled here, but I’m going to do my best to share my perspective. In the Canadian national myth, trains played a massive role as a connecting-force, bridging the gap between the populous, “cultured” Eastern provinces, and the “frontier” in the West. Obviously, the real history of Western expansion is much more complicated (and much darker) than that, but this is what most of us are taught as children, and I think that idea remains part of the public imagination. But just as settlements built up quickly around these rail-lines, they died out just as fast when rail stopped being as important. In a sense, Chapel Head is an outpost whose connection to the outside world has been severed, aside from this brief, flashing moment on this one little stretch of decommissioned track.

I think one thing about Jake is that he (like a lot of kids in small towns, especially kids who don’t conform as well to the environment) feels fundamentally trapped in Chapel Head. The notion of being stuck in place is a big theme of the story, with all of the other ghosts (aside from the train) being essentially defined by the places they haunt. Jake’s also a little bit invisible – his father is usually absent, and when he’s around he’s abusive. Jake doesn’t have a large friend group or any real social circle beyond Gabe. That’s kind of what his “HERE” tags really represent – it’s almost like a prisoner scratching his name in the wall of his cell, “Jake was here” – both as an observation of the place that he’s stuck in, but also just an assertion that he’s a being who exists in the world, in this dark corner that no one is looking at.

I think maybe more than any character I’ve ever written, there’s a LOT of myself in Jake. He’s very sensitive – he feels deeply – but he’s also introverted, reserved, hesitant to take up more space in the world than he feels he deserves, yet also chafing at the discomfort of that tiny box that he’s put himself in. The feelings and thoughts inside of him wind up bleeding out through his tags, because he doesn’t give them any other avenue to be expressed. Over the course of the story, though, his perspective shifts in some small but meaningful ways. Theron is a new person in Jake’s life but he does small things that make Jake feel seen. Firstly, Jake initially thinks that painting the train is impossible, Theron doesn’t just think it’s possible, but he thinks Jake should be part of doing it. Theron sticks up for Jake when he’s being bullied in the cafeteria. Jake “slips” (in his own eyes) when he hints at his father’s abuse in front of Theron in the woods – he exposes something about himself that he prefers to keep hidden – but Theron neither pushes the issue, nor ridicules him, instead Theron offers him comfort. At the same time, Jake gets to see Chapel Head a little bit through Theron’s eyes and become reacquainted with some of the magic and the beauty of the prairies that Jake had become a little bit blind to, which influences the way he paints his GONE tag, in all the sunset colours and soft, ambiguous shapes. The other thing is that the ghost train is going to be leaving. It’s going out into the world – away from Chapel Head. The prisoner might scratch “Jake was here” into his cell wall, but that’s not the sort of message he would write on a letter that he planned to throw over the wall in the hopes someone else might find it – I don’t think that letter would say where the person is, I think they’d want to say who they are.

I guess the GONE tag is kind of like that. It’s about Jake coming to recognize something inherently beautiful (or at least valuable) inside himself that he had been blind to, doing his best to turn that beauty into shapes and colours, and then sending it out, hoping that someone sees it. He doesn’t need a picture of the finished piece, because painting it was the important part. He writes GONE because the piece is going to be gone as soon as he’s finished painting it, and he’s okay with that.  But also, the story starts with Jake being asked to do a thing, and him saying that it’s impossible to do.

The story ends with Jake doing that impossible thing. I think that’s a really transformative experience for anyone, not just to do a thing that’s difficult, or even to do a thing that other people told you that you couldn’t do, but to do a thing that you told yourself you couldn’t do. I think the final moments of the story, with Jake in his bedroom listening to Aquemini and thinking about a train just starting to pick up speed from a dead stop sort of represent the first time in Jake’s life where he’s realizing that he might have been wrong about himself. That he’s not so much trapped as he is just stopped, and that if he wants to start moving forward, he can. It won’t happen immediately, it won’t happen without effort, but it will happen, so long as he chooses to.  

How many times has this story been rejected?

I think this one has only been rejected once. I wrote it for a creative writing class, and I liked it a lot personally (as did my professor) but I wasn’t sure if it was really relevant to the broader public. Part of that is just my own insecurity, but I also worried that people who didn’t know much about Saskatchewan, and that people who didn’t know much about graffiti, would both find it kind of esoteric and alienating. But then, after seeing a bunch of people on the Radon Journal Discord championing the “when in doubt, yeet it out” mantra, I took the plunge and I’m glad I did.   

What’s a great short story you’ve read recently?

The New Yorker released a massive anthology in 2025 commemorating a century of publishing short fiction in their magazine, and I’ve been surfing through that on my eReader periodically, picking and choosing pieces just based on either the writer or the title. The story “Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain” by Jamil Jan Kochai absolutely melted my face off, and not just because I’m a big fan of the game. Incredibly inventive, powerful, and it touches so many different themes.   

But also (and I promise I’m not pandering) “Joan’s Stone on Loan” by Lyss Buchthal, published recently in foofaraw, has a blend of comical absurdity and emotional honesty that just tickles my brain in the perfect spot. I might never look at a statue the same way again. I’ve suggested this story to I think a half-dozen people in the week or so since I read it.  

What book are you reading right now?

I just finished reading The End of the Ocean by Maja Lunde a few hours ago, and it gets a strong recommendation from me. Rich characters, gorgeous prose, important themes, and just a staggeringly beautiful ending.

Do you have anything else you’d like to share?

Check out Radon Journal and Neon & Smoke, they both publish tons of great work, and it’s all easily accessible online. I also have pieces scheduled for publication in the near future with Spring Magazine, and Grain Magazine. If you’re interested in my music, you can find me on most streaming platforms under the name Skizza, or at https://skizza306.bandcamp.com. I released a new album in December called “Winter Classic” and I’ll have a few more releases between now and the end of the year. I’m pretty bad at social media, but my Instagram is @SkizzaFromSask.

Thanks to Tyler for talking with us extensively about trains, music, and street art!