So what do you have against heavy-duty, industrial sized dinos like the Triceratops? What did they ever do to you?!
You know what, this is a valid point, it really isn’t fair to the dinos to put this all on them. In real-life I have an intense amount of anxiety around motor vehicles. I don’t drive myself (never have, never will) and I prefer to get things done on foot or by bicycle whenever possible, but that’s not really realistic in a place like Saskatchewan. My fiance grew up out in the country and has been driving since she was young because that’s really the only way to get anywhere out there. She never really “got” my car-anxiety at first. One time she asked me to try and describe it, and the best analogy I could come up with was to say that being in a car/in traffic makes me feel like I’m on the back of a dinosaur, surrounded by other dinosaurs, and I have to just trust them not to do dinosaur things. That conversation stayed stuck in the back of my mind for a few months, and then you announced that foofaraw was running a dino-themed issue and I thought “maybe there’s a piece in there somewhere?”
How do you have such a vast knowledge of dinosaurs??
I was a kid in the '90s, and I feel like that was a very dino-heavy era: Jurassic Park, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, all that stuff. I had a pretty heavy dino-phase when I was young, where I would consume anything dino-related like crazy, from cartoons to those big hardcover books from the Scholastic fair with all the infographics and everything. I ate that stuff up. When I was seven or so, we went on a long family road trip, and one of the stops was at the Royall Tyrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta, which is an absolutely incredible dinosaur museum, and it absolutely blew my mind. I made it back to Drumheller in late-2024 while I was on tour, and got to spend another afternoon there, and it was just as magical as an adult. Dinosaurs rule.
Do you have a favorite dinosaur? What dinosaur would you be driving to work?
I always thought the ankylosaurus was very cool. It’s much smaller than the classic dinos like the t-rex, it doesn’t look fast like a velociraptor, he’s kind of just a little guy, but he’s plated in armour and he has this big club tail (which I guess would be almost impossible to aim with any accuracy because it’s behind the head anyway) – I don’t know but there’s something simultaneously so cool and so impractical about the ankylosaurus that has always tickled my brain.
Assuming this is an Editor’s Chisel for some sort of publication… what would the publication be called?
I actually brainstormed a few different ideas for this when I was drafting, and they were all basically “(some kind of rock-based pun for an existing city) + (some kind of ancient writing medium)” but by the end I felt like maybe the piece worked better if the silly puns didn’t really start rolling until the body of the story. The last publication title I had settled on before I finally decided to just pull it was “The Sedmenton Daily Cuneiform”
How would the publication get delivered? Are their paper boys and girls? What do they ride???
I like to think that even in this crazy world, children aren’t expected to be responsible for dinosaurs on their own. Instead, they probably have like a sled that gets dragged behind a team of sabretooth tigers (much safer) from door to door.
How many times has this story been rejected by other markets?
None. I wrote this one specifically with this call in mind.
What’s a great short story you’ve read recently?
I know I’m about forty years late to the party on this one, but I’ve only recently become aware of the work of Lorrie Moore, and I’m absolutely flabbergasted at just how incredible her stories are. I’m a sucker for second-person POV, and sad people being beautiful in their brokenness. Moore is a master of both things. “How To Be An Other Woman” seems to be her most well-known story, and it’s absolutely worthy of all the praise that’s been heaped upon it over the decades, but nearly every story in her Self Help collection is brilliant IMO.
What book are you reading right now?
I’m nearly finished Paul Auster’s In The Country of Last Things. I’m a huge fan of Auster, and while this one doesn’t work quite as well for me as my favourites from him, I’m enjoying it quite a lot. The dystopia depicted in the novel is interesting in so far as it feels (to me) simultaneously both very alien and very mundane. The political structure and “mechanics” (for lack of a better word) of the society are constantly in flux, and completely hidden from the characters (and the readers) but the people adapt to these changes in a way that almost makes them seem normal. That realization is especially chilling for the reader (or at least it is for me) in the current political environment, where it feels like the President of the United States, tech billionaires, and other global power brokers are conjuring up “new normals” on a near-monthly basis, and getting scary amounts of buy-in from the public on them.
Do you have anything else you’d like to share?
If you like way-too-wordy underground hip-hop, you can find my music under the name Skizza on most streaming platforms. I have stories recently-ish published in Radon Journal, Grain Magazine, Temz Review, Neon & Smoke, spring, and of course foofaraw, and I have stuff coming out in the TBD-but-near-ish future with The New Quarterly, and Tome & Space. I’m on Instagram/Threads @skizzafromsask.
Make Art. Drink Water. Read Books. Lift Weights. Love People.