♪ Opening theme music ♪
Hello, and welcome to this episode of ArtsAbly in Conversation.
My name is Diane Kolin.
This series presents artists, academics, and project leaders who dedicate their
time and energy to a better accessibility for people with disabilities in the arts.
You can find more of these conversations on our website, artsably.com,
which is spelled A-R-T-S-A-B-L-Y dot com.
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Today, ArtsAbly is in conversation with Alex Masse, a writer, a musician,
and a communication specialist living in Vancouver.
You can find the resources mentioned by Alex Masse during this episode
on ArtsAbly's website in the blog section.
Welcome to this new episode of ArtsAbly in conversation.
Today, I am with Alex Masse, who is a writer, a musician,
and also a communication specialist.
They live in Vancouver, in BC.
Thank you for being here, Alex.
Thank you for having me.
Yeah.
Hello. My name is Alex K. Masse.
I use they/them pronouns, and I work in what is colonially known as Vancouver
and the Greater Vancouver area.
I'm actually just outside Vancouver, but I like to say Vancouver
because a lot of people don't know the various other areas.
But yeah, I like to say I do just about anything with words and sounds,
and it's a good thing this is a podcast because I tend to gesticulate wildly
when I talk, and that can be a little distracting.
Thank you.
Well, I know you're doing a lot of things.
Your website is incredibly rich with activities.
Even if you say that it's going to be updated.
There is already a lot of things to explore in that.
I know that you are doing a lot of artistic, like poetry,
you write plays, you perform music, you compose, you do sound design.
Can you tell a little bit about, first of all, what kind of education did you do
and what are you doing now in terms of academic and artistic activities?
Well, as both a writer and musician, I primarily consider myself to be a mix
of self-taught and community-taught.
That's a term that I like to throw around because I really
feel like you can learn so much from a local art scene and local creative scene.
I owe so much to mentorship that I've received in both writing and music
and just general art stuff from local theaters and organizations and all that.
My background, artistically, is - I've been writing since I was a kid.
I did really good in English classes, but I never really
got any professional training in that.
As for music, the only "professional training" I've ever had would be,
I did concert band all through high school.
But I decided at some point that I wanted to be able to pursue
both of those seriously, and I just kind of started.
I just opened up Microsoft Word and started penning away little plays
and scripts and novels and poems and stuff.
I downloaded a free music production software
and pretty much taught myself that.
The free ones are pretty limited, but
I think that I did a pretty good job with what little I had.
I still cringe when I listen to my old stuff, but I feel like everyone does.
It's just exciting in a way to be like, Wow, I've really grown a lot.
Yeah, I like to thank the community that I have in Vancouver,
what is colonially known as Vancouver, for everything that it's done in helping to uplift me and stuff.
I also, in a way, like to thank my neurodivergence because I'm very lucky to
have a brain that's totally cool to just sit down and focus on something for hours
on end and find so much joy in that. Yeah, I don't know.
Art has been very healing for me.
I'm someone with multiple disorders going on up here.
I have autism, OCD, PTSD, and all of those just jangle together and tangle together.
And art has always been a refuge for that from some of the rougher stuff.
And it's also just been a means of expressing some of the beauty that I find in having a mind like mine.
I like to write poetry about being autistic.
I like to write poetry about celebrating what that can look like.
And I like to write poetry about healing and stuff.
And on the musical side of things, people call my music "stimmy,"
and say that it brings them joy to listen to us neurodiversion people.
Yeah.
Your music is also, I think, very inspired by video games in this universe, right?
Yeah. I grew up playing a lot of video games, or at least
the same handful of video games a lot.
I had a Nintendo DS that went everywhere with me.
I became absolutely enamored with the world and storytelling
and the soundscapes.
And I actually learned flute, my first instrument, by just learning.
I would get better at flute just by playing video game songs.
I would find sheet music made by fans, and that's how
I became more acquainted with music.
But today you play another kind of instrument, right?
I do. What is your instrument?
I can go grab it, actually.
Okay, it should be in now.
I juggle with a handful of things.
I have a kalimba that I use sometimes.
I still bust up my flute every once in a blue moon.
I actually just bought a keyboard and a bass this year,
but my signature instrument is generally the Suzuki Q Chord.
I don't really know how I would describe this for people in the podcast world,
but it's this nice dark purple instrument with a lot of buttons,
and it's shaped like a guitar from the future, except it's not from the future.
It's from the future that people were imagining in 2000.
Yeah, that's the instrument.
It's called what? A Suzuki Q Chord?
Q Chord, yes.
It's part of a line from Suzuki called the Omnichord.
This was the newest version for a very long time.
They're actually making a new model, which I did not buy because it's $900
and I don't have that money, but mainly because I bought other instruments in this year,
and I can't justify buying another.
But yeah, the Suzuki Q Chord is, as it says on the front, a digital song card guitar.
Basically, it plays like an electric auto-harp
if you're acquainted with what an auto-harp is.
If not, basically, it's impossible to be out of tune
because there are little buttons that correspond to chords, and if you press the right buttons, you can just
play little arpeggios in that chord.
Yeah, I really like using it.
It's a mix between a keyboard and a bass or something like that?
I guess it's a guitar built like an autoharp.
Okay. Yeah.
I don't know. It's complicated, but it's also very simple.
The learning curve with playing it is very straightforward.
That's part of what drew me to it for a really long time
because I wanted to be a songwriter and I wanted to be a performer.
But the only other instrument that I knew how to play at time was flute.
Flute is not the most accommodating to...
It's not the most accommodating to that
because it's hard to sing and play flute at the same time.
I was going to say you sing and play at the same time when you're doing it.
Yeah.
There's probably some way to do it with a copious amount of loop pedals
and the like, but I just...
I figured it would be easier to just find one of these and pick it up and do that.
Okay, very good.
I wanted to go back to your poetry. Are you reciting publicly this poetry, or
are you just writing it for your pleasure and to share it with others?
A bit of both, honestly.
Poetry started as something that I just did on the page.
I started writing poetry.
I started taking it seriously in senior year of high school
when creative writing club became a thing at my high school, and I just had a lot of fun with it.
And on a whim, I submitted to the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards,
which are this thing that I think is all across North America,
or maybe it's only a national. I don't know.
But I submitted a bunch of stuff on a whim, including a couple of random poems,
and I got a gold key from them, which isn't something
that comes with money, but they gave me a little pin and a fancy piece of paper.
And that made me think like, oh, maybe this is something
that I'm halfway decent at.
Because before that, I considered myself primarily a writer of prose,
and I don't really I have a lot of that professionally released or do it much
on a professional level right now.
But it is something that has always been close to my heart.
But poetry, yeah, I just fell into poetry.
I ended up reading at a friend's gallery opening because they asked me to,
and then I ended up stumbling into a poetry mentorship.
And from there, I just constantly found myself drifting into the poetry scene
across the Lower Mainland.
And you also wrote articles about your work, right?
Can you tell about that?
Articles, yeah.
I write articles on a freelance basis, generally about either media and pop culture
or my personal lived experiences, because I definitely feel like I haven't
had the most conventional...
I haven't had the most conventional journey as an artist.
I feel like a lot of people, they either start from nothing
or they go to art school.
I'm in some weird in between where it's like, I didn't go to art school.
I'm a communication major, for goodness' sake.
But I am someone who has a community that I owe so much to, and not just
as a creative, but also as a queer person, a neurodivergent
person, a mentally ill person.
I owe so much of who I am to the local art scene, and that's something
that I rarely see discussed.
So just being able to go out and write little odes to that and how music
has helped me, and how the art scene has helped me and how I self-advocate
as a queer and neurodivergent person, those are all important to me.
Okay.
Also, I read that you are hosting a podcast.
I co-created a podcast.
Yeah, it was this lovely little..
It was this project with the Future Perfect Project, which is
an American organization that dedicates itself to platforming and uplifting
the voices of young queer folks.
I'm actually going to be aging out of their curriculum this year,
which is a little sad, but hey, there are good things that come with being 24.
But yeah, I was involved in this cohort for this podcast that eventually
became called I'm Feeling Queer Today.
I did help co-host a couple of episodes and put things together.
I wrote some music for it. I did a segment on it.
I peered in a couple of other segments on it.
It was a really exciting opportunity.
I really love the world of podcasting, and it's just really cool
to be able to be involved in that.
As a communicator, what is the influence of everything you're creating
to your communication skills?
Well, when I work on communications, that's generally a job
that isn't just me.
I've worked for Simon Fraser University, in the Office of Community Engagement.
I've worked for a couple of local nonprofits.
When I work in communication for other organizations, it's all about just
being able to put forward their messages and stuff and use my skills
to just get that out there.
But when it comes to my own work, I definitely do try to keep something
of a cohesive narrative.
And that isn't easy because I'm someone who refuses to niche down,
which in the social media world is somewhat masochistic
and troublesome, but I'm stubborn.
I refuse to be just a musician. I refuse to be just a writer.
Those are both so important to me, and they so often overlap.
I shan't.
I shan't to be reduced to either of those.
I really need to stop saying I shan't.
I'm really bad at that.
But yeah, I've tried to craft something of a narrative that is
"social media/algorithm friendly."
But also, I don't know.
You have to pick your battles when you're a creative person trying
to communicate your practice and stuff.
I will probably never be fully comprehensible and algorithm friendly.
I bid farewell to that the second I started being openly queer and disabled, but
I don't know.
I think that I strike a pretty good balance.
I think so, too.
I think that there is nothing wrong with having a diversity of activities
and in a way, they all connect to each other through your personality.
Yeah. No matter what medium I'm in, even if I'm writing newsletters
for a day job, I'm still storytelling.
That's, I think, the combined total of everything I do, that storytelling
is somewhere in all of it.
For a while, I was playing with the idea of labeling myself as a bard
because that's less of a mouthful.
It just brings to mind this image of a person who can play instruments
and can speak poetry and can sing and can recite myths and write myths
and combine and alchemize stories.
And that's what I do.
I guess I'm something of a modern bard.
Plus the auto harp goes very well with the bard.
Yeah. It can actually get battery power, so I can just walk around playing it.
I used to do that with my flute during the pandemic.
I was really bored, and I have a park by my house, so I just
run around playing flute.
It was actually a hit.
People now know me as Flute Girl.
And while I'm not a girl, I am too lazy to correct them.
I live in a neighborhood with a lot of older people who probably have never
met someone who uses they/then pronouns.
It's like, Yeah, I'll be Flute Girl for you.
Why not, why not?
What are you working on right now?
Is there a specific project you are focusing on?
Well, as of now, hang on, let me check my calendar.
How long has it been?
It's been one, two, one, two, three.
It has been just over three weeks since I had my play
Faye’s Room at the Roundhouse.
That was incredible.
For those not aware, the Roundhouse is this lovely venue
in what is colonially known as Vancouver, like
smack in the middle of downtown Vancouver.
It's really lovely. It's right by the water.
I go there a lot for things like festivals and events.
I'm probably going to be going there again this month because I have a friend
who's got some stuff being exhibited there.
But yeah, I have my play at the Roundhouse through Realwheels Theatre,
which was an incredible privilege and an incredible opportunity.
I was just so honored to see my silly little play
that I started writing back in 2023 just come to life.
I kind of think I started writing it in 2022.
I digress. It's one of those projects that I just started on a whim.
It started with a single image, and suddenly there was a whole cast
of characters, and suddenly I was in a writing cohort
with people who were cheering it on, and then I got a first stage reading.
And then last August, I was asked by - One of my creative mentors, Shawn McDonald,
reached out and was like, hey, do you want to bring this to Realwheels Theatre
and have this read? And I was like, absolutely.
And I don't know how much I can say quite yet. I don't know.
But I will say that there will be more with this play.
I'm not done with it yet, and I'm really excited for that.
But in the meantime, honestly, right now, my big priorities are just kind of
getting all my stuff together and trying to graduate.
Not very artistic stuff, more bureaucratic things.
I'm trying to write a CV for the first time ever, wrapping up some
artistic commissions that I can't talk about.
They're commissions, like scoring things that haven't been released yet,
working on collaborations that haven't been released yet.
I have a song coming out in June, so that's very exciting.
It's called "King's Ruby," and it's about two characters from the Moomin franchise
because I really like the Moomins and I had the opportunity
to write about them for Pride Month.
But yeah, right now, my main priorities are trying to create a CV for the first time
and trying to graduate.
Yep. BA in communication with a minor in publishing.
Yay! Well, yeah, that's - fingers crossed for that.
I know that I don't think you're going to have an issue to graduate, right?
I shouldn't.
After this semester, because I am taking a couple courses.
It is summer, but I'm stubborn and I want to get out of here before 2025.
After this semester, I should only have one course remaining.
So that's really exciting.
Just any third year communication course.
I'm really hoping that I get something fun and very niche.
Earlier last year, I got to write about...
I got to take a course all about popular music and culture
and the production of esthetics and culture through popular music.
I wrote a whole essay comparing two genres I really enjoy.
That's the thing that I love using my major for.
I know that it's not as useful as some of the more applicable stuff,
the things that I've actually done in my communication jobs,
but it's also just really nice and enjoyable being able to just chew on things
through various academic lenses.
I don't know. I find a lot of joy in a lot of very nerdy things.
Plus just know that when you're writing about a variety
of topics, they like that.
They like to know that you're not focused on only one little thing,
that you open your mind, that you can write about different topics.
So yeah, continue doing that.
That's the plan.
Honestly, I might add an academic essay section to
my portfolio website because if only just to put that essay that I wrote last year on there.
It's so nerdy. I was comparing new wave music and hyper pop music,
but my prof loved it and I loved it.
Yes, the bibliography was three pages long, but it's fine.
Welcome to the academic world. Ah!
Profs at my university keep asking me if I want to do a master's,
but it's like, I've been in school for about 20 years straight now.
I kind of want a break.
Yes.
Okay, I want to go back to your play.
You said your play was over now, right?
Yeah, it just had a one single-staged reading last month.
It was called Faye’s Room. It was very exciting.
There's more coming with it.
I don't know what's been announced yet, so I can't say more, but there is more in
the works with Faye’s Room, and it's this play that's really close to my heart.
Can you give us the pitch, what it is about?
Oh, absolutely. I wrote down the pitch, actually.
I did a whole package for it because I was just so thrilled that
it was getting staged for a second time.
Yeah, it's called Faye’s Room, and it's about neurodivergent solidarity,
intergenerational bonds, and internalized ableism, and it thrusts viewers
into the autistic lens, a world of living mannequins, traveling rooms, and ghosts.
It follows Faye Murphy, an autistic lesbian who works at a queer café,
and who happens to have the power to summon and hide in a magical sensory room at will.
When she becomes trapped in this room with her least favorite coworker,
son of the founder and token heterosexual, Chase McLure, an unlikely bond forms,
and the two find themselves having a bit more in common than they had thought.
Wow. Yeah.
Okay. Interesting.
It's going to be great. Yeah.
It's a fabulous story.
It started as wish fulfillment where it was like, Okay, I wish I had a room that
could just magically appear and be a safe space for me whenever I get overwhelmed.
From there, it just became this whole project about internalized ableism
and asking questions about how can one get over internalized ableism
and what is a healthy relationship that one can have with neurodivergent and
how can we unlearnt those things that we've been told about ourselves for so long?
If someone is listening to this podcast and saying, I want to do like Alex.
I want to gather all my ideas and put that into a play or into something.
What should they do next?
Well, if you want to create something, there are two pieces of advice
that I was given in my first ever creative mentorship, and it was just
to do even just a little bit every day.
My minimum that I try to do is 200 words a day if it's a writing thing or
10 minutes a day if it's a music thing.
Just like those little iterative blocks.
You so often end up doing so much more, just so much more.
But even on your worst days, you can probably hit that 200
or 10 minute milestone.
And then the other thing that I was told four or five years ago now
was probably: writing is a rewriting.
It's just this concept of being able to just lock your inner perfectionist
in a closet for a while and get a first draft out.
First drafts, they are almost never great.
There's this thing that I like to tell people that they generally get a kick out of.
My mother is a huge Stephen King fan, so I grew up with him
as this mythologized figure.
I heard all these stories about how he wrote this one novel of his, "Cujo,"
while he was on a serious bender with a multitude of substances,
and he doesn't remember writing it at all, so he got to read it and experience it for the first time.
But what I'd like to say is we can't all be Stephen King writing "Cujo" on a bender.
Most of us are not Stephen King.
And maybe that's a good thing because we don't need...
The man's already writing a gazillion books a year.
We do not need more Stephen King stuff out there.
The man's a factory himself.
But the point of that little line is your first draft will probably not
be good, and that's okay.
So much of writing is in the editing process.
And that's scary because a lot of people don't like to think of themselves as editors.
But you have to get to know your work before you can really start spifting it up.
If you try to revise something before you've even finished it,
you just end up with a mess.
It's like trying to draw something without sketching.
I don't know. My girlfriend's a visual artist.
I don't know any of that, but I know that you sketch first.
Okay, thanks.
Okay, I have a last question, which is about people you can
think of who really encouraged you in all your process and/or inspired you.
If you had one or two people to think of and to mention, who would it be and why?
Honestly, I don't even know.
I guess that there are just so many ways to be inspired
by people. I owe so much to my...
I can't even name all of my mentors in the local arts scene.
Everyone at Realwheels, everyone at the Arts Club,
everyone back at the Frank Theater, even though that was four years ago,
and all the people in between that were truly amazing.
The team that I I had at Faye’s Room, Sean and V, and Jordan,
and my cast, absolutely perfect.
Absolutely just a dream come true working with all of them and having
my work be shaped the way it has.
But also my friends and my girlfriend.
And then on the complete other side of the spectrum, people I have never met
and probably will never meet, like
Tove Janssen for writing these whimsical stories.
Literally like my next song is based on Moomins.
I can't not shut her out.
Or I compile the lists of quotes that I really like because I'm a nerd like that.
And the most commonly cited authors were Mary Oliver and Terry Pratchett,
who I've been reading a lot of. Yeah, I don't know.
And musically, God, the entire new wave scene, the people who composed for the
TV shows and video games I grew up with as a kid, it's just, I don't know. It's amazing.
And sometimes I could compare to some of them, which is really cool.
I'm pretty sure I just get told that I'm like Rebecca Sugar because I own this thing.
For the people at home, I'm holding up my musical instrument,
which was popularized by Rebecca Sugar.
But I don't know.
I take every comparison in strive.
I love just my very eclectic mix of musical inspirations.
Some of them are more obvious to the ear.
Others are more just a vibe, like one of my favorite bands
is Talking Heads, but you probably can't hear that a lot in my work.
But that's okay. It's a vibe.
It's inspiration in the process. I don't know. I'm rambling.
Basically, I find myself to be a whole web of inspirations.
There are people I know, people who have mentored me, people I know personally,
people I know artistically, people I know kind of artistically,
kind of personally, in between.
And then there are just people who I look up to, and you can see that in my work.
And there are people who I look up to who are so opposite from what I do.
Anyways, that's the gist.
Any artist who says that it's simpler than that is lying.
Well, yes, it's true that we are all getting inspiration from multiple
sources, and that's a good thing.
It keeps us seeing other things that might give you an opportunity
to create a new universe.
I recently read about this term called "worlding," which is basically
this concept of being able to create worlds and storytelling and stuff
through various creative means.
It's not just building in the fantasy sense.
I actually just finished an essay on that, and I'm going to read another essay.
I finished an essay that mentioned that, and I wanted to read
the other essay where it was invented.
It was by this guy called Ian Cheng.
I've only seen excerpts, but I'm really looking forward to diving into it.
I don't know.
Worlding, worlds, the multitude of inspirations, art as just something
so cosmic and nebulous that it's hard to break down,
and that's what makes it so exciting.
Well, thank you so much for all that,
all this great conversation and all these thoughts.
Thank you for having me.
I know it could be a little bit of a mile a minute.
It could be because I'm a little sleep-deprived.
Pro tip, folks, do not travel three hours within an hour of waking up.
It's a little bit much, but if you do, bring a good book.
I don't know. I can't drive.
I bring a good book everywhere I travel.
Well, get some rest.
Thank you. That's the plan.
Okay. Thank you so much.
You have a great day, too.
Bye. Bye.
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