ZZOO | The MA|DE Interview

This interview was conducted in March 2025

Sarah Marie: I am a chatty person who is happy when a writer will talk to me; I am always so excited! 

MA|DE: That’s great; we are excited too!

SM: I’m also evolving in this, but my questions tend to reflect a sort of unpolished vibe, and this is definitely going to be shaped around how I move through being a social media addict. 

MA|DE: We’re ready to experience your approach.

SM: Okay, so … something like ZZOO is a traditional book of poetry — but only sort of. How does something like that come together? 

MA|DE: It was a slow process, really. We started writing the poems that would eventually appear in ZZOO back in 2018, which is also when we first started collaborating. We didn’t really have any plans when we first started writing together; we just wanted to experience one another through the work. 

When writer/publisher Andy Verboom put out the first Collusion Books call for submissions in late 2019, it came at the perfect moment. He was starting a chapbook press here in Canada that was specifically interested in collaborative work! When we saw that call, it spoke to us directly; it was like a prompt for us to level up. We felt that we had enough material around and that we should pitch something. As we were looking through our completed poems, we noticed that animals were a motif in many of them, and we put together a chapbook-length manuscript — a tight 20 or so pages of work. We submitted A Trip to the ZZOO and, happily, it was one of three manuscripts accepted for the inaugural season of Collusion releases. 

In the process of assembling the Collusion chapbook, we realized we had opened up a door to a cage that revealed a space for something much bigger: we had more to say on the overlap of human and animal life. By the time the chapbook came out in 2020, the elephant haunting that imaginary tableau cage had befriended us, and we were already working on the full-length book. We applied for grants and actually had a very good round of applications, which helped us in pushing through the large project rather quickly. The pandemic was an interesting moment to get grants for strange arts projects it seems. 

The process of completing ZZOO was interesting. We decided we wanted to take on the design of the book as a direct part of our authorship of the work. We actually composed the latter half of the book’s poems directly in the layout, so that concerns about typesetting, line breaks, etc. could be contemplated and resolved in-the-moment, rather than adapted from a word doc into a layout years down the line, as is traditional in publishing. We also played around with several poems that were experimental in form, works that we really couldn’t have successfully composed if they weren’t created directly in ‘book space’. So, that’s a major point of difference in our work: not only are the texts collaboratively written, their sequential/spatial presentations are authorially determined. As MA|DE, we submit our completed manuscripts to presses with this design intention clearly described as a condition of acceptance in our cover letter. It’s a risky position, since we understand that some publishers want to help shape a manuscript, but for us it’s important to note that we’ve collapsed wordcraft and book design onto a single plane.

Anyway, we had ZZOO largely finished in 2022 — which is when it was acquired by Palimpsest Press. There was very little editing of the manuscript on our end for a couple of years — it had been sort of hidden in a drawer since it was accepted, virtually print-ready, minus a cover and a light edit. There’s been quite a gap between when we wrote the work, and ZZOO finally coming out in early 2025. We kind of just sat on it for the intervening years while it was in the queue waiting to go into production, which a lot of writers have to do, right? 

SM: Oh, interesting! That makes sense; you probably can’t keep revising it. It must be very personally challenging to leave it alone for that length of time?

MA|DE: It really wasn’t challenging to leave it alone; we hardly touched it at all in the space-time between acceptance and production. To be honest, our mind was on other projects by that point. It sat until Jim Johnstone — who heads Palimpsest Press’ Anstruther Books imprint — got to editing it in fall 2024, and then we carefully revisited it with him then. Remember, when ZZOO was accepted for publication, the font, the order of poems, the table of contents, the endnotes were all pretty much set, so there was only so much wiggle room. This probably would’ve been a bit of a nightmare for any editor who really wanted to get their hands into the work in any significant way. Luckily for us, Jim is someone we’ve both known for a long time, and he understood that, by the time he got the book, it was already alive in the most important ways and ready to roam its own territory — it just had to be groomed a bit, and set free. Add to that the challenges of editing a collaborative book, where Jim’s suggested edits had to work for both authors, and you have an interesting and unusual editing path to navigate. Jim was great at traversing this path with us.

The last piece of the puzzle was the cover. The original cover mock-up Mark did in 2022 was similar in its basic structure to the five variant covers that ZZOO ended up having, but the sketch used a lot of lo-res imagery that was pulled off the Internet. So we couldn’t really use the prototype that Mark had made. But the spirit and design framework of the cover were in place at the same time as the poems themselves. When it was time to finalize the cover, the elements and textures that make up the cover changed, and then Mark did four more distinct versions patterned after the first, an entire litter of them — and now we’ve got five.

SM: So the poems are fully collaborative, and then the visuals are Mark’s work?

MA|DE: The poems are fully collaborative, yes. Any visuals are structured around poems that we’ve authored together in such a way that we try to totally erase which of us has written any given part. Which is easier than it sounds now that we’re getting old and our memories are a little fuzzy. Strictly speaking, the creation of images and any design work is guided by Mark’s hand, because Jade does not have that particular skill set. But there is still collaboration happening in the sense that Mark will often be like, well, what do you think of this image, this juxtaposition or these options? There’s a lot of Jade standing over Mark’s shoulder while he works. 

SM: I can imagine that ZZOO was a difficult thing to capture when you were conceptualizing it.

MA|DE: With our collaborative work, there’s a lot of things going on that sometimes one or both of us are not even always aware of. One of us will write a line, and the other looks at it after like, what did they even mean by that? You think they meant one thing, and actually they meant some other thing, and then the line ends up kind of meaning both things. We feel like there’s a lot of nuance in the work that one or both of us might sometimes not know about because of these layers. By contrast, when we’re working on solo work, there might be layers, but it’s much easier to be aware of them as you work on the piece. You’re putting them there, and it’s deliberate. With our collaborative work it’s a bit more of a mystery.

One of the ways we grounded the poems in ZZOO was to organize them into four distinct sections within the book. Our idea was that we would start submerged in ‘Water,’ then go on to ‘Land,’ then up into the ‘Air’ and then out into the heavens / the afterlife / the unknown (the section is called ‘Elsewhere’). Some of the poems, especially in that section, get quite morbid. There’s also a poetic suite that travels inside of ZZOO, a kind of long poem that is quartered and distributed across the terrain of the book so that a part appears in each of the four sections; collectively, the poem explores the life cycle, transformations and migratory patterns of Danaus plexippus, the monarch butterfly.   

SM: I definitely felt like there was a full emotional landscape I had to navigate while reading ZZOO and I wondered if that was a guided thing, if that had something to do with the way you ordered the poems. To put something like this together, is it as intense of an experience for the creator as it is for the audience?

MA|DE: With respect to emotional navigation, for us it helps that, with a few small exceptions in the book, most of these are not based on experiences that are personal to us. They’re things we read about, researched or encountered in passing. The poem “Psychopomp” was one of the few exceptions to that approach; it was actually written after our cat, Ari, died.

Having said that, most of the poems in ZZOO are inspired by things that emotionally resonated with us when we came across them, and that’s why we wanted to write about or reference them. Still, they weren’t part of our actual lives so there was an amount of distance that was built-in. When we went to reference or work with them, it was a lot easier for us than it is for people who are grappling with things / traumas that are immediate to their experience. Some of the poems we attempted to actualize based on an initial point of insight didn’t always work or come alive, and we abandoned them. That does happen sometimes. But overall we were able to balance out the four sections of ZZOO topically and emotionally. 

We also used the endnotes section of the book, ‘Taxidermia,’ to reveal references that the reader might not readily get, and to acknowledge the real-world incidents that were the starting places for the poems. Poetry opens up all kinds of doorways into a subject but it doesn’t always provide a lot of grounding. It can be very extrapolative. We wanted to have that balance available in the book between art and fact, but not let the poems get mired too much in extremely concrete details. Endnotes let us strike that balance. To use a music metaphor, which we are fond of doing, the endnotes act a little bit like liner notes in an album. People spend time with an album looking at the lyrics, the production notes and equipment lists. We’ve both always really liked that experience, and so we were trying to embed something similar into the book structure. 

SM: Jade, I know you’ve worked with Palimpsest Press before on your novel, Anomia. What was it like finding a home for MA|DE there and working with them on a challenging book like ZZOO? 

MA|DE: Our experience with Palimpsest Press on Anomia was a good primer for ZZOO, because we were both involved in different capacities. While Jade was the solo author for that novel, Mark actually did the cover, layout, and some of the editing so this allowed him to experience Palimpsest’s workflow from the position of a designer, and to interact with the printer they regularly use. 

If there were some asks that were a bit unusual about Anomia (such as our request to leave the author name off the cover, along with that dreaded ‘A Novel’ thing that most publishers insist must be there to signal-flare the reader about the book’s genre), there were even more unusual requests related to ZZOO — most notably, the idea of releasing the book with variant covers. It required quite a lot of openness on the part of Palimpsest’s heroic and hard-working publisher, Aimée Parent Dunn. Fortunately, we did end up convincing her that letting us design our own book and having cover variants would not be terrible ideas, and could be an interesting way to market the book, and, you know, kind of play with the audience. 

It’s really nice living in the same city as your publisher. If things get tricky, you can go across town and have a little chat. You can say, “Hey, we’ve got this really bizarre idea we would like to talk to you about in person.” Between Anomia, ZZOO and MA|DE’s forthcoming book Detourism (out in 2028), we would say that Palimpsest Press feels like a home for us at this point. It’s great to work with a press on more than one project. A relationship with your publisher is like any relationship: it is made better through nurturing, and blooms over time as you work successfully together.

SM: Sometimes in interviews I catch myself trying to tease a question without directly asking it because I don’t know if the answer would be a spoiler for a future reader. But, I guess it’s harder to spoil a book of poetry because it doesn’t have a plot twist I could ruin by asking the wrong thing. What is significant to me about a book may not be the right question either, because that does not reflect the intention of the person who wrote the book, which I do think really matters.

MA|DE: In our minds, collaborative writing really undermines that kind of intentionality. Often when we’re writing, we don’t talk about what we want to accomplish in a poem. We just sort of start writing it. And you see what it builds to. It’s very exploratory, maybe more so than when someone’s writing by themselves. We actually feel that one of the joys of collaborative writing is that we can’t go into individual poems with a very clear plan and idea of what we’re going to do.

SM: Oh, that’s a good point!

MA|DE: It’s this half-life / third mind / partial ‘death of the author’ thing that happens in collaborative writing that we like.

SM: I actually really like thinking about that! Generally, I feel like any project that involves collaboration is going to be more difficult, but I hadn’t thought about it in those terms. Like, the disruption of a plan and just looking at the steps might make the experience of creating something nicer. 

MA|DE: We think it’s very particular to poetry, too. We would hate to have to write an essay that way, or something else that’s more linear or purpose-oriented. But for poetry, when you’re trying to sort of ‘mine the unconscious’ and move in surprising ways, it’s very generative.

While we approach writing poems in an exploratory, open-ended way, we balance that with a strong sense of our essential collaborative dynamic. We formulated MA|DE as a long-term commitment — rather than as a one-time literary fling between two authors. Of course, those can be super exciting; but we’ve tried to get this collaboration to go beyond that. 

We want to always be trying out new forms and approaches. This means that every manuscript is a completely new animal. For each new project, we’ve had to reset the parameters of what the collaboration means to us. Right now, we’ve finished writing three full-length books of poetry, we have two in-progress poetry manuscripts on the go, and we have another non-poetry project in the works. Every single one has a different set of rules, a different set of working methodologies, and a different production arc and timeline. We’ve got one project that has been ongoing for four or five years now and there’s still a long way to go. It’s moving really slowly because in addition to poetry it has a pretty strong visual component involving both sculpture and photography — all of which is aimed first and foremost at an eventual book, though it’s the kind of work that could also have a parallel life as a gallery exhibition. Jade is trying to be much more actively involved in the visual side of its development, which is a challenge; there’s a learning curve. We really want the making of the visual components to be a fully collaborative effort as well, in addition to the writing. That’s the goal.

SM: I am genuinely curious about the marketing part of being a writer in this space, in this time, and how you are navigating all of that as poetry creators. Your first launch for ZZOO is at a local bookstore, and you mentioned sending press kit stuff to the local newspaper?

MA|DE: Toronto and Guelph launches happened already, actually — right around the start of March. Our Windsor launch was at Biblioasis Bookshop on Canadian Independant Bookstore Day (April 26). We’ve had launches there in the past; they host a fair number of the literary events that occur in Windsor, where we live and write. It’s a real local hub — and of course, Biblioasis is another notable Windsor-based publisher as well as a bookstore. Besides the hometown event, we’ve had several other stops on our Ontario ZZOO tour. In April we visited Little Wren Books in London, and the Phylum Reading Series at the NAC in St. Catharines. In June, we’ll hit the road for about a week, doing events at Take Cover Books in Peterborough, Novel Idea in Kingston, the Ottawa Small Press Book Fair, and Hamilton Public Library. Possibly a few additional places and dates are still in the works, likely in the fall. We definitely feel like going on tour is kind of a necessity. In the same way it would be for a band. It’s part of the essential on-the-ground work to promote a book and connect with potential readers, for sure.

To answer the second part of your question: local newspapers don’t tend to write about poetry, but we decided to contact the Windsor Star regardless. Mark’s been covered in the paper as a visual artist, curator and local troublemaker a number of times in the past, so we reached out to the paper’s chief editor — who used to cover the arts beat like 20 years ago — to say “here is why we think you should write about this.” We’re hoping that the national reach of Palimpsest Press, located here in Windsor and celebrating its 25^th anniversary this year, plus the work of two local artists at a celebrated local bookstore, will hopefully be appealing. Fingers crossed. 

SM: I imagine poetry is not the easiest thing to promote, particularly since you’re not producing the kind of poetry that would fit easily in an Instagram square: this is a book. What is the reaction, when you reach out to a place like the local paper or elsewhere?

MA|DE: From the start with ZZOO, we were doing that D-I-Y band thing of booking your own gigs and taking an active role in promoting your own work. It seems normal to hope that the press or publicist you’re working with will take care of promotion in its entirety. But when you’ve been around the scene a while, you understand that the people who work in small press publishing are very busy people juggling far too many balls at once. So we chose to be ambitious about taking a personal role in outreach, in promoting our book. Promotion takes a lot of forms: traditional news media of course, but also podcasts, radio, lit mag interviews and reviews, social media, announcements through organizations we’re members of, alumni news, and more.

Our approach has been to treat promoting the book the way one would promote pop music. MA|DE is our band name in a way, you know? That name choice allows us to kind of erase the individuals, Mark and Jade, and treat it like a group. Even the idea of the book cover having different versions … there is a conceptual reason to take this approach — we wanted all of these covers to represent a multitude of creatures on public display — but there is also a marketing side to it that mimics some of the ways that the music scene, or even the comic book scene, markets their products. We wanted to offer the reader a choice, to engage their instinct to collect, which we feel we all have inside us. 

The variant covers of ZZOO are a luxury that’s extremely uncommon for poetry. There’s a certain amount of roteness to the way poetry is produced a lot of the time. Don’t take that the wrong way: we love poetry, and we love that so much poetry exists, but there’s probably as many writers of poetry as there are readers, put it that way. So it feels like you’re putting a lot of fish into a very small pond sometimes, and we want to make sure we’re contributing something a little bit special, a little bit unique.

SM: To end off, I’d love to ask: what Canadian poetry books are you folks reading right now?

MA|DE: We just finished Ashley Elizabeth-Best’s Bad Weather Mammals (ECW Press, 2024); and Zane Koss’ Country Music (Invisible Publishing, 2025). We read with him in mid-April at Little Wren Books in London. 

SM: Are you reading anything else that you want to recommend?

MA|DE: In the fall, we joined a horror book club here in Windsor. We do one book a month, things like Strange Pictures by Uketsu (HarperVia, 2025) or Crypt of the Moon Spider by Nathan Ballingrud (Tor Nightfire, 2024). We actually read these novels out loud together, so we’ve been enjoying that. We recently completed Nick Cutter’s The Queen (Simon & Schuster Canada, 2024); it’s set in St. Catharines, ON, where Jade lived for a while.

Jade also did a blurb recently for Caitlin Galway’s forthcoming collection of stories, A Song for Wildcats (Dundurn Press, 2025) so you know they liked that one. 

SM: Well, this was very fun! Thank you very much for doing this with me.

MA|DE: Thanks for having us!