Right.

That’s so perfect. Did we decide how we wanted to start the episode?

Do I need to introduce myself? No.

She does say, “I am Katherine McLeod.” I think. Now my brain’s just zoning it out ’cause I’m like, “Oh, I know, I know. It’s Katherine McLeod” [Laughs]

Welcome to Shortcuts. My name is Katherine McLeod, and I’m the producer for this Shortcut series on the podcast. Yes, they were right, I am introducing myself and telling you about what you’re going to hear.

This month, we’re back with another Shortcuts Live, talking with researchers in person and starting those conversations with a shortcut of audio. These Shortcuts Live conversations were recorded on-site at the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium held at the University of Alberta. For this conversation, we’re sitting down with Xiaoxuan Wong to talk about sound, language, video, poetry, voice, making room for the indeterminate, and more, like playlist recommendations – listen to the end for that.

[Music fades]

The piece that we’re gonna be maybe talking about and hearing a little bit from will sort of be a good example of how my practice converges a few different

mediums.

listening to this. Is that right? Okay. Let me pull it up. And here we go.

I don’t know the names of trees, but I can tell what time it is from the way their shadows lean. It might feel sometimes like we are here just to run out of time. I want you to know, it hurts me, too. One day, we will drive through the mountains. The weather will be unusually hot. Actually, it will be your birthday again. You will pull over on the side of the road and say, “come here. I wanna show you something.” And it will be the tops of trees. I go to a lot of parties, hoping I’ll see you there. Often, what I remember the next day is all the people outside smoking. The air flares up in turns, like a circle of lightning bugs. Someone offers me a drag, I refuse, or no one does. And I ask for one, forgetting I was supposed to be leaving just like in previous years. This summer, too, is likely to leave us with its heat mixed into us. The trees are thinking of what I’m thinking of – your face next to mine in the absenting light due to atmosphere. Due to all the time we don’t have.

But this iteration of this project was made in response to the call of this year’s symposium “Reverb Echo.” So yeah, this piece is like around six minutes. It’s an audio-visual piece as well as a poetry collage of, I guess, fragments that I took from a longer project, which was my master’s thesis called “All the Time.”

But, this iteration of this project, the six-minute audio-visual poetry collage, is called “The Way We Hold Our Hands With Nothing in Them,” which itself is a fragment from “All the Time.” So, I think what I said before about multiple mediums and practices kind of informing me, my mode of practicing “hybrid poetics,” this is one version of how it sometimes shows up. Generally, I think about sound and musical sound and ambient sound or ambient musical sound, I guess, as a part of the voicings of my poem. But, it’s not necessarily the most authoritative one. I love my poems dearly when they’re just on the page as well. And also just, you know, read.

And so there’s these multiple registers of voicings that I’m really interested in playing with. And kind of sensing through how certain ways of displaying the poem could, on some levels, create a different type of room that we can all enter together and that feels different from the room that is made through just a stanza, which itself also means room.

the visual is just actually like an iPhone footage. One long shot of, I think a blood moon from last year that I took.

And, the image of the moon has kind of accompanied my short, relatively short career as an artist. I’m only 30, so yeah. And, I’m sure it’ll stay with me. But, on top of the video are these like yellow kind of traditional, like yellow font?

So also, you know, putting those two intentions, like the visual of the square brackets, the text being withheld on screen while the voice is kind of speaking in utterance.

[Overlapping: Right. Right.] What makes you kind of question the gap that’s maybe occurring?

I don’t know. That’s a big, long, twisty question. Feel free to take anything from there that feels like it speaks to you.

body itself in turning becomes an apostrophe. Like, apostrophe is, means, to turn. And, I –

That’s so lovely.

I think with that line, the way I’m feeling it now in conversation with your question is like, I’m thinking about turning’s relationship to listening and like what it does to turn a body to face a certain way. And so, now I’m thinking about orientation, what we choose to focus on. And we all know that listening is as much about attention and focus as it is about volume. So, I think that ultimately, listening is an orientation that we get to choose. I mean, to a certain extent.

My friends make fun of me. This is off-topic now, but my friends – I love it – make fun of me for all my playlists. Like, my music taste is like boys who can’t sing and sad indie girls. And, um, [Laughs]–

and, um, hearing texture when things aren’t super smoothed out and polished, that is so compelling to me. And so, when I take that as like a, um, I think that’s informed by like my, the way I grew up in small-town Ontario, music scenes and, um, Kingston, Ontario – shout out to Kingston [Laughs] – um, such a rich music scene for its like per capita in terms of its–

Okay. Well, I’d like to finish with one last quick question, which is: What are you listening to lately? Like in your research or at the conference–

NTS’s “Infinite” mixtape, [Laughs] that they have on there, and make some cool discoveries there. And yeah, I think I’ve, the internet has introduced me to a lot of connections too, like Lucía Meliáwho is based out of Mexico City. She is, yeah, she is a radio…she has a radio show called “Sinister Flowers.” That great name, right?

Shortcuts is part of the SpokenWeb podcast.

The SpokenWeb podcast is made up of supervising producer Maia Harris, sound designer, James Healy, transcriber, Yara Ajeeb, and co-host Hannah McGregor, and myself, Katherine McLeod. Like all of these Shortcuts live

conversations from last year’s symposium, there really is a sense of being there. And, I thought that this conversation in particular was such a great way of thinking back to the feeling of being there last year and looking ahead to this year’s symposium. In fact, we’ll be rolling out the last of these Shortcuts Live conversations as a full episode in the very same week as this year’s SpokenWeb symposium takes place. Stay tuned for that in the first week of June, right here on the podcast feed. And, for now, thanks for listening.