Three Short Interviews With Reading Series

Chi-Leung Lee (李智良): Speakeasy Reading Series

TALI VORON-LEIDERMAN: Tell me a little bit about the Speakeasy Reading Series. And what’s one thing our readers may not already know?

CHI-LEUNG LEE : Speakeasy is a monthly literary reading series hosted by University of Guelph Creative Writing MFA students. One thing readers may not already know is that the event features not only readings from students, alumni, and faculty of our program but also from writers in the broader community. We aim to feature both emergent and well-published authors across genres and disciplines.

TVL: Imagine our readers have never attended a Speakeasy Reading Series event before. Set the scene. What is it like?

CLL: Wednesday evening. A legacy bookstore on Church Street. The glass door buffers the street noises. Eclectic choice of music playing on low volume. The light is dimmed a little. A diverse mix of people, mostly the quiet type. No one wears perfume. The smell of good books. Some were sitting by themselves. Some sit around tables, more at ease with their friends. The bar gradually gets busier. A projection screen at the bookstore shows the reader’s lineup and their looking-cool profile pictures. You tried to match the images with the quiet people sitting nearby. Under the screen, a mic stand with the microphone’s battery light on standby. The hosts were testing the web camera angle …

TVL: What are the duties of the Speakeasy host each year, and what did you bring/are you bringing to this role during your term?

CLL: The Speakeasy hosts are responsible for all the behind-the-scenes work that makes the monthly reading happen, enjoyable, and accessible. This includes applying for and managing funding, liaising with the venue, handling publicity (social media, flyers, mass emails, Eventbrite page, etc.), compiling bios, making music playlists, and ensuring the accessibility needs of readers and the audience are met. The most challenging part of event-planning tasks is securing our lineup, because readers are often juggling their work, family responsibilities, and travel plans. Occasionally, we need to respond quickly to unexpected circumstances, such as readers being unable to attend at short notice, TTC or a heater breakdown, or a malfunctioning microphone. During my term, I was privileged to work with Alex Cafarelli and Desiree Mckenzie, who have great talents and personalities. We introduced two changes. One is to make the event more accessible by livestreaming, so that readers and audience who cannot attend in person can also join us. I remember that one of our readers was travelling on a boat when she joined us last year! We also have readers in the diaspora whose friends and families from home joined us online! We also found that live captioning was welcomed by audience members who have difficulties following the text. Another change we brought is to make the event donation-based, to cover the honorariums for readers who are not funded by any institution or organization. We appreciate the labour and time our readers put into their work. It is also one of the small ways to move forward in building an ecosystem where we support one another and rely less on institutions.

TVL: So much of literary citizenship is engaging with our communities, and that often takes place through attending events like book launches, reading series, festivals, and more. What role does the Speakeasy Reading Series play in your literary community?

CLL: As an international student and someone who has moved across countries, not always holding the correct passport, I am very averse to the idea of “citizenship.” Literature belongs to the commons and should be accessible to all. At Speakeasy, the hosts and I share the same urgency to platform readers from historically underrepresented communities, and those whose work is not shy about engaging with the world. The last two years have been particularly challenging for many of us as we see a genocide unfold. I feel that Speakeasy has not done much for the greater cause, but in a small way, we create a safe space for our community to f ind one another and a space where we think together about the role of writing and our responsibilities at this historical juncture.

TVL: What is something you’re excited about right now?

CLL: A tarot reader recently told me it’s going to be a striving time, rather than just survival mode. I want to believe it, so I am keeping things very open, although it can be scary. I am relocating to Taipei so that I can stay closer to my family and loved ones. Upon completing my MFA, I now have a manuscript that I aim to develop and publish—it’s a hybrid work that responds to the personal stories I collected through research and interviews with those who participated in the 2019 Hong Kong protests. I am working on a side project of erasure poems in conjunction with this manuscript. I am also becoming curious about narrative therapy and wondering how some of the principles of life re-authoring may be applied in a creative writing workshop setting. I can go on and on. I am excited because I am now on the other side of what I couldn’t have imagined before joining the MFA program.

CHI-LEUNG LEE (李智良)

is a genre-defying writer working across fiction, non-fiction, and poetry in English, Chinese, and Cantonese. His most acclaimed book, A Room Without Myself (《房間), is an unapologetic chronicle of surviving the psychiatric system, awarded both the Hong Kong Book Prize and the Hong Kong Biennial Awards for Chinese Literature. His other works—Porcelain (白瓷), Grass is Bluer by the Sea (海邊草更藍), and Days We Cross (渡日若渡海)—blend plotless fiction, verse, photography, and essayistic reflections to explore fractured identities, memory, and poetics of displacement. Lee has held fellowships and residencies in Iowa, Niigata, Hong Kong, and Berlin. He holds a BA and MPhil in Comparative Literature (University of Hong Kong) and an MFA in Creative Writing (University of Guelph), and has taught creative writing, literature and film studies at CUHK and HKBU. His work appears in Fleurs des lettres (字花), Springhill Literati (春山文藝), Asymptote, Brick, and Riddle Fence. He believes literature should unsettle, dissolve borders, and make the trembling of the world felt.