An Interview with Ivan Coyote

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Interview in CWILA - Canadian Women in the Literary Arts



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in CWILA (Canadian Women in the Literary Arts)

Interview by Tina Northrup

In an interview with Joy Parks that was published in Books in Canada in 2003, you speak of learning to tell stories in the company of your huge extended family. How did you begin to publish and perform?

I actually started off as a sort of a three-or-four-chord lesbian folk singer, and quickly realized that I liked and was better at the banter in between songs, I guess. Then there was a period of doing open mikes and such, it is a little blurry in there, but all of a sudden there I was on the bill with folks like the Minimalist Jug Band and Cass King and even Al Purdy before he died, the literary performance types, this was before the slam poetry scene really took off. Then around 1996 or so I was one of four founding members of Taste This, a four-person (we all identified as women back then, I don’t really, now, I call myself trans, it is closer to the truth of me) performance troupe that blended music, storytelling, performance poetry and monologue type of stuff. I’ve never really been much into labels, they only serve us until they don’t, and they stifle innovation sometimes.

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