Meet poet Junie Désil: SFU English’s 2024 writer-in-residence

Junie Désil, the 2024 Ellen and Warren Tallman writer-in-residence, holds a special place in SFU English’s history of supporting creative writing. The department’s 20^th writer-in-residence, Désil follows in the footsteps of Order of Canada member Daphne Marlatt, former Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate Fred Wah, and more recently Governor General award-winning author katherena vermette, among others.

Désil remembers all too well the anxiety she felt when she approached the department’s 2016/17 writer-in-residence with her writing.

“I remembered feeling super nervous about bringing my ten pages to Cecily Nicholson when she was writer-in-residence,” she says.

Almost ten years later, Désil is the one offering writing consultations to SFU students and the public. Like Nicholson, she’s inviting people to submit ten pages of their work for feedback.

“I’m just here to honour and elevate people’s voices—whatever they feel is important to get out, and to help them do that in the clearest and best way possible,” she says.

Désil describes becoming a writer as “a lifelong dream” that only came to fruition when she moved to Vancouver from Winnipeg and met writer Wayde Compton (another former SFU English writer-in-residence), who became her unofficial mentor. She enrolled in The Writer’s Studio and her first poetry collection, eat salt | gaze at the ocean, grew out of her desire to produce a piece of writing for her portfolio before the due date.

“One of the things that was sort of rattling around in my brain was that Halloween’s coming and I don’t love Halloween,” she says. “‘What is it about Halloween I don’t love?’ I started thinking about zombies. ‘I definitely don’t like zombies,’” Désil thought.

When she began to explore her dislike of zombies and how they were depicted in western movies and television, she looked to her Haitian roots and the origins of the zombie in Haitian culture.

“I remember going through my parents’ old suitcases and seeing Esquire-esque-type articles about somebody getting turned into a zombie and I couldn’t ask them about it,” she says.

In her poetry collection, she explores the ritualistic, spiritual practice of zombification and its connection to slavery, while contrasting it with the commodification of zombies in western media.

"Zombies function in real time—that’s what enslavement meant,” says Désil. “You’re in this liminal space. You’re alive, but you’re working for someone else, and we continue to be in this space, but it’s also one of those mythical creatures that’s easily consumable, so people like to use it and take it and make it theirs. In that sense and commentary, I was trying to say that even in death, Black bodies or Black mythology continues to be exploited.”

Also, in eat salt | gaze at the ocean, Désil discusses consumerism and the culture of overworking, as well as people’s attachment to their cell phones. She touches on what it means to really live and experience life. She will explore these themes further in two future projects: her next poetry collection, allostatic load (spring 2025) and Complicit, the collection she’ll be working on during her residency. The former explores her struggle with health in the capitalist system.

“Six or so years ago, I had a pulmonary embolism,” says Désil. “The doctors said I was too young to have had a pulmonary embolism, but when I looked at all the risk factors, I started to see it. I was working in the Downtown Eastside. I was working long hours. I was stressed. There was no self-care happening. I was also looking at the larger, structural reasons why I wasn’t well.”

While she discusses her own experience, Désil emphasizes that the larger messaging of the collection is that people cannot be healthy if they are in a world that sets up structures that do not allow them to prioritize their well-being.

Complicit will discuss how everyone is complicit in things that happen locally and globally. For example, Désil notes how mass consumption negatively impacts the Democratic Republic of the Congo. She emphasizes that the purpose of the collection will not be to shame or guilt-trip the reader. Instead, the emphasis will be on how we can make things better.

“Can we reuse some of the items we use?” she asks. “We are constantly buying new things. Can we return to a culture of getting things repaired instead of chucking them and getting new things? Do all three of our kids need their own iPad? I’m inviting folks, instead of us wringing our hands and saying, ‘I don’t know what to do’, to see there are things we can do.”