The Return of SIGNIFICANT OTTERS!
+ announcing our first SO of 2024!
Otters!
Significant Otters is back! No, I can’t believe it either!
This Monday, June 10, at noon EST / 9 am PST, you’ll get to read my interview with Ivi Hua, our first Significant Otter of 2024! Ivi is the author of Body, Dissected (kith books, 2024)
I can’t wait for you to read it and I can’t wait to have one of my favourite parts of Things You Otter Know back in the world after so long.
But wait, what IS Significant Otters?
(I understand the confusion. SOs don’t arrive on a regular basis because of the time they take to put together.)
But, essentially: I write a lot about other thing (sports, music, my stupid little life) and that will never change. Also, that way every Otter here will feel like they belong, even if they’re not a writerly type.
But SO is perhaps my most literary venture on Things You Otter Know, perhaps the thing that brings me back the most to my roots as a budding poet in the larger literary world. It’s my interview series with writers about their new books—writers who (more importantly) happen to be Otters.
Before you ask, Otters are… like, you know how Taylor Swift fans are called Swifties? It’s like that, but for me. (I did not coin this term—my ego isn’t that big.)
Now, I don’t do interviews with Otters because of my ego, but rather because it’s a sign of trust between me and my interviewee. I don’t have a particularly large network, but being a (now former) teen writer means I happen to know a lot of teen writers. It therefore makes me very proud to say that literally every single Significant Otter has been or is a teenaged writer, someone now or formerly embedded within the global teen writing community and its respective ugly disgusting complex brought upon by late-stage capitalism and very annoying corporations and foundations and non-profits and, you know, the works.
When I conceptualized Significant Otters in mid-2022, I assumed that it would eventually be the thing that, down the line, would grant me access to the big literary minds of our time. (After all, given that we were once in the same anthology, Margaret Atwood is sort-of technically an Otter.) And I do think that is always going to be one of my goals! If the stars align and a big name agrees to talk to me, that would be sick as hell.
But the more engrained Significant Otters becomes in the greater literary world and in the very large web of literary magazines doing sophisticated interviews with big-deal writers, the more I realize that I’m an outlier in that web. SO has its own niche. Thus far, I’ve only talked to younger, emerging writers about their debut books, and I’ve interviewed them all in a way that is very much my own and not of a seasoned vet. As much as I try to model myself after Tom Power (the host of CBC Radio’s q, my favourite podcast), I don’t have his charisma or his intelligence or his army of producers that dig up facts for him behind the scenes. But I do crack jokes, and I ask questions I think my audience would want to know the answers to, and I don’t use big words in my questions because I don’t know enough big words.
So far, the formula has worked. Lots of you are here because of the unique angle Significant Otters contributes to the literary interview space! And that means more than you know.
I also think that teen writers deserve a platform to showcase their book-length work, and they deserve the opportunity to be taken seriously. If being a 20 year old rando from Toronto doing the interview helps break down that barrier, then I’m happy to be that person. If the New Yorker doesn’t want to platform emerging talent, why can’t I?
I had one of my SOs tell me awhile back that I had basically become THE interviewer for teen writers. And let me tell you, I was shocked. Because I don’t think of myself that way at all! As Gwen Stefani once said, I’m just a girl. But I’m a girl in a very privileged spot right now, to be able to tell these teen writer stories and tell them to the greater world wide web, and I want to continue to give back to this community that has given me so much.
I want kids who stumble upon Things You Otter Know and who find Significant Otters to no longer think of writing a novel or short story collection or chapbook of poems as impossible. That they’re young, and the world is their oyster, and they can write one if they want to! That these genius teens I’ve managed to talk to who themselves managed to put gorgeous books together and get them published are yes, geniuses! But they’re also your equal, and—I can’t stress this enough—you are already, simply by putting in the work and caring deeply about your craft and about the writers in your orbit, as cool as them. And you don’t need to be studying at a fancy school or live in the United States or win a bunch of miscellaneous awards or have connections for your work to matter and for it to garner a beautiful sense of merit and achievement on its own wondrous terms.
You may have already known that I, Ottavia Anna freakin’ Paluch, don’t have any books to my name. Like, I don’t do these interviews to plug my own stuff, you know? I’m not one of those guys. And Significant Otters has really changed my perspective on what it means to be a (teen) writer. It motivated me to start writing poems more regularly and even begin work on a manuscript not too long ago. Because, again, these incredibly talented writers, my peers, literally told me to my face, over Zoom, that I could do it! If that’s not motivation, I don’t know what is.
There’s a poem I’m working on right now that begins with the line, “You are miraculous.” And I want every teen writer to feel that way. Ten books or zero, you are.
You are!
But I can’t do it alone, Otters. We have to help each other and we have to believe in each other’s ability to change the world simply through our words. James Baldwin once wrote that writers are obliged to realize that they are involved in a language which they must change. This is my means of doing that. I believe in mutual aid, and I believe that gatekeeping helps no one. Writers united can be a uniquely powerful force. For one, we would likely be incredible at stabbing people with pens.