Zoe Dickinson lives on the unceded lands of the lək̓ʷəŋən Peoples on Vancouver Island, where she is a manager at Russell Books and artistic director emerita of the Planet Earth Poetry reading series. Her debut full-length collection, Staff Picks for Invertebrates, was released by Guernica Editions in 2026.
Staff Picks for Invertebrates is a semi-autobiographical love letter to books, readers, and the lands they inhabit. Russell Books staff and customers, swallows and starfish, the store itself and the books inside: all are part of the same family and dwell in the same fragile, radiant world.
Interviewed by Barbara Pelman
Barbara Pelman (BP): First, because it hits you right away, the cover. How perfect a symbiosis of Russell Books window and the undersea world! It also reminds me of Edward Hopper’s famous painting, The Nighthawks. If that was your intent, would you talk more about the relationship between the painting and the themes of your book? What is the overall tone or mood you convey in these poems?
Zoe Dickinson (ZD): I’m going to be honest, I’ve never heard of The Nighthawks before. I just looked it up and it’s beautiful, so I’ll take the comparison as a compliment! Staff Picks for Invertebrates’ cover is the work of a very talented and very patient designer, Rafael Chimicatti. We went through a lot of potential options before deciding to put a bookstore at the bottom of the sea. The storefront is a photo I took looking into Russell Books from the outside one night, right after a Planet Earth Poetry reading (this accounts for the after-dark vibe that reminded you of The Nighthawks). The underwater scene was sourced by Rafael, and he did an amazing job of blending the two. This is a book that is very much about place, but place told slant; it pleases me deeply that the most straightforwardly literal interpretation of the book’s content results in this really surreal image. In that way, I think the cover is a faithful reflection of the book: deceptively simple, but with surprising complexity on closer examination. If I were to sum up the mood of Staff Picks, I guess I would say it’s… nostalgia for the current moment – a sudden, piercing awareness of the fragility of the present – the resilience and precarity of the bookstore, of the ocean, of my own inner and outer ecosystems.
BP: The first poem, “your Acknowledgement”, is my favorite of all acknowledgement statements. What do you think we are gaining, as a community, paying attention to these acknowledgements?
ZD: I’ve received a lot of feedback about that poem. It’s interesting performing it now, because I wrote it over four years ago and part of the poem’s core is a promise to do better. Every time I read it, I ask myself, am I more educated about reconciliation than last time I read this? Have I taken more action now than the last time I read this? Have I followed through? I hope so, but I’ve still got work to do. I feel uncomfortable every time I read this poem. Which I guess is the point.
A land acknowledgement is not enough. Not doing one is bad, but doing one thoughtlessly by rote is not better. Acknowledging a theft that we have every intention of continuing to commit is just putting into words the hypocritical cognitive dissonance that is a necessary condition of North American colonialism. But the benefit of putting it into words, even in a cursory or perfunctory land acknowledgement, is that each time we’re forced to confront it. Even if it’s only for 20 seconds while someone mumbles “respectfully acknowledge the unceded territories…” we still have that reminder of what it is we are doing here, every moment that we live on this land. And over time, maybe that reminder grows into something more. I know that land acknowledgements have deeper roots and meaning in Indigenous protocol, but from a settler-Canadian perspective this is what they do for me.
BP: I love how you find wisdom and philosophy in your careful attention to the ‘kilometre of beach’ you have chosen to focus on. Like: “What is armour/but participation/with the predator”? Do these thoughts arrive while noticing, or later with the writing?
ZD: I thought I knew the answer to this question, but as I try to frame it here, I realize I actually don’t. I think the true answer is, somewhere in between. In the space between the noticing and the writing, something happens. A big part of poetry for me is close observation. The details I zoom in on don’t resolve into poetry until they’re on the page, though. This is one of the reasons I write, and one of the reasons I think writing is such a uniquely human activity. A machine may be able to throw a bunch of words in a blender and spit something out the other end, but for a human the act of writing has the potential to clarify thought, in fact to allow a thought process to happen that couldn’t unfold without that opportunity to play out on the page. Maybe some poets can do all this in their heads (like some people can do long division in their heads?) but I really need a page in front of me, and a pen in hand.
BP: That careful noticing, your benign focus on creatures, spills wonderfully into the Bookstore poems. What creatures inhabit those aisles, you point out to us. Endless material, I assume. And I love the humour of them, your affectionate annoyance. Whom have you missed? Are there more poems to come?
ZD: Oh, absolutely endless material! Every day somebody surprises me. It’s part of what I enjoy about working with the public. Humans are bizarre and often frustrating creatures, but I really do have a deep affection for them. Us. There are plenty of folks who didn’t make it into the book and are totally poem-worthy. Russell Books has a cast of characters that any poet could spend a lifetime chronicling! That being said, I don’t foresee myself writing many more bookstore poems in the immediate future. As a poet, I’m a lot more interested in place than in people.
BP: Organizing a book of poems is a complicated (and sometimes agonizing) process. Especially with such seemingly disparate topics: bookstores to nudibranchs. Can you talk about how you wove the elements together so seamlessly?
ZD: Staff Picks started out as two manuscripts. One, a book of ocean poetry that racked up numerous rejections over several years, and the other, a book of retail poetry that I really liked but felt was somehow lacking dimension. I have to give credit to the amazing poet Tanis MacDonald, who edited my “retail” manuscript and suggested that perhaps I didn’t need to separate the ocean poems from the bookstore poems. I think her exact words were something like, “let the wild in”. So I did, and in the process I realized that the bookstore is part of the same ecosystem as the ocean. This is one of those instances of using the page to clarify thought that I was talking about earlier… actually it’s a pretty profound revelation that has stayed with me in my daily life. Just because I spend a good portion of my time inside a manmade wood or concrete or steel box doesn’t mean I’m not part of my local ecosystem. Everything I do impacts and is impacted by it. Russell Books, along with every other constructed structure on Vancouver Island, participates in the same ecosystem as the oystercatcher and the Garry oak and the otter.
Anyway, with Tanis’ help I let the ocean flood into the bookstore. I ended up using a series of short “commute” poems to bind it all together – these poems began their life as my first chapbook, Public Transit, published by Leaf Press in 2015. I wrote them while busing to and from Russell Books over a decade ago now. With that missing ingredient, suddenly the book took on a rhythm, entering and leaving the bookstore and the beach as I commuted to and fro, more or less mirroring the rhythm of my own life. It seems obvious in retrospect that I was writing an autobiographical poetry book, but it took me a long time to realize that these poems are as much about me as they are about the physical places. I tend to think of my poems as focused on external environments but they’re actually about human (and specifically my) relationships to those environments.
BP: I’m always interested in one’s writing practice. Are you a daily routine kind of writer, or a ‘burst of energy’ kind? Do you have any rituals about writing? How do your poems come to you? Do you wrassle them to the ground or wait patiently for them to appear?
ZD: My routine is to walk on the beach every morning and pay attention. If I’m lucky, something will spark. If I’m even luckier, I’ll have time to sit down for five or ten minutes and write before I’m swept off into the day. If I do that, I can capture the spark. That’s the most consistently productive practice I’ve found, and I’m certainly not that consistent with it. Beyond observation, I think what builds poetry for me is curiosity about the world. The more I learn about the world around me, the more interesting it is and the more likely to inspire a poem. The poem “Nudibranch” for example is the result of going down a research rabbit hole after encountering a shaggy mouse nudibranch in a Dallas Road tidal pool. I could have written a poem about my encounter in the tidal pool, but it wouldn’t have been as interesting as the poem I ended up writing after learning more about their life cycles, habits and quirks. For me poetry is a product of and a catalyst for my curiosity and my deepening relationship with the world.
The same is true about the poems set in the bookstore – it isn’t my habit to turn that curiosity towards my fellow humans, but I decided to use that mental muscle I developed peering into tidal pools as I went about my daily interactions at the bookstore. The bookstore poems were also largely propelled by NaPoWriMo. I’m one of those quixotic poets who tries to write a poem a day every April. That burst of effort would not be sustainable year-round, but over the course of a couple of Aprils I produced a wealth of material that I could turn into actual poetry during the other 11 months of the year. Once something’s on the page, even in a very imperfect form, I can come back and work with it at my own pace. That initial spark is somehow banked and can be rekindled.
BP: As an interviewer, I’m sure I’ve missed asking the questions that you are dying to answer. What did I miss? What do you want to tell us that these questions haven’t yet offered?
The thing I most want people to know about this book is that it comes from a loving place. Love for the bookstore, its staff and customers, the ocean, the coast, this ecosystem… and myself. I’m pretty snarky in some of these poems, and I poke fun at people, their contradictory foibles, but I love this community. All the human and more-than-human parts of it. I hope that’s apparent. I don’t want anyone to experience these poems as judgemental or unkind. That’s always a risk when writing about other people, real people with whom I share a community.
Any good poem is an act of empathy, and my hope is that these poems will help people on both ends of the customer service interaction understand each other a little better. A lot of these poems come across as light, you know, funny bookstore poems, but the intention behind them is serious. In our culture, retail type interactions are one of the most common ways that we encounter other humans. For some people, a cashier or customer service worker is the only human contact they have on a regular basis. These moments are discarded as meaningless but they’re not. The relationship between a cashier and the person she’s ringing through is a fleeting, but very real opportunity to acknowledge someone else’s humanity. Each of these short, formulaic interactions can make a difference to other people and thus to the world. I know this sounds like a fantastical aggrandizement of my humble industry, but I genuinely believe this and I hope that the poems in this book will help more people see the potential for kindness and connection in the retail space.
Interviewer Bio: Barbara Pelman is a retired teacher and a poet, with four books (One Stone: Ekphrasis; Borrowed Rooms: Ronsdale; Narrow Bridge: Ronsdale; Brief and Endless Sea: Caitlin) and a chapbook (Aubade Amalfi: Rubicon). She is on the board of Planet Earth Poetry, edits, and conducts workshops.