My standard answer for “what are you working on right now?” is “everything,” but for the purposes of this project I will try to be a little more articulate.
For an entire year now, I have managed to support myself entirely via freelance writing. This means that I write all of the things all of the time. I have fixed columns for Canada Arts Connect, the This Magazine website, and Toronto Is Awesome, and am a regular contributor to Torontoist, Toronto Standard, About Heavy Metal, Angry Metal Guy, Hellbound and Exclaim!. I also have worth forthcoming in broken pencil and The National Post. I write about heavy metal, comics, video games, feminism, sadomasochism, arts and culture, video games, combat sport and local politics.
As my writing-to-eat career has grown, writing creatively has become more challenging. My second book of poetry, DOOM: Love Poems For Supervillains, is now out (published by Insomniac Press), and so I am regularly doing readings and interviews to promote it. I have started work on a series of poems that look at the intersection between heavy metal (the music) and heavy metals (the elements). I also started something that I intended to be a weird, magic-realist autobiography that is veering ever more into fiction, about a young woman in Windsor who becomes an illegal medic for people across the border who can’t afford medical care. She operates out of a massage parlour.
Natalie Zina Walschots is a music writer, poet and editor based in Toronto, Ontario. Once a scholarly, bookish young woman, she now spends the majority of her time permanently damaging her liver and her hearing at heavy metal shows. Natalie’s second book of poetry, DOOM: Love Poems For Supervillains, was published by Insomniac Press in the Spring of 2012. Her first book, Thumbscrews, won the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry and was published by Snare Books in the Fall of 2007. Natalie earned her MA in English Literature and Creative writing from the University of Calgary. Visit Natalie’s website and follow her twitter.