"You know, when we were in undergrad, gender or orientation around being bi or straight or gay was what we felt empowered to explore. And that even as a person who at that point was like, Okay, I'm a girl and find myself desiring people with penises, that means I must be straight, right? I wouldn't have questioned anything other than like, Well, if I have this body, and I desire that kind of body, then I am straight, but in undergrad you could still make out with a girl and be like, I'm just experimenting, but now it seems to me that the opportunity to ask oneself about one's own gender is there. And the more I learned about fluidity, the more I thought about my own relationship to the pronouns that I've grown up with, the more I was like, I think that these other pronouns really more accurately express how I've lived most of my life. So 'they' feels deeply right for me now."

Sonnet L'Abbé is a Canadian poet, songwriter, editor and professor. They are the author of A Strange Relief, Killarnoe, and Sonnet's Shakespeare. Sonnet's Shakespeare was a Quill and Quire Book of the Year. In 2014 they edited the Best Canadian Poetry in English anthology. Their chapbook, Anima Canadensis, won the 2017 bpNichol Chapbook Award. They teach Creative Writing and English at Vancouver Island University, and are a poetry editor at Brick Books.

https://www.instagram.com/sonnetlabbe/

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/2017/12/tree-i-invented-a-new-form-of-poem

www.creativeprocess.info

www.oneplanetpodcast.org