Alex Creece is a writer, editor, collage artist, and average kook living on Wadawurrung land. Alex’s first book is Potty Mouth, Potty Mouth (Cordite Books, 2024), with an introduction written by Rae White. You can read Rae’s introduction at Cordite Poetry Review.

In this interview, Rae chats to Alex about poetic experiments, gremlin energy, collage chaos and being a rude dude. Alex also shares some of her visual art.

Potty Mouth, Potty Mouth is available now online and at all good bookstores. Cover design by Zoë Sadokierski (courtesy of Cordite Books).

Rae White: Hey Alex! You’ve been recently creating collages inspired by your new poetry collection Potty Mouth, Potty Mouth, which, in turn, was partly inspired by collages. Talk to me about Potty Mouth, Potty Mouth and its collage origins.

Alex Creece: Thank you! I made two new collages: one for each ‘Potty Mouth’, I suppose! It was just for fun, but it did make me reflect upon how this book wouldn’t exist without collages.

Potty Mouth, Potty Mouth started with scraps of paper and a scrappy spirit. And my beloved dog, who resembled Scrappy Cornelius Doo.

I’ve been writing for a lifetime. Over the years, my writing developed its own voices and textures, like a series of literary puberties. I started collaging as part of art therapy circa 2017, and it has since evolved into a more serious arts practice (I say ‘serious’, but don’t mistake that for lucrative!).

These interests have fallen together in fun ways. Words and images already exist so heavily around us. If I stare at a blank page, I feel like I must invent words off the top of my head. But really, I just have to find new combinations. I can jot down some funny jargon, look at my shopping list, peel a sticker off a nectarine, make a pun, accept a pamphlet from a Jehovah’s Witness, and patch it all together into a new monstrosity.

Collage is a way of playing with what’s already there, twisting it, amplifying its weirdness through re-contextualisation.

‘Potty Mouth #1’ by Alex Creece.

For me, collaging fills multiple purposes, too. I’m someone who has trouble initiating tasks, and needs something to do with their hands. I want prompts and parameters, but I also want autonomy. I want autonomy, but I also want an element of chaos. Collage (as a visual medium and a poetic tool) is perfect for this: it’s about both chance and choices.

Collage comes from Dadaist and Surrealist traditions (come through, undergrad Intro to Poetry class!), and I feel a kinship with the nihilism and whimsy of these art movements. And I love how accessible this art form is – you don’t need specific skills or materials to collage, you can do it your own way with whatever’s around.

Two of my poems, ‘God Wants You to Come’ and ‘Girls Gone Wild’, were also visually prepared before being transcribed into text-only forms for Potty Mouth, Potty Mouth.

Funnily enough, the first batch of books were misprinted, so I’ve got a bunch of rogue copies to play with even further. From collages they came, and back to collages they’ll likely become. (Imagine me saying this as an Ex on the Beach voiceover while someone’s ex swims back into the ocean after being voted off, like a sexy dejected manta ray. I’m gonna make more sexy dejected collages.)

‘Potty Mouth #2’ by Alex Creece.

RW: This collection is delightfully insubordinate, anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian. Tell me about these themes and other topics explored in Potty Mouth, Potty Mouth.

AC: Thank you! Potty Mouth, Potty Mouth unpacks what it is to be a ratbag by nature, to be a little grot, to live in a failing way.

I’m interested in being kind without being polite. I was raised to be self-flagellating, to subjugate myself, and to squash down the things that made me ‘difficult’. This, of course, doesn’t work.

I hate that a person’s functionality is often assessed around things like social status, compliance and sanity. Humanness shouldn’t depend on things like being well-mannered, agreeable, charming or conventionally ‘successful’.

It makes me think of a meme I saw comparing Rattus from The Ferals (and its spinoff Feral TV) to Rat-in-a-Hat from Bananas in Pyjamas – the rat who is neat and ‘respectable’ isn’t the better-hearted rat. The rattier rat can be a worthier role model.

A dichotomy of rats.

You can be a good person and a feral employee. You can be a crybaby with fangs. You can be the punchline in public school and the goofiest, sexiest clown college dropout. You can be an artist just because you say so – there’s no singular ‘right’ pathway to being who you are, and you don’t need anyone’s permission to name yourself as you see fit.

Your behaviour – and your art – can be motherless, fatherless, parentless and godless, but that doesn’t make it ‘bad’. As long as you’re never heartless, you’re doing okay. (If I sound like an early 2000s emo band, thanks very much, and please talk to me about My Chemical Romance and The Used.)

I find that collage can be inherently insubordinate too; after all, you’re corrupting the source materials. If I take clippings of 1950s Woman’s Day mag that’s about how to be a good housewife, or how to be thinner and less tired, and I make a collage that celebrates self-indulgence and abdicates domesticity, I’m defying its original intent.

‘God Wants You to Come!’ by Alex Creece.

RW: Your book has Big Gremlin Energy – in the best possible way! Potty Mouth, Potty Mouth doesn’t shy away from queerness and deviance. Talk to me about this book’s defiant heart.

AC: Thank you so much! I love critters and creatures – I think they represent the best, funniest and most honest parts of ourselves. I feel in tune with myself as a blobby sack of teeth, blood, bone and gristle, like a teratoma. I feel alive as a mammal, even if I often feel disconnected from people and lack much of a social life.

Although I see myself as a grotty gremlin to an extent, how much of that is just surviving as a person with no future, too much information, and a dying home planet? Am I less human if my heart is always broken and my clothes are never ironed?

Am I failure if I feel existential pain and let it affect how I navigate the world? I don’t think so, but a landlord, CEO or politician might disagree. We’re still waiting on a dyke for a president – not just a lesbian, but a good, honest dyke.

In a usual workday, there’s no time for fucking, crying, playing and making mistakes (and whatever else is in The L Word theme song). The world makes so little space for the things that make us human and animal, the things that make us hungry, thirsty, horny, delirious and afraid. And that’s devastating.

‘Beanz’ by Alex Creece.

Potty Mouth, Potty Mouth is also an attempt at accepting certain traits of my voice, both on page and aloud, that are immutable.

I have a loud, deep-pitched voice, with a strange accent, tone and syntax. Like Paris Hilton, I modulate and heighten my voice in particular social situations or when I feel that it’ll make people more comfortable.

On paper, even my best attempts are deftness are done with clumsy hands. It shows, and that’s good, actually. By writing or speaking, I’m forever telling on myself.

We all contain traits that are gross, perverted, neurotic and messy – I just can’t conceal mine easily. We all leave footprints on each other, and poetry is a place where I can clomp around freely like a Clydesdale.

I want to distort the usual connotations of what poetry is. I know that, for poetry readers and writers, there’s an awareness of how nebulous and expansive the genre can be, but for the layperson, the typical associations are things like Shakespeare, Keats, and such.

Writing poetry that isn’t dainty, careful or pretty is another way for me to lean into failure and ratbaggery.

‘Rainbow garlands (Y2K edition) / Sappho is sliving / What if Sappho drank a pumpkin spice latte and shit her pants and then watched Legally Blonde?’ by Alex Creece.

RW: This collection doesn’t shy away from discussing mental health, selfhood, and climate change, just to name a few topics. Heavy AF question: how has writing poetry helped you explore identity and the inescapable?

AC: When writing about myself, I used to feel a strong obligation to lead with my belonging to identity groups and lived experiences. And while this is inextricable from my work in some ways, I now value the freedom of both talking shit and setting boundaries.

I like to be vulnerable and open, for sure. But I want to be mindful of how writers – especially young writers – are sometimes pressured to trauma-mine in a way that can feel disempowering. For example, when applying for award and grant opportunities, there can be an expectation to mention your financial difficulties, your disabilities and mental health status, and the ways in which the world harms and marginalises you.

These are obviously significant determinants in our lives, but I wish that we didn’t have to compete for crumbs by offering up our hardships at the forefront for consumption (and, often, rejection).

It reminds me of the formula of a Drag Race semi-final episode, where RuPaul would present a childhood photo and ask, “What would you say to little Alex?”. Not a damn thing, that’s what. I’ll do my own trauma work, but I won’t be mining (or fracking) for it. I just don’t want to feel like fodder to the churn of an industry.

‘How’s Your Head?’ by Alex Creece.

I’m fine to be known as a queer writer, but not if it’s all anyone wants me to talk about.

I don’t really want my writing to be gendered beyond dyke; don’t invite me to speak on International Women’s Day. I’m something of a girl, but I’m not an International Woman™. I tend to feel more aligned to queer people of all gender constellations, rather than spaces that centre women specifically.

Similarly, I don’t only want to be invited to speak on disability panels, even though I value these opportunities. I have access needs, and I’m visibly autistic – that is, I don’t pass for non-autistic or neurotypical, even with my best efforts. So, there will always be limitations and an inevitable disclosure or noticeability of that disability. But I don’t ever want to write an autism memoir.

Autism has such a big and obvious impact on my everyday life whether I like it or not, but as an artist or writer, I don’t want that to be the main reason I’m invited or commissioned for a project, or the only thing I’m ever asked about.

Poetry has been a space where I don’t have to explain myself. I don’t have to lead with neat identifiers. My selfhood is baked into the work, or danced around, or puked on, or floating in the space between the writer and the reader. It’s slippery and sludgy, and although the work is vulnerable, I feel less pressure to offer myself up on a platter, or on a Centrelink form.

Poetry is on my terms, because it can be anything. Each poem is its own experiment.

That said, as a white settler, I’m aware that there’s privilege in this desire to be seen neutrally and not judged on matters of personal identity as a first impression. Having your personhood and legitimacy affirmed without question is historically and politically fraught. Not everyone has that same option or preference. Not everyone has been welcomed into the spaces that I can choose to reject or challenge of my own volition.

‘Psychoterratic Syndrome’ by Alex Creece.

RW: This collection tackles some big topics, which makes it more charismatically and comfortingly relatable. Potty Mouth, Potty Mouth is a big mood. What impact do you hope your poems will have on readers?

AC: I’ve never been called charismatic before, so firstly, thank you! I hope Potty Mouth, Potty Mouth makes people feel itchy, not numb. I hope my readers cringe. I’d rather they hate it than feel apathetic. I want to tap into the emotions that we so often try to avoid, escape or mask.

I hope it’ll encourage people to read and write more poetry, and let their writing take its own shapes. Write the swampiest, most hagridden poem in the world, or make a nightmare/daydream collage. Embrace the parts of yourself that allow you to feel anger and heartbreak, because that’s also what makes you tick in the liveliest ways.

I want to affirm emotions, thoughts and sensations in their complexities: the rage that never reaches the light of day, the dreary delight of a popped pimple, and the unrelenting nature of feeling and being.

We’re all just looking for ways to unclench our jaws for a moment, to release a pressure valve. I don’t want to wait for perfect moments or perfect emotions, I just want to use what’s around me, even if it’s beige hospital walls or the pixelated flurry of a doomscroll.

So yeah, to my readers: I hope there’s at least one poem that sticks in your teeth like a popcorn kernel.

‘Succulent Fruits’ by Alex Creece.

RW: Thank you so much for chatting with me! Where can folks find more of your work?

AC: Thank you so much for your time, and for introducing my book! You can find more of my writing here at Archer Magazine, as well as at Cordite Poetry Review, Australian Poetry Journal, ABC, Scum Mag, Kill Your Darlings, Rally Mag and more.

My website (which needs to be tszujed up, I know!) tells you where to access my work, and how to contact me for opportunities or commissions.

You can also find my collages and keep up with my shenanigans @roguedyke on Instagram. I’m super shy and bad at responding to messages, but I try to connect with other creative folks as much as possible. I’m always excited to discover writers and artists whose work is new to me, and I love a good recommendation. Feel free to get in touch!

Happy-crappy reading!

You can grab a copy of Potty Mouth, Potty Mouth by Alex Creece through Cordite Books.

You can check out more of Alex’s visual collages @roguedyke.