What is it like to grow up with the tensions of growing up in a working-class family and being queer?

In his poetry collection Queers Like Me, Michael V. Smith reconciles with the particular relationships he had with his eccentric family and how it shaped his identity today.

Queers Like Me is an intimate poetry collection reflecting on the poet's experiences being queer in a small town. The collection begins with the poem Grandma Cooper's Corpse which follows a family discovering their estranged grandmother had passed away in a perplexing way many months ago. Then, in two sections called "You Queer" and "Family", the poet explores childhood, the connection between grandparent and grandchild and moving to the big city as a queer person.

Smith is a writer, filmmaker and professor of creative writing at University of British Columbia's Okanagan campus. His other books include his memoir, My Body Is Yours and the novel Bad Ideas. He currently lives in Kelowna, B.C.

The Next Chapter's Ali Hassan was joined by Smith to talk about his upbringing in a small town and how his grandparents and unique experiences were captured in the poems of Queers Like Me.

They grew up through the Depression, they were very poor and I guess my grandfather went days without eating as a child. So my grandparents didn't throw anything out. They kept every elastic, every twist tie, you name it. They had jars stuffed full of things, but it felt like a kind of magical kingdom in a way. They had a big side storage area that was stuffed full of furniture and we weren't allowed to go in there, but sometimes they would go to get something they needed — a fan or a chair and so you'd get to follow them in. Then you would see this warehouse of furniture, antiques and stuff that nobody would need anymore and they had stacks and piles of it. So they weren't hoarders in the sense that their whole house wasn't like this, it was just all the extremities.

The house also had that kind of magical quality. You'd show up and you didn't know what new object they had pulled out of the storage and had put somewhere. So much of it was taboo — you weren't allowed to go here and you weren't allowed to look in that and you couldn't go in this drawer. They had a very strong sense of personal privacy so much of the house felt off limits.

Well, we were the family that had moved away. My dad had four brothers, there were five boys and we moved an hour away. That was a big deal because everybody lived within about ten minutes drive of each other and they all grew up in small towns and I just watched my grandmother pick fights.

She would have these, not even arguments, but beefs with somebody. Somebody said the wrong thing or somebody did the wrong thing and then she just didn't interact with them anymore.

I didn't have much of a relationship with my mom's cousins and my great aunts and uncles so it didn't impact me very much. But in my adult life, it's curious because I see other families who are really close. You have family gatherings and there's 100 people there with all the grandkids and great grandkids and I've never had that. I haven't had that since I was about 10 years old.

So it's disorienting, you know that you're related to people, but family was very insular and very immediate. As a queer person as I got older, I just found my own family. I found queer family, chosen family and filled my life with people.

I wished I would have grown up in a place that understood me better and gave me more permission to be myself. I was really bullied and had my gender presentation policed and my body… people talked about my body all the time because I was such a skinny kid and I had long hair in high school and I had a really high voice, so I was just ridiculed quite regularly.

I lived a very stereotypical young queer life where I imagined I would go to the city and find more people like me and feel safer and feel more at home and that sort of happened. One of the tensions that I'm interested in is the tension between queerness and class, because moving to the big city made it really clear to me that I had come from a very different class background than the majority of people I interacted with at university.

They were mostly middle class and upper middle class and I was from a very blue collar family. My language was different, the way I expressed any kind of feeling... I quickly had to learn how to adapt to a new climate and environment. Even just food, there's a poem in the book about the first time I ate a falafel because I grew up with a very conservative palette, we had meat and potatoes every day.

So there was just a very disorienting sense of wanting to go to the city to be queer and then being a very class-based outsider in the city as well and needing to catch up. I'm 53 and I still find I'm catching up.

People have read things that I haven't read, which were part of other people's lives growing up that weren't part of my life and I find that trajectory a very interesting one; that my queer coming out is also a class climb and those two things were often at odds with each other.

I really believe that you need a village to raise a family and so grandparents are the next spoke in that wheel or the next tier. I really think grandparents are full of unconditional love and insight and wisdom. What I lost with the loss of my grandparents is my own sense of my legacy, like where did I come from? How did I come to be this person?

Because I think who my grandparents were had a huge impact on who my mother is and certainly who my mother is had a huge impact on me. I miss the loss of that sort of legacy.