Sherwin Tjia has turned unconventional party planning into a vocation of sorts. The Toronto-born Montrealer organizes numerous idiosyncratic events in both cities, from Slowdance Nights to Strip Spelling Bees and the self-explanatory Crowd Karaoke. His social experimentation dissolves inhibitions with a few clever rules; “designated dancers” attend the swaying-shy, for example (Tjia himself DJs, often in drag), while uncertain spellers who risk disrobing can do so knowing that photos are banned. Tjia is also a poet/artist, and not just in his day job of medical illustration: his 2009 graphic novel The Hipless Boy was nominated for a Doug Wright Award. You Are a Cat!, his latest book, refracts its protagonist through the many narratives of a choose-your-own-adventure format. As the stray in question, you come across humans playing out dramas of their own, but your fuzzy perspective lends each one a strangely adorable variation on the alienation effect. After last weekend’s launch party at the Drake, where Tjia explained why publisher Conundrum Press made him change a first-page description of “hummingbirds fucking” to “hummingbirds kissing,” I interviewed him via email about feline formalism, chance encounters and the mysterious vial of catnip he carries around. Why did you decide to revive the old gamebook format? You Are a Cat is faithful to it in a formal sense, but the adventure here comes from recontextualizing an otherwise mundane setting. Probably I could have told this story in a very traditional way, like a novel, but that wouldn’t have been very interesting to me. I am a big fan of various mediums, and strange systems, and I wanted to see what I could do with the gamebook format, having read through so many of them when I was a kid. You’re right that everything seems fresh when seen through the eyes of a cat, even if it’s just a hallway. Part of that comes with the switch in perspective, I think. You see the world from a foot off the ground. But like a fetishist who is obsessed with women’s feet, there is a change in emphasis too. What’s considered mundane to most of the world is magnified and takes on significance. Scents are a lot more powerful, and anything small that moves very quickly you want to catch and kill. The book ends with a series of fake previews for future Pick-a-Plot titles. You said that it was fun making the covers and blurbs without bothering to work on any of their hypothetical contents, but if you were forced to decide, Fighting Fantasy style, which of those would you choose to write in earnest? The one I want to write the most is the You Are Alice’s Mum! one. I think that one could actually be really cool. A close second is the You Are Obsessed With Johnny Depp! one. But the Alice one I have already envisioned out. What I mean by that is that in my head, I can already envision the various scenarios that Alice’s Mum would be working through. I can see the choices already. What I like about it the most, is the idea of taking something whimsical and fantastical and done-to-death – the Alice in Wonderland story – and grounding the facts of it in a very real and sordid Victorian London. I mean, your daughter Alice has gone missing. What do you do? Photocopying didn’t exist back then. How do you put up missing posters? The idea was that you are this very proper Englishwoman – which, as you’ll remember, at the time, didn’t go around unchaperoned – and you are knocking on doors, desperate to find your kid. You find clues. You hear various rumours. You meet this sly grinning man who runs an illegal opium den in the Cheshire district who speaks in broken English that sound like riddles named Singh Sang Soong who might be helping you and might not be, and he mentions a gang of white slavers. Later you discover that a prominent member of the royal family is involved somehow. You didn’t mean to get involved in dismantling a huge conspiracy – you were just looking for your daughter – but too late now. I think it would be a blast to write. Did you do anything unusual to get into a feline mindset? How much research was involved? I had certain questions that came up during the writing that I had to answer, like, What does it look like when cats have sex? But for the most part, I just spent a lot of time watching, playing and hanging out with cats. Could you retell that launch-party story about your catnip philanthropy? So, there’s a character in the book who’s this guy you meet in an alley, and he gives you catnip. Anyway, while you’re rolling around on the ground, he starts taking pictures of you, and telling you you’re beautiful. Well, that character is me. I’m that guy. In the summers, I’ll walk around with this vial of catnip in my pocket. It’s kind of a saltshaker. And so when I meet a cat, I’ll give it catnip and take pictures of it. I just like taking pictures of cats in pleasure. They are hilarious when they’re high like that. I’ve often thought about how weird it is that I do this. People have told me that they find it charming and neat, but I’ve thought that if it was candy in my pocket that I was giving to young children that it would be really creepy. As the proprietor of a kitten-centric gimmick Tumblr myself, I’m curious: what do you think about this relentless memeification of cats facilitated by the Internet? I like it tremendously. I feel that the more cats on the internet the better. I am always astounded by the new and innovative ways that cats are portrayed. The only thing I object to is the way LOLcats talk. I think that cats would talk in fully-formed sentences, and not that childlike banter they all seem to have. Also notable is that dogs don’t seem to have gotten the same sort of internet love. Probably because the internet is very cat-like. Not only because people are catty on it, but because cats are quite solitary, indolent creatures, which the internet kind of turns people into. Dogs like to be moving, in packs. My suspicion is that dog people spend more time outdoors and less time trawling forums. They use the internet to plan things, and then go and meet up. Do you see any connections between an aleatoric book like this one and the various events you organize? I didn’t know what aleatoric meant and so had to look it up. (Defined as “characterized or dependent on chance.”) And so yes, I think you have hit upon it. A lot of times when I do an event or create a book, the question on my mind is – What’s going to happen? And the answer is I don’t know. Let’s find out. Part of the draw, for me, in doing this book was the challenge of trying to write a charming and compelling narrative even while you give the reader all these opportunities to derail it. Often times during the writing, I’d get to a branching point and offer up a couple of choices, and I wouldn’t be sure where that choice would lead and how it would play out. That’s kind of why I invented Slowdance Nights, and Strip Spelling Bees – I wanted to see if people would do it, if they’d come and engage with each other in that way. And I have all these rules and safety mechanisms in place to ensure that people feel safe and comfortable enough to do this very brave and risky thing. But ultimately, every event is different. When you get a hundred people into a room, you aren’t sure how they’re going to react. You set up these very particular hoops to jump through, and people will play with those hoops. They will push against the limits of those rules and there is pleasure in that. Probably the book is like that too. I like that there is a Warning! page at the front that gives instructions. Sometimes a structure of rules allow people to feel MORE free to do the things they really want to do. But one of the problems with a book which leaves things somewhat open-ended is that you don’t know how people will read it. I mean, I can control some things – for instance, there are certain narrative chokepoints I will funnel the reader toward, but if they die along the way, there is no guarantee that they will go back through the book. The same goes for reviews of it. Unlike regular novels, I suspect that reviewers won’t read through all of the narratives, won’t fully explore all of the choices before rendering judgment. It’s a risky format to work in, but on the other hand – I can safely tap into the huge well of happy nostalgia these kinds of gamebooks bring up. Finally, I have I ask: how do you feel about dogs? I am not a big fan of dogs. I’ve only met a few I like, and those ones were cats trapped in a dog’s body. __ Chris Randle is Toronto Standard’s Culture Editor.
