Caffè Italia bustles on any given weekday afternoon.

I love interviewing people here. With its seemingly willful disregard for any sense of hip aesthetic currency, its supercar posters and wobbly tables and naked fluorescent lightbulbs force patrons to focus on what really counts: the coffee, the sandwiches, the conversation.

Today, I am in the company of Emma Cosgrove, Catherine Machado, and Iva Celebic, collectively known as the poetry power trio RODAISUN. We have come to Caffè Italia to talk about their enduring friendship, their print publication, which now boasts more than 40 issues, and why making material objects feels all the more crucial in a world that increasingly favours the virtual and artificial.

The three 30-year-old writers exude a kind of punk band vibe, each with their own unique voice, but instinctively occupying their station on the proverbial stage. Celebic is something like the lead guitarist, with Cosgrove on bass, and Machado keeping the steady backbeat.

They all met as students of the Journalism programme at Ryerson and relocated to Montreal from the greater Toronto area five or so years ago, attracted at that time to this city’s relatively inexpensive rents and its legendarily bohemian lifestyle.

“A lot of people who were making anything in Toronto were just looking for other places to go,” says Celebic. “It was this moment where everyone was like, we can’t afford to do what we’re doing here. Where do we go?”

“Sort of a mass exodus,” Machado rebounds.

Toronto’s loss, however, is Montreal’s gain, as the three brought with them an aggregate ambition to enliven the literary world with their incomparable combination of whimsical observation, enthusiastic work ethic, and resuscitation of the poetic quotidian.

“We all are avid Moleskineers,” Celebic explains, referring to the popular diary brand.

Reunited in Montreal, they launched RODAISUN, a collection of works culled from their poetry notebooks published monthly in limited print runs and distributed in select bookstores, at dedicated events, and often by hand.

“We’d been doing this privately for ever. Everyday poetry was a really big thing in the ‘60s, the ’70s, the ‘80s, and it’s just not really happening now. No one is writing about watching a man eating a sandwich,” Celebic says, as I bite into my Prosciutto panini. “That could be a perfectly good piece of work.”

The three began by sharing their writing amongst themselves in freewheeling email chains. “Then we thought, what if we just picked our favourite things from that month and printed them off?” says Celebic.

“It doesn’t matter if it looks nice. There’s no pressure. If you don’t feel like sharing anything, you don’t have to. And we were like, okay, that feels like a better way to acknowledge the practice that we already have. And then it just didn’t really stop.”

RODAISUN, along with contemporaries like The Page, The Pit, Ahoy, and yolk, has gathered momentum and cultivated a dedicated following in the city’s English-language literary scene. Their readings are well-attended, and they always run out of their print editions in time to compile the next month’s issue. Though unlike their peers, they do not accept submissions.

“That’s kind of the point,” says Cosgrove. “It’s a conversation of our three voices. The number of times we’ve echoed each other, or had coincidences, or the same thought. It’s spooky. We’ve had side-by-side pieces that are kind of a conversation. And it feels like you don’t really get that with a series.”

“Our common ground,” Machado elaborates, “was that we were interested in archives, and archiving whatever was happening. We were all always journaling anyway. It’s not that we weren’t interested in journalism in general, but underneath, we’re poets. We’re interested in documents.”

“We were too emotional to be journalists,” Cosgrove recalls of their school days. “We just caught each other’s attention in a room of blank faces that we didn’t connect to. There were a lot of people who didn’t share our interests. And then I would see a book on the table that someone was reading and be like, oh, you read that? Can I borrow that?”

“Everybody wanted to be like the next newscaster for CBC,” Celebic scoffs. “And we were just kind of like…”

“We like writing,” says Cosgrove.

“We like writing,” Celebic reiterates. “We love finding out shit that no one knows about. We had more of an anarchist approach.”

That ragged and revolutionary orientation is what differentiates RODAISUN in a climate of so much sterile, themed poetry that seems algorithmically designed for social media.

“Life is a theme,” Celebic observes of their ethos. “Like, that month, she was depressed,” she points at Cosgrove, “and she was angry,” turning to Machado, “and I was happy — and these things need to sit together. It adds so much value because it’s always well rounded and it’s always all over the place and you can get what you want from it. This is us.”

When it comes to retail acumen, RODAISUN again works against the grain, sometimes selling their journals, other times giving them away for free, but never really establishing a standardized price.

“We make money on our events” says Celebic. “But in terms of the product itself, I never want to say it costs this much. We’re kind of loose about it. Which is not really the best business practice. But it’s the backbone of the project. It’s to be free.”

Our discussion turns to the significance of publishing on the page. There is an apparent incongruity between the common mantra that print media are dying, and the enduring success of independent booksellers, the launching of hyperlocal magazines that cater to niche audiences, and the printed word’s general persistence.

I ask the three why making a magazine is so important, when it would be much easier, say, to start a Substack.

“So you can throw it in the garbage,” Celebic quips without missing a beat. “So you can rip it. So you can give it to someone. So you can…”

“…underline it,” Cosgrove says.

“Underline it,” Celebic repeats. “There’s a nowness about it.”

“It’s more intimate,” remarks Machado. “It gives us some breathing room. Because we are so different, not just in our individualities but in our art, it gives you space to breathe that you don’t have to be something. It’s like a virtual studio that ends up in print.”

“I want to be able to look at my shelf in 50 years and see a stack of these,” says Cosgrove, wagging their latest issue. “And to always be able to pull it out and show someone — my child or whatever. There’s no way I’m going to go on a website in 50 years. I’m never going to see that. I’d much rather pick something up. That’s what’s lasting in this world.”

“It’s also nice that there’s a finite number that we’re printing,” Machado says. “You give them away, you sell them at a market, and then that work is gone. The release aspect of it actually really helps. Instead of it feeling like it’s infinitely sharable, it’s like, I’m out of copies. And then it’s the next month. It’s kind of a reset in a sense.”

Celebic concurs. “The physical thing is where you go to. It’s a space. Plus, a website is expensive. You pay for that every month and you’re like, I don’t go on it, I don’t interact with it. It’s important to have it for grant bodies, but you have to maintain a website also. You have to make it look trendy and make it clean. You don’t just build it and have it last for years. You have to update it. You have to have logos. A part of our political thing is that we want our grandmothers to read this. We want homeless people to read it. There are so many people who don’t live online.”

As they veer off on a tangent about the romantic appeal of looseleaf paper stapled together and doing DNA swabs on handmade objects that Thurston Moore might have touched, it becomes clear that RODAISUN represents all the things of value that artificial intelligence is incapable of replicating.

Connecting apparently disparate thoughts — often hilariously. Igniting the spark of linguistic spontaneity. Finishing each other’s sentences, not with pre-programmed ripostes but with just the right turn of phrase, sharpening and refining their endpoints like a new form of punctuation.

The banter continues for some time after our interview ends. RODAISUN inspires the reassurance that there will be no last word.◼︎

_{Cover image: From left: Iva Celebic, Emma Cosgrove, and Catherine Machado. Photographed by Sophia Perras for RODAISUN.}