I was blown away when I first heard Caspar Blanchard read from his debut book Fresh Pack of Smokes (Nightwood, 2019), full of poems about a life lived at the intersections of the drug and sex trades in the Downtown Eastside (DTES), about the harshness and beauty. As a former sex worker and intravenous drug user in the DTES, I had never felt more seen, had never encountered a work of literature so true in its depiction of the neighbourhood and the folks who live and lived there. In the wake of the conviction of a man who murdered at least twenty-six women from the DTES, it became popular for people without either lived experience or solidarity with DTES folks to write and/or make art about the area where many of the Murdered and Missing Women had lived and worked. Caspar’s book is medicine, a balm for this harmful voyeurism, thoughtless art making, and extractive scholarly knowledge production, a balm for people who use drugs, especially those in the sex trade, because they know someone like them got out of the life. It’s also a community-generated archive of the Downtown Eastside before fentanyl and the toxic drug crisis. We grew into friends, talking for hours about the many things we couldn’t really talk about with other people, the dark stuff, but also the mundane stuff – or mundane for sex work anyways – and more and more we talk about joy, and pleasure, and the future.
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— Mercedes Eng
Mercedes Eng
Your brilliant award-winning book of poetry, Fresh Pack of Smokes, gets at the hardness of street life from the position of a sex worker, and it also has beautiful poems about community care in the Downtown Eastside. Like I remember that poem about Candy:
Candy’s hair was her résumé, she was my street mom and she taught me how to behave in jail, taught me where the good places are on the street and who to avoid, she had many street kids as her children, she is the only person I truly respected in that world.1
Could you talk a bit about the care that you received from street moms and jail moms?
Caspar Blanchard
Often older drug-using women will take younger drug users under their wing and will mentor or look out for them. For myself, for years I had a street mom who guided me on the street and in jail. She had many street people as her kids. Her name was Nancy and in jail she taught me how to behave. She also helped to bring me out of a deep depression after I was incarcerated and recovering from an extremely abusive relationship. Some might not think a drug dealer would be a good role model, however she became a mother figure for me when I barely had a relationship with my own mother due to my constant drug use and not coming around the family home. Feeling loved in the harsh world of the streets, and in the intensity of jail, helps young addicts know that it is still possible to feel like they have some sort of family.
ME
And now we’re family too, street siblings who got clean and left low track, not just surviving but thriving! I love the suite of numbered poems called “Love.” There’s “Love V,” a beautiful piece about Tecia, a woman you knew there, that shows the love you have for that community in doing “what [you] did which was to sit and listen to her story in between hits,” and how the danger of loving Tecia was different than the danger of toxic romantic love or addictive dope love – the danger of the love here is so tender, the danger here is letting yourself care for these women:
so the downside of quitting drugs is that I have to quit everyone as well, like I must ignore my heartstrings, to give them up so it’s better not to let others get under my skin, it’s better not to make friends and it’s especially wise to not care about anyone like how I grew to care about Tecia and her daughter2
Has that feeling (about the danger of caring) changed now? Can you talk about your most recent visit to the DTES?
CB
Recently, I went to a Bonnie Raitt concert so I had to take the Hullo ferry from the Island to Vancouver. I decided to walk the East Hastings strip from Cambie all the way to Campbell Street to see the neighbourhood, as I haven’t walked that street in many years. I also made sure I had cash on me because I always give money to street women. To me, I figure I am giving them twenty bucks that they don’t have to do anything for. They don’t have to suck cock or steal or anything. I realize I am giving them a free high but hey, they are not getting in any danger with me giving them the cash, and their lives are already full of danger. Parts of Hastings were pretty empty due to the extra policing for FIFA [World Cup 2026].
ME
I remember that quote about rats scattering: “I admit if I see a cop nowadays my heart does a tiny little jump cuz for so long I kept six and tried to avoid them as much as possible, and how funny it is when cops walking will clear a block faster than anything.”3 And I’m also thinking about how the same thing happened during Vancouver’s 2010 Winter Olympics: extra surveillance in areas where women worked; checking for warrants while issuing by-law tickets; dismantling encampments; harassment.
CB
Yeah, so I wanted to give cash but I didn’t see one sex worker working a corner and I think it is the first time I have seen that. The DTES has definitely changed, but as I passed by street folks, I felt like they were a part of my people.
