Allusionist 212. Four Letter Words: Park transcript

July 8, 2025 The Allusionist

HZ: What is a park?

JUSTIN McELROY: I think ultimately a park is… and it's funny because people sometimes debate: should there be grass, should there be trees? Should there be a playground? Does it need to be a certain size? A park can be anything, that's part of the wonderful flexibility of how we use public spaces. I think, fundamentally, so long as it's a public space that people can hang out in and do a variety of activities, then you got yourself a park.

HZ: Even if those activities aren't hunting? You'll accept?

JUSTIN McELROY: I'll accept, because we're no longer in 17th century Britain. But I traveled the world for the last year before coming back to Vancouver. And every country, every city has different things that they think is an ideal park, and you can see that shape the set-up. But that ability to be different things, I think, is the shining example for what makes them universal.

HZ: Vancouver is a bit imbalanced because it has a lot of little parks and then one massive park at Stanley Park.

JUSTIN McELROY: And Stanley Park is the best park in the city. It might be the best urban park in the world, when you consider just how big it is, the range of things you can do.

HZ: Yeah, they filmed Twilight there.

JUSTIN McELROY: Ha! The amazing views that you have of the mountains and the ocean and the city, that you can jog, that you can bike, that you can walk, that you can see all different sorts of gardens and playgrounds: it's absolutely phenomenal, and an absolute jewel. And it's fun to contrast that with the other 242 parks. They can't all be winners, but they're all doing something.

Allusionist 118 Survival: Bequest transcript

July 4, 2020 The Allusionist

ELIZABETH KEREKERE: I'm so convinced that transphobia, biphobia, homophobia are such an integral part of colonisation, I reject that as a colonial construct, I reject it as racist.
As they took our land - tried to take all of our land, tried to take all of our language and suppress our culture, they also took our expressions of sexuality and gender. And that is important to us in a core part of our culture, especially because the way that the institutional racism, the intergenerational trauma that is the legacy of colonisation has impacted on us and the levels of discrimination against people with diverse genders, sexualities and sex characteristics, that we see that all of this, all of this was a massive attempt to cover up what was already there and pretend it never happened.

Allusionist 116: My Dad Excavated a Porno transcript

June 3, 2020 The Allusionist

HZ: The Victorians really did a number on people. I feel like we're still unpicking Victorian attitudes.

KATE LISTER: Yes, we are. I mean, we're still very much the children of the Victorians, and they're a fascinating bunch, the Victorians. No generation, at no point in history, has sex been successfully repressed, ever. It just doesn't happen. But what you have is really strict social morality, conditioning and mores and constructs and power dynamics around sex that dictate what we are and what we're not supposed to be doing. And outward facing, they were so repressed and polite society and so offended by everything even remotely to do with sex, to the point of where they wouldn't say the word 'trousers' because they thought they were too rude. They were 'sit down upons'.

Allusionist 85. Skin Story - transcript

September 21, 2018 The Allusionist

HZ: Thirteen or so years ago, I met a friend at a pub, and she had someone with her who had a tattoo on her elbow of the word ‘cuticles,’. An unusual word to see as a tattoo - unlikely to be the name of a loved one or a birthplace or something. And also it wasn’t just the word ‘cuticles’, it was ‘cuticles’ followed by a comma.

SHELLEY JACKSON: With a piece of punctuation attached, you can really tell that it must be part of something else.

HZ: She was part of something else: The Skin Project, a story, 2095 words long, and each word tattooed on a person.