Name: Zorras (Sandra Alland and Y Josephine)

Day job: Same as our night job (making poetry-music-video-weirdness fusion, with megaphones). Y composes and performs music. Sandra writes and performs poetry and short fiction, as well as making video and photo art.

Extra-curricular: Reading. Real books, with pages and such. Y also likes to hand-make books and paint. Sandra likes to publish and review other people’s writing, and grow plants.

Our main extra-curricular habit is curating Cachín Cachán Cachunga!, our multimedia, multicultural, queer & trans cabaret in Edinburgh. It’s our three-year anniversary tomorrow!

Favourite book of all time: Impossible to have just one. The best we can do is Books We Have Felt Compelled to Read More Than Once…

Whipping Girl by Julia Serano, Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson, The People of Paper by Salvador Plasencia, Beloved by Toni Morrison, Orlando by Virginia Woolf, Battles in the Desert by Jose Pacheco, Live Through This edited by Sabrina Chap, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Maribou Stork Nightmares by Irvine Welsh, The Bonesetter’s Daughter by Amy Tan, Widows by Ariel Dorfman and I Am A Red Dress by Anna Camilleri.

Literary pet peeve: Rhyming poetry, unless it’s actually good. The way Sarah Waters overuses the word ‘queer’ without meaning something sexy or ironic by it. Literary competitions, be they slams, death matches, or publications where you pay for a chance to ‘win’.

Guilty pleasure: Watching David Suchet as Agatha Christie’s Poirot.

Three favourite authors: 

Y: Virginia Woolf, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Zoe Valdez.

Sandra: Again, an impossible question, but I’ll give you a few people I’m thinking about lately. Tracey Emin fascinates me lately because she’s an excellent writer – so fierce, fearless and hilarious– yet I often dislike her.

I’m not a huge fan of Jackie Kay’s poetry or novels, but I’m completely addicted to her short stories. I think I’ll just arbitrarily say Harold Pinter for the last one. He was fantastic, was he not? Oh, but wait! Larissa Lai is also way cool.

Favourite fictional characters: Winnie in Happy Days by Samuel Beckett. Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. Alice B. Toklas in An Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein. The bookseller in The Possibilities by Howard Barker.

Other recommended reading: Pretty much any short stories by Ali Smith, Miranda July and Jackie Kay. Poetry by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Chrystos, Nathalie Stephens, Juliana Spahr, Rachel Zolf, bill bissett, Stuart Ross and Andra Simons. Plays by d’bi.young, Howard Barker, Caryl Churchill, Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett.

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