Six Questions interview #57 : Monty Reid

Monty Reid was born in Saskatchewan, lived for many years in the Alberta badlands, and moved to the Ottawa area in 1999 to work at the Canadian Museum of Nature. His books include Karst Means Stone (NeWest), Crawlspace (Anansi), The Alternate Guide (rdc) and Garden (Chaudiere) – his most recent collection is 2016’s Meditatio Placentae (Brick). His chapbooks have appeared from many small publishers in Canada and abroad, including five from above/ground. A three-time GG nominee, he was Arc Poetry Magazine’s Managing Editor for many years and is currently the Director of VerseFest, Ottawa’s international poetry festival.

Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?

I've been in the Ottawa area since April, 1999.  For the first 5 years I actually lived in Quebec, up the valley near a little town called Luskville.  In 2004 I moved into Ottawa proper, and into my current home in the east end of the city in 2010. Like many, I moved here for a job. For me, it was a position at the Canadian Museum of Nature, but for many other writers (Phyllis Webb, John Newlove, Pk Page, Archibald Lampman, to mention just a few) it was work with the CBC or the post office or various government departments.  I had worked for many years in Alberta museums, primarily at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology and was getting just a little bored with building dinosaur exhibitions, so the offer to move to Ottawa was welcome.  Of course, the first thing I had to work on in Ottawa was re-doing the CMN's dinosaur gallery.  

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?

I grew up dirt-poor in central Saskatchewan.  My father died when I was very young and my mom gave piano lessons to keep us fed.  I read voraciously, but mostly what we had in the house was an old set of encyclopedia and the Western Producer.  I think my interest in writing grew out of that early reading, and from the escape and solace that it offered. I wrote a bit through high school but it wasn't until university that my interest solidified.  WO Mitchell wouldn't let me into his writing class, which was probably a good thing for both of us, because it made me work at it a little more seriously, and a year later Doug Barbour and Stephen Scobie accepted me into their Creative Writing - Poetry seminar.  I've written pretty steadily ever since.  

The one notable and extended gap was when I moved east in 1999.  I was welcomed to Ottawa by rob mclennan and Chris Levenson almost immediately but I found the move and the new job and the new (mostly francophone) community I was in completely exhausted my time and available energy.  I didn't write for 5 years, and I had a hard time starting again.  But then my longtime partner, dubious about the move right from the start, went back to Alberta, we sold the house by the river, and I moved into town.  I started writing and publishing again and was pleased to appear in the inaugural group of Chaudiere Books publications.  That was really what got me involved in the Ottawa literary world.

Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?  

It didn't shift my thinking all that much, but it reinforced how valuable that kind of community is for most writers.  I had been in a very active community in Alberta, and had helped to found the Writers Guild of Alberta, which has since become a mainstay organization in the province, and helped to introduce a more equitable and generous funding program for writers.  But it was the interaction between writers that I really missed, with little magazines and micropresses, conferences and collaborations and workshops all feeding the excitement.  I could count on people like Bob Kroetsch, Aritha van Herk, Bob Hilles, Wade Bell, Doug Barbour, Myrna Kostash, Stephen Scobie, Rudy Weibe, Bert Almon,  and many others as my friends and co-conspirators.  But that experience also led me to the belief that while writing communities can spring up by fortunate coincidence, they can't survive that way. They can only survive with the conscious and focused effort of the writers themselves, and even then, they will eventually disappear, or morph into something else, the original energy dissipating.

Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow? 

The literary scene has been pretty good in Ottawa for the past 15 years or so.  The Writers Festival has really solidified its presence, and VerseFest has become one of the biggest poetry events in the country.  Local writers like Sandra Ridley and David O'Meara have risen to national attention. Arc Poetry Magazine is a sturdy build. The spoken word scene is on the upswing again and francophone poets are building a scene as well in conjunction with their colleagues in Gatineau.  At the same time, we no longer have a literary press, and things do seem to be splintering a bit, which is probably just a normal result of a period of significant growth.  I don't think this kind of cycle is unique to Ottawa - it's just fun to be part of it while it's on the upswing.  

One notable thing that is very different in Ottawa is the relatively low profile of the universities in the poetry scene.  In most other large cities, poets often cluster around the academic institutions (think Concordia, UofT, UofC, SFU, etc), which offer both intellectual and financial sustenance. They provide office space, support literary magazines, sometimes even engage with the broader community. But they can also support a certain liturgy of style and reference.  It's probably changing as we speak, but at the moment I can't think of any well-known Ottawa poets embedded at our universities. One might argue that the public service, all those govt jobs, have replaced the academic institutions in this context.  That may well be true in terms of financial support, but I don't think there's much intellectual sustenance to be found there.  

Q: Have any of your projects responded directly to your engagements here? How have the city and its community, if at all, changed the way you approached your work?

For sure.  I've developed a large garden, and a related book of poems.  I live next to CSIS, and now next to a long sequence of spy poems.  I'm working on some translations, which has come from my work at VerseFest. Etc.  

Q: What are you working on now?  

Grants - to pay more poets for their work. And UnGrief, my response to the epidemic of grief.
 

Six Questions interview #56 : Deborah-Anne Tunney

Poet, novelist, and short story writer, Deborah-Anne Tunney was raised and has lived in Ottawa all her life. Her book of linked short stories, The View from the Lane, was published in 2014 and her novel, Winter Willow, in 2019 by Great Plains Publications, Enfield and Wizenty imprint. In July 2020, her collection of poetry, A Different Wolf, on the life and work of Alfred Hitchcock was published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. Her work has also appeared (or will appear) in Canadian, American and UK literary journals, notably Narrative, Missouri Review, Threepenny Review, Exile, Fiddlehead, The New Quarterly, Event, among others.

 

Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here? 

 

Fate, or as Heidegger would put it, my thrownness, where I happened to be thrown. My father’s family lived here for many generations, in the Westboro area, on the land now referred to as Tunney’s Pasture. And my mother too was born and raised in Ottawa, in the Sandy Hill area. Except for the odd season away when I was younger, here is where I have lived my life also.

 

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here? 

 

For me writing had always been a secret activity; I suppose because it felt presumptuous to think anyone would want to read what I wrote. My brother, a decade older than me, had books which I would borrow (or steal) and in one of those books, an anthology of American writing, I read the poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot. At the time I read it without understanding its intent, but I knew immediately that here was the thing for me that would give meaning to life. It was like finding a new element in nature.  I wish now that I could experience the exhilaration I felt when I first read that poem and others in my brother’s book. At this stage, I could likely speak of what Eliot was communicating and feel I’d tamed the beauty of his language into something like logic, but I cannot capture that feeling of  – and here I struggle for the correct word – the bliss, or joy, or awe that I felt at twelve reading it for the first time. I’ve come to feel gratitude for that spontaneous impulse and that I was able at such a young age, to know what I wanted to study and what I needed to have in my life. Around the same age I had an experience of what I can only refer to as a waking vision, after which I was left in awe and not wanting to lose the emotions it evoked, it struck me that the only way I could hold on to it was to write it down. That was the first time that I wrote on my own initiative, without obligation.

            I did not personally know another writer until it became necessary to stop my PhD program in English Literature (I was at the point of having to attend fulltime, which my situation then did not permit). I had begun working at the National Research Council as a teenager and for years had done my university studies at night and so I decided to use my evenings to change my focus from the study of literature to its creation. At the time Humber College in Toronto was starting a writing correspondence program, to which I was accepted. For the first two years I worked with Bonnie Burnard, and then Isabel Huggan for almost a decade. Today I tell Isabel that so much flowed from my working with her because she introduced me to Jean Van Loon, who recommended me to the Rubies poetry collective. Joining this group of talented women meant I met and became friends with some wonderful writers: Lise Rochefort (who hosted our gatherings), Frances Boyle, Laurie Koensgen (these three poets were the founding members of the group), Jacqueline Bourque, Pearl Pirie and Robin MacDonald. A little while later Jean joined the group along with Mary Lee Bragg, Claudia Radmore, Doris Fiszer, Sneha Madhaven-Reese, Jenny Haysom, Susan Atkinson among others over the years. Through Frances, I attended a short story writing group run by Mary Borsky, a writer I’d always admired, where again I met a group of talented writers, and I note especially Sonia Tilson who became another friend. These dear friends and remarkable writers helped me incredibly, not only in the creation of my work – their critique has been invaluable – in their support through all the trials of the writing life, but also in their knowledge of the Canadian publishing world.  As an example of how my fellow writers have helped in the process of promoting my work, Laurie reached out to one of her contacts, someone she felt would be interested in my poetry collection, A Different Wolf, on the life and work of Alfred Hitchcock. This contact then gave her names of experts in the area of cinema from across Canada whom I was able to contact in the promotion of my book. And if it were not for the urging of Frances, the book itself might never have been published.

            With Frances and Mary, I am also part of a short story group that meets monthly (now over zoom) when again I met another group of amazing writers – Rhonda Douglas, Barbara Sibbell, Debra Martens, Maria Saba, Kathlyn Bradshaw, Una McDonnell, Sara Mang, among others. It’s easy to appreciate how the cross pollination of local groups has created the vibrant writing scene we’re lucky enough to enjoy in Ottawa. 

 

Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?

  

When I first started to write I realized that there was an element of pure joy to it, when I was able to transform into words a thought, or a moment, or an image. Of course in the harsh light of day I’d read what I’d produced in those moments and wonder what I was thinking, but putting that aside, this experience is the magic that not only allows creation, it also makes a writer crave the creative act. It is the thing you miss terribly when you’re unable to write as it is the moment that lifts you from the everyday into a place where you can define and order and bring sense to the chaos of experience. So if that’s the impetus, the next stage in the creative process is to bring this enlightenment (I use the term lightly) to an audience, to have it rinsed of superfluous details or intent, and it is then that a writing group can help immensely. They are the sounding board, grounded in the world, and if a writer is lucky enough to have such generous writing colleagues as I have, they are invested in seeing your work be the best it can be. They celebrate with you when things go well and give you emotional support when they don’t, when you meet those inevitable pitfalls and disappointments. Fundamentally, they understand the writing quest, that thing that drives you to create, they are afflicted, some would say, with the same involuntary need to express themselves, ‘the midnight disease’, as the neurologist Alice Flaherty refers to it in her book on the subject.

 

Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow? 

 

Having not lived elsewhere for any real length of time, it is difficult to compare. But, that said, I cannot imagine a more generous and supportive environment than the writing community I’ve found in Ottawa. Nor can I imagine a place where I could find more interesting and compelling stories as those I have gathered over my lifetime here. Of course, it can be argued that anywhere you find humans, you find human stories, and these stories – the language of our psychology – are universal enough that where you live is not that crucial an element to your creative process.

            I love visiting New York City, or Montreal, or travelling to large European cities. I love the cosmopolitan sense that at any moment something exceptional can happen. It sparks the mind, but I am reminded of Flaubert’s famous dictum to writers: “Be regular and orderly in your life so that you can be violent and original in your work”. This is not to say that the exceptional is not found in Ottawa, for as I’ve said, the elements of life here, like life anywhere are full of mystery and hope and the universal.

            When my stepson was young and would complain “I am bored,” I would reply, “Well, then you are boring”.  You have a personal obligation to fight boredom, I’d argue, and you do that by engaging the imagination. Ottawa is the place where I was first able to read Eliot, and where I was able to study literature that linked me to generations of writers and thinkers, a place in short where my imagination was given free reign to create. I guess what I’ve come to appreciate about Ottawa is that, as my home where I can easily be regular and orderly, supported as I am by friends and family, it is unarguably the perfect place for my writing life.

 

Q: Have any of your projects responded directly to your engagements here? How have the city and its community, if at all, changed the way you approached your work? 

 

My first published book, The View from the Lane, which is a collection of linked stories is set mostly in Ottawa. I saw the east end neighbourhood of Overbrook where I grew up as the landscape for some of those stories. I’m not sure I had an option as this is the place I knew best, the place where all my young life happened, the place, in fact, that provided the mystery and puzzlement that often is the impetuous for a work of art. It’s difficult to know or even express the impact your home has on your imagination, but I believe place is a crucial element in the creation of literature, one that cannot be divorced from the stories themselves.           

            Where my novel Winter Willow takes place is never revealed, but I can tell you that the snow scenes, when Melanie is marooned in that large mansion called Winter Willow, were inspired by the Ottawa storms I have experienced through the years. When I wrote of the university, it was the University of Ottawa I saw, and the surrounding streets and bridges.

            Likewise, in my poetry collection, even though I used the work of Alfred Hitchcock as the point of departure, the link between the movies and poetry brought me back to Ottawa, for it was in Ottawa that I experienced my first viewing of these movies. And it was here where I tried to initially untangle the mystery of Hitchcock’s cinematic vision. I was driven to align my experiences of life with the expectations implicit in his world view, especially in his depiction of women in the 1950s. Arguably, this to be the era when we find Hitchcock’s fullest creative expression and I’ve analysed why the work resonated so powerfully with me. I came to feel it is Hitchcock’s obsession with women and the societal pressures of the 1950s. His observations of these elements allowed him to create the artefacts whereby we can examine the cultural implications of the era and in fact how those assumptions continue to define classifications of ideal femininity. And I believe the confluence of these two facts – Hitchcock’s portrayal of his vision of women and my own personal reaction to such a vision – was the impetuous for writing A Different Wolf.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

Just as I tend to always be reading at least one book of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, I have three projects of my own which I am currently working on. The first and oldest is a collection of poetry which I’ve called ‘The Yard’, and which to varying degrees looks at how yards – those from the past and those currently in my life – have come to represent all that can pass through a life. As repositories of years of constant change, they display seasons, death, birth, they give comfort, are laid bare by storms, know winter cold, are awakened in spring, and bloom in summer. I did not set out to write a collection on yards, but noticed that this topic seemed to find me, as if a gravitational core around the idea took form to find its expression in the poems.

            I’m also working on a book of short stories which I’ve tentatively called It Is What It Is, after a story in the collection. Of its fourteen stories, six have been or will be published. And my newest project is a longer work which has at its heart a trip I took to Dublin about eight years ago. It is in the nascent stage when I am not sure of its value or even what I am trying to capture, when I may decide it’s not worth the effort and let it go. Years ago, when I was working with Isabel, she gave the sage advice to dream my way into the story. And when I am falling asleep often it is this story that comes to mind, that I can see when I close my eyes. This seems to me to indicate that I will not have the option to let it go, although I will have the option to not share it.

 

Six Questions interview #55 : Jennifer Falkner

Jennifer Falkner (she/her) is an award-winning short story writer living in Ottawa, Canada, on the traditional unceded territory of the Anishinaabe people. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, in Canada and internationally. Her forthcoming novella (Susanna Hall, Her Book) will be published in 2022 by Fish Gotta Swim Editions.

Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?  

I was nineteen and didn’t know what to do with myself. I had some friends living here and, coming from Kingston, Ottawa seemed like a “manageable” city, small enough not to be intimidating, but still busy with plenty to do. I enrolled in the College of Humanities at Carleton, although having to read Aristotle in second year nearly broke me. I ended up switching to Greek and Roman Studies, and then an MA from the University of Ottawa after that. Hard to believe I’ve been here for just over twenty years.

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?  

Although I always had it my mind that I wanted to be a writer, and I submitted a few poems as part of my portfolio when applying to the College of Humanities program, I didn’t get really serious about writing until a little over ten years ago when I left school.

I can’t really say I’ve been part of the writing community here, though I’ve been peripherally aware of it. Most of my writing community I have found online in the friendships and writing circles that came out of various online writing classes. I regret not having pushed myself out of my shell more while I was at Carleton though. I knew of In/Words and various literary groups and events but was too shy to go.

Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?

There’s such a relief in being in contact with other writers, isn’t there? In having the strange obsession/compulsion to make marks on paper be understood and celebrated. 

Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?

I think Ottawa’s size has a lot going for it. Not too large to be intimidating. Though I don’t think the literary community is as culturally diverse as perhaps it could be.  

Q: Have any of your projects responded directly to your engagements here? How have the city and its community, if at all, changed the way you approached your work?

I don’t think they have, except in so far as some of my historical fiction has been inspired by either reading Classics in university or from local history (as long as local is broadly interpreted as southern Ontario). 

Q: What are you working on now?

Currently I’m looking for a home for a short story collection. Having just completed a novella, I’m trying to up the ante and write a novel. But this keeps getting sidetracked because of the affair I’m having with poetry at the moment.

Six Questions interview #54 : Sean Johnston

Sean Johnston lives with his family in Kelowna, BC. He teaches at Okanagan College, is currently at work on a new novel and recently finished a short fiction manuscript called Multiplicanda Ah Um.

Q: How long were you in Ottawa, and what first brought you here? What took you away? 

A: I was in Ottawa for 4 ½ years in the early 90s to get a Bachelor of Journalism at Carleton University. I left for work, finding working briefly as a journalist in Alberta and then returning to surveying for highway construction as I had done since I was 16.

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?

A: I was writing my whole life, sending horrible stories out to Asimov’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Omni, and other magazines that I was reading at the time. I didn’t have a community most of the time, but my family all read and I remember our trips into Saskatoon and hours spent in the Saskatoon Public Library downtown or Westgate Books on 22^nd street in Saskatoon. I would read things I didn’t understand from the library (big books by Charles Olson or ee cummings for instance), and things I did from the science fiction and comics sections of Westgate books.

Aside from taking part in a writing group in Saskatoon that I wasn’t ready for, as a teen (a very nice group including Susan Andrews Grace, a friend of my mother’s, who was my introduction to the group – I am still embarrassed by the memories of the poems I shared there, and my inability to speak intelligently due to social anxiety and being in the very early stages of my thinking and development), I hadn’t been a part of any community of writers until I got to Ottawa. There I met many writers through classes with Tom Henighan and Christopher Levenson, and we would go out to open mics and readings and meet every so often to argue and share poetry. There is a long list of people who became friends that way, and people I didn’t become friends with but still admired, and admire still.

Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all? Have there been subsequent shifts due to where you have lived since? 

A: The first time I found myself in a community of writers was in Ottawa during my time at Carleton, and the most important way it changed me was by giving me permission to be a writer. The J-School was the first part of that – arguing with peers about sentences changed me because here were people who cared about the same things as me. Then meeting Chris Pollard and Stu Konyer from Hostbox, and being in Hostbox did the same thing. Each subsequent group I met in Ottawa did the same for me. Roger Bird was important at Carleton. Jim Larwill was important. James Spyker was. Robert Hogg, who was kind and patient with my cynicism about contemporary poetry when it frustrated my expectations.

Subsequent communities of writing that I have been a part of have worked differently, but that’s because of the stage during which I lived in Ottawa. I was young and full of myself and I loved the arguments over poetics. I was still a bit like that when I lived in Fredericton and went to UNB, but there I discovered, mostly due to Ross Leckie, I think, the amazing variety of work that was available to me if I met it on its own terms. At times in the pub after class, I know Ross would be frustrated with my relentless questioning, but I kind of would have listened to him speak about any poet; his love of all kinds of writing was what I tried to learn.

Every move I made in my life was unplanned, really. I would work in construction, then save my money and go back to school in order to sit and talk about writing with other people who were there to do the same. At the University of South Dakota, where I went to spend a few years because the cost of living was cheap (I had been working in Vancouver at the time) and because I (honestly) wanted to live in a flat place again, I worked with Lee Ann Roripaugh, who was much like Ross the breadth of her poetic and artistic interests, and it was an amazing, supportive community too.

Now I am lucky again, here in the Okanagan, where writers like John Lent, Jake Kennedy, and Corinna Chong tell me who they’re reading, who they can’t read, why they love who they love, etc. 

Q: What did you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What did Ottawa provide, or allow? 

A: Ottawa for me will always be about a certain time in my life, so my idea of the writing community there is necessarily nostalgic. It is the 90s and I could do what I wanted to do for the first time in my life. I had little money, but I had good friends who cared about the written word.

Q: Have any of your projects responded directly to your engagements here? How had the city and its community, if at all, changed the way you approached your work? 

A: I wrote a number of poems about my life in Ottawa. I have found a lot of my work is still about the prairies but I have set a few stories in each place I’ve lived after I left it. I have written a couple of stories set in Ottawa, including “We Don’t Celebrate That” about a government writer allowed to return to Ottawa after being exiled for some years. He meets an old friend on the canal in winter and is thankful the cold weather and the winter clothing hides the marks of his embarrassment and torture.

Q: What are you working on now? 

A: I am working on short fiction always, and a sequel to my first novel, All This Town Remembers. It’s called Outside Harris and it’s about the protagonist trying to change a tire on his truck at night in the middle of winter. He is unprepared.

Six Questions interview #53 : Missy Marston

Missy Marston’s first novel, The Love Monster, was the winner of the 2013 Ottawa Book Award, a finalist for the CBC Bookie Awards and for the Scotiabank Giller Prize Readers' Choice. Her second novel, Bad Ideas, is about daredevils and love. She lives in Ottawa with the artist, Peter Shmelzer, and the two small dogs with which they have replaced their grown children.

Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?

I moved to Ottawa when I was 18 to go to school and, except for a brief and super fun Student Work Abroad stint in the UK, I have been here ever since. Thirty-five years of joy and sorrow.

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?

I wrote as a little kid and I had a couple of kind teachers in my hometown that encouraged me. This led to some angsty teenage journaling. (I would write day after day, filling notebook after notebook. Then I would tear each notebook to pieces and shove them in the garbage.)

At Carleton I found writing friends. I remember Andrea Thompson and I sitting at the dining room table in her apartment on Bronson, typing up submissions to poetry magazines. We sent out stacks of them. My first reading was at an open-mic at Rasputin’s. My first published poem was in Arc magazine. I still have the check for ten dollars pinned to my bulletin board. Treasure.

Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?

I guess being exposed to the variety of work being produced gave me a better idea of where my work fit and how I wanted to define it. I was still kind of a child when I moved here so this was the first time I was part of a community and making friends that weren’t my exact contemporaries (that weren’t in my grade!). So, I was able to benefit from other people’s experience and also I was able to picture my future as an independent adult which honestly had been impossible for me before.  

Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?

I love Ottawa. Almost everything important that has ever happened to me has happened to me here.  My kids were born and raised here. I found the love of my life here. I went to my first rock concert here (Fifth Dimension at the Ex when I was four). I wrote both my novels here and had launch parties in rooms full of beautiful friends. I don’t know what happens here that doesn’t happen anywhere else but I have loved living and working here.

Q: Have any of your projects responded directly to your engagements here? How have the city and its community, if at all, changed the way you approached your work?

I’m not sure how much direct evidence there is of Ottawa in my work. I can tell you that every reading I have ever been to -- at the literary festival, VerseFest, Plan 99 at The Manx, open mic stuff at Tree or Sawdust – has energized me and made me happy to be alive. I have my “writing group”, whose activities mostly involve talking about books and drinking beer but when it matters, providing advice on works in progress. Writing a novel takes a long time. A person can lose hope or get lost. These friends have kept me on track. Eye on the prize.

Q: What are you working on now?

I am working on my third novel. It is pretty juicy. Full of the unthinkable and the unbelievable. Sometimes I hate it. Today I love it. As usual, it will take me forever.