Q: How long were you in Ottawa, and what first brought you here? What took you away?
I was born in Ottawa, but my family moved to Halifax six months later. We moved around quite a bit – Halifax, Burlington, Memphis, Brantford, Edmonton, Saskatoon. My parents returned to Ottawa in the early 80s, and I moved west to Vancouver, but that’s when I started visiting Ottawa regularly. Back then, it was just another strange city. I remember discovering the feral cats behind Parliament Hill and the old guy who looked after them. In those days, I felt more at home with the feral cats than anywhere else. My parents lived in Nepean, about as suburban as it gets. I was living in East Vancouver, working at radio station in the Downtown East Side. Reconciling those different places was always a bit strange, a bit of a challenge. I eventually moved to Montreal to go to grad school, met my partner and together we moved to Ottawa – not actually Ottawa; it was Chelsea first, and then Old Hull – but that’s when I returned to Ottawa on my own terms. My partner was finishing her PhD at Carleton, I was completing a postdoc at McGill. My daughter was born in Ottawa. A little while after, we moved to Edmonton for work.
Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?
In grade 10, I think -- my English teacher introduced us to the work of William Carlos Williams. When I read The Red Wheelbarrow a little door blew open in my head. It probably sounds corny, but that’s what it felt like. In grade 11 or 12, another English teacher asked us to keep a journal, as an assignment. He said my journal was like a writer’s journal – and that stuck. When I drifted out to Vancouver, a couple of years later with all my meagre belongings packed into an old Ford Fairlane I’d bought for $500, it was to be a writer. That was the goal. The shelves of my little Stathcona apartment and my days were were filled with WC Williams, Sylvia Plath, Kurt Vonnegut, JD Salinger, Pablo Neruda, Michael McClure, Jerzy Kosinski, ee cummings, Richard Brautigan, Herman Hesse - at least in those early days. I had followed a friend out west and we were both going to be writers. A bit later, I was involved in the poetry community in Vancouver in the 90s - Slaughterhouse, Glass Slipper, The Grind, Silvertone, Malcolm Lowery Room, Vancouver Press Club - performing and organizing. Some of us started a poetry magazine – Rain City Review. I was part of the Ducktape Platypus Poets Coalition – we were so ridiculous and enthusiastic.
When I moved back to the Ottawa area in 2009, the writing community was more active than I might have suspected, but I was busy doing my academic thing in Montreal, traveling back and forth, and then I became a father, so I did not connect in as much as I might have wanted to. Life gets in the way. I went to a few readings -- at the Tree Reading Series, and to David O’Meara’s series at the Manx – such a great venue for readings. I loved the Manx. I read there once when my first book came out and had many a late night there. rob mclennan held a literary xmas party and reading every year above the Carleton Tavern that I somehow managed to get to. I found a talented, supportive crew of writers in Ottawa.
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?
Being in a community of writers is, I think, essential at different stages of a writer’s life. It is where a writer can learn, commiserate, be celebrated and perhaps most importantly, be understood. Writing can be a lonely journey, especially before you’ve published anything or anyone cares that you exist - professionally, I mean. The writing community understands and can be a place of sustenance and support. I belong to a writer’s group in Edmonton, for fiction writing, and the support and learning that I’ve experienced with these writers is absolutely remarkable. My activities in the Vancouver poetry scene in the 90s, also helped sustain me creatively. There are few rewards for a young poet, especially for one whose work was as god-awful as mine was. But getting up and sharing it put me in touch with other writers, some of whom became friends and who, over the years, have become wonderful poets and with whom I have maintained not only friendships but active dialogues about poetry, writing, and so on. Without these kinds of relationships, the writing life would be too lonely to contemplate.
But then there’s times life takes up more space, and connecting with a writing community is harder – logistically, existentially, whatever. That’s OK, too. But the work that goes into building these communities – in Ottawa, Vancouver, Montreal, Edmonton – is so vital. These are the spaces that nurture our writers before and often after they have found wider publics to engage with.
Q: What did you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What did Ottawa provide, or allow?
It’s hard to answer this question, because I was pretty disconnected while I lived in Chelsea and Old Hull; or maybe better, only peripherally connected. I suppose what I caught a glimpse of is what a more mature writing community might look and feel like. In Vancouver I was a 20 something idiot, with time on my hands and a lot of BS in my fuel tank. We created readings and then gathered at them in any space that would have us – from private BDSM clubs during their downtimes, to cafes, to churches converted to performance spaces, to dive bars and so on. In Ottawa, I was working on an academic career – unrelated to poetry – and learning how to be a father. That abundance of time had evaporated, and the fun foolishness we used to get up to just wasn’t a thing. But what I encountered in Ottawa were adult writers, people who had given their lives to this activity – no longer running on the fumes of youthful enthusiasm, but with the mature dedication and passion of more seasoned writers. I appreciated that – still fun, and of course the kids were around, but it was different. I could appreciate more clearly how important that kind of community can be for those who define their lives by writing.
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?
I’ve written a few poems that have emerged out the Ottawa environs, at my parent’s place in Nepean, or traveling to and from Ottawa while I lived in Montreal. My father was diagnosed with cancer just when I started grad school in Montreal, so Ottawa became a place for increasingly important time spent with my Mom and Dad. And then becoming a father myself. So much happened while living there. I also defended my doctoral dissertation. My first collection of poetry was published. I think the most direct influence came from the place, the region. When we lived in Chelsea, a little north of Ottawa, we wanted to live in the country, back to the land, all that - I was finishing my doctorate. I kind of went bananas living in the country. We rented a place on a very small lot, on a rural highway, and drove back and forth to the university. Days were spent in that rural place – the silence, the trees – it should have been idyllic, I suppose, but I missed being connected to people. From the Plateau in Montreal to a rural highway was a big leap, at least for me. I used to walk on a small gravel road at the boundary of Gatineau Park, a few kilometers long, through grassy fields alongside a small creek. When my father died, that’s where I collected wildflowers for his service, two massive bouquets of wildflowers. Ottawa, the place of my birth, the place of my daughter’s birth, was also the place of my father’s death. Poems came out of all of this churning, some of them are in my new collection. I think being able to connect in when I did to the
Ottawa writing community helped keep this part of my life alive at a time when I had so little energy to put there.
Q: What are you working on now?
My second collection of poetry, Who We Thought We Were As We Fell, is coming out this spring (Cormorant Books, 2021), so that’s exciting. Most of my creative energy for the past little while – in addition to completing this collection – has gone into longform fiction, a novel; such a difficult process, but it does continue to grow and find itself. The story is about disparate, broken people trying to overcome limitations - being forced to, really, or invited to by the circumstances of their lives – individually at first, and then with the possibility of collectivity, and in the face of the kinds of indifference to suffering that algorithmic cultures seem to propagate. I have also started working with a visual artist on an illustrated version of one of my short stories. It’s my first foray into writing for a graphic novella, and if it works out, we’re hoping to explore more work together. And finally, I have another collaboration in the works with a visual artist on a kids alphabet book, which is really fun and whimsical.
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