Q: How long were you in Ottawa, and what first brought you here? What took you away?
I’m a Nepean boy, from a failed suburb that consists of 14 houses in a farmer’s field on Merivale Road, halfway to Manotick – something I’ve gotten mileage out of in my poems. I lived in Barrhaven during the hi skool epoch and later in Gatineau while studying Classics at U of O in the 90s. I spent some time away then came back to study French linguistics at Carleton in the mid thousands. In between were stints as a student then later lecturer at Queen’s (oil thigh! etc.), and also as a doctoral burnout case at U of T. Fun times.
Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?
Like so many writers, it started with childhood precocity. I was never satisfied with just hearing goodnight stories or reading out of picture books. I needed to create, dammit. It was in my blood. I was an inveterate liar as a child, a confabulator extraordinaire who always got caught out but that’s beside the point. I won awards for my stories in grade school, and for a high school creative writing assignment I wrote a 40-page novella when the teacher was expecting only 5. I sought to support a writing career as an academic, and deliberately chose to avoid English Lit in favour of Classics because hey, let’s get to the root of this whole Western Canon © thing. My involvement with the writing community was unfortunately rather minimal, as it became clear that studying myself sick was going to be a full-time job. I knew about Blaine Marchand, Robert Hogg, Cyril Dabydeen, Christopher Levinson, Norman Levine, John Newlove, and the Tree Reading Series, but stayed on the periphery out of sheer terror. I did, however, manage to make contact with John Metcalf when he was writer in residence at the Nepean Public Library in Barrhaven(!). His Going Down Slow alerted me to a new way of writing, one that wore its style deliberately, one that was umpteen times more sophisticated than that Frederick Philip Grove toe jam that high schools still taught. Dear Lord, tell me they’ve progressed beyond that point.
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?
I wanted to write the Great Canadian Novel, or at least a clutch of really good short stories. I didn’t bank on mental illness or a gnat’s attention span. Or the inability to generate, you know, narrative. So after decades of banging my head against the granite countertop of fiction, I turned to poetry… 10 years ago, at the ripe age of 42. I’m a naïve poet, in the way that Rousseau was a naïve painter; in matters of literature, I’m strictly an autodidact who only ever took one course in university that wasn’t about works written in Latin or Greek. So becoming a poet came about only after I’d moved to Grey and Bruce counties and failed as a school teacher (but that’s a story for another campfire). Upon my arrival in Owen Sound, after a stint of homelessness, and borderline suicidal, I reached out to the artistic community and discovered a local coffeehouse series which was all about spoken word. My first few page poems went down like lead balloons, as this is a performance town that is mostly about singer-songwriters. If you’re going to be a poet here, you’d better ditch the pages and learn to chew a mic. I learned to do so under the influence of the genial Kristan Anderson. I quickly got to know scores of people in the various interpenetrating artistic communities here – visual, auditory and literary – and got to know the venerable Liz Zetlin and steadfast Rob Rolfe. Under their influence I began a shift to literary verse. All of this literally saved my life. I’m essentially unemployable; art gave me a purpose when I figured I had run out of options.
Q: What did you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What did Ottawa provide, or allow?
Ottawa gave me an urban awareness. If I had grown up in a small town like Owen Sound I would doubtless have succumbed to the 9 to 5. But Ottawa – what a city! Even if in the 80’s it lacked so much of what Toronto and Montréal took for granted, it was still big enough to have the NAC, the National Gallery, all those sweet, sweet museums, and so much more, while also being small enough that one didn’t feel overwhelmed or bombarded with sensory overload. In short, it allowed me to conceive of broad horizons, and it exposed me to some awfully good art.
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 just completed a full-length poetry manuscript which contains many pieces that deal with life in the ‘burbs. The book, A Current Through the Flesh, is all about my immediate and extended families, and much of it is a response to my childhood and teenage stomping grounds in Nepean. Maybe in future I will go into it in more detail. My shoplifting of a cassette of the Rolling Stones’ Undercover from the Carlingwood Sears circa 1983 is surely worth a ghazal.
Q: What are you working on now?
As Poet Laureate of Owen Sound most of my work consists of elevating the position of poetry locally, and doing so during a pandemic. This has brought about many challenges, but paradoxically it has led me to become more prolific than ever. In addition to my full-length, I completed two chapbooks, one of which, provisionally titled The Book of Lists, will be published by Bywords for having won the 2021 John Newlove Award. I’m also getting back to my spoken word roots, and preparing a show for when my creative partner croc E. moses and I can begin a tour.
