Six Questions interview #156 : Sharon King-Campbell

Sharon King-Campbell is a theatre and literary artist based in Ktaqmkuk, colonially known as Newfoundland. She was the 2017 recipient of the Rhonda Payne Award, was long-listed for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2020, and is a three-time winner of the Arts & Letters Awards in fiction, dramatic script and poetry. Her collection of poetry, This Is How It Is, was published in 2021. Sharon holds a BFA Theatre and a MA English from Memorial University of Newfoundland, and is currently pursuing her PhD.

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

I moved to Ottawa with my parents when I was not-quite-2, and I stayed until I was 19. I moved away for university, owing to the double-cohort that graduated from high school in 2003 and gummed up the first-year classes of every university in the province (and the country, to some extent).

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

I started writing pretty much as soon as I could. I think the first poem I ever published came out when I was about 7 in the kids’ section of the Alta Vista community newspaper. I kept it up as a fun pastime through childhood and attended the Literary Arts program at Canterbury High School, which I credit for so much in my life, including introducing me to the work of a lot of local and otherwise-Canadian writers. I didn’t stay in town after graduation, and that was before Facebook so I haven’t reconnected with all of my old friends, but several of my classmates have books out now, which I think is a testament to the program.

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? 

Writing, and learning about writing, for a couple of hours every day from ages 14 to 18 had a pretty big impact on my thinking, and so did my colleagues in that class. Without too much top-down guidance, my classmates taught me about working with different genres, about finding your ideal collaborators (and collaboration as a skillset!), and about taking notes with the generous spirit in which they’re offered. Those lessons have followed me through a 15-year career as a theatre artist, and, more recently, back to writing for the page.

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

I really don’t see programs like the one at Canterbury anywhere else. There are in-school and extracurricular music, dance, theatre, and visual arts programs available where I live now, but the Lit program at CHS seems to be a fabulous anomaly.

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? 

Growing up in Ottawa and living in Newfoundland now gives me a sense of being on the outside a lot of the time. I think that duality and liminality – belonging to two places at once and occupying the figurative space between them – is a theme you’ll find in a lot of my work.

Q: What are you working on now? 

I’ve just started work on a new book of poetry and creative non-fiction called two lines, and I’m about to go on tour with a couple of theatre engagements. I’m also up to my eyeballs in work on my PhD, which is looking into the impact of COVID-19 restrictions on the experience of live theatre.

Six Questions interview #155 : Dean Steadman

Dean Steadman is the author of their blue drowning (Frog Hollow Press, 2010), a poetry collection nominated for the 2011 Ottawa Book Award.  His second poetry collection, Après Satie – For Two and Four Hands (Brick Books, 2016), was nominated for the 2017 Raymond Souster Award and the Archibald Lampman Award.  He has also written two chapbooks: Portrait w/tulips (Leaf Editions, 2013), and Worm's Saving Day (AngelHousePress, 2015).  A long-time resident of Ottawa, he and his wife now live in the Town of Carleton Place.

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

My father was in the Air Force and, in 1954, he was posted from Europe to Ottawa.  I was 4 years old at the time and we lived on Rockcliffe Air Base in the northeast end of the city on the Ottawa River.  The base was very self-contained with an elementary school, a library, churches, a small IGA, wonderfully wooded areas, wetlands and fields, and facilities for every type of sport imaginable.  It was like living in a small town with the added advantage of having everything the city had to offer only minutes away.  When my father retired from the Air Force, we moved to Lindenlea, a small community neighbouring New Edinburgh.  As a result, I was able to complete all my elementary and secondary education in Ottawa.  I also attended Carleton University for a couple of years as well.  In the early 70s, I married and my wife and I moved to Halifax where she attended the art college and I continued my studies in English literature at Dalhousie University.  Soon after we completed our undergraduate degrees, we returned to Ottawa to begin our careers and to raise our children.  A few years ago, we moved to the Town of Carleton Place but altogether Ottawa was home for close to 70 years.  As a side note, I discovered this past summer that the first of my Steadman ancestors to come to Canada arrived from Ireland in 1817 and settled on farmland less than a half hour drive west of where I live now, and less than an hour away from Ottawa.  Seems I was meant to be here.

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

I had excellent English teachers during high school and was encouraged to pursue my interest in literature and literary criticism at the university level.  I was also encouraged to write creatively and my poetry (although as bad as juvenilia often is) attracted some attention.  I did little creative writing during my university years and even less during my thirty-three years with the federal government.  But as retirement approached, my interest in writing poetry resurfaced and, in the early 2000s, I began participating in local poetry workshops, including one given by a vocal, longhaired fellow named rob mclennan.  Heard of him?  I also started around this time to co-direct the Tree Reading Series and over the four years that I was there I got to meet local poets at the open-mic sessions and to host established and emerging Ottawa poets as featured readers.

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

I was 57 years old when I started again to write poetry and it was clear to me (and I'm sure to everyone in the workshops and writing circles I attended) that I had a lot of work ahead of me if I wanted to get my work anywhere near the calibre of poetry I was hearing at Tree and elsewhere.  Still, I wasn't discouraged.  My government career was one learning curve after another requiring time and devotion and I expected poetry to be much the same.  I wasn't wrong, and established poets in the community and fellow emerging writers were encouraging and assured me that my writing would improve if I kept doing what I was doing.  I soon developed a daily routine: listen, read, analyze, write allowing the poem to speak with its own voice, and edit, edit, edit until that voice resonates.  Expressions like "Show up for work!" and "Get out of the way!" became mantras.  It was a period of creative ups and downs, and I felt at times I could paper my desk with rejection letters.  But it was all good.

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

Ottawa has a history of having a vibrant arts community and it’s a community that has benefitted and continues to benefit from support from all levels of government and from the generosity of a very appreciative public.  In the case of the literary arts, local journals and societies, publishers, and a range of reading venues and festivals have helped to win Ottawa a reputation as a city of readers and writers.  Added to all this is an extremely enthusiastic volunteer base dedicated to ensuring the Ottawa arts scene continues to thrive.  I'm not very knowledgeable of the arts communities in other Canadian cities and can't really say how Ottawa fares in comparison.  But I'm sure Ottawa is by far superior.  Joking.

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?

During my government years, I was an avid reader of novels and paid little attention to poetry with the result that when I began writing again in my late 50s I wasn't current with the trends and styles of contemporary poetry or, for that matter, knowledgeable in a practical sense of the art of poetry.  My attendance at Ottawa's various reading series and literary festivals helped to remedy this situation, and my work soon began to show the influences of the poets I was hearing and studying for form and technique.  As well, the feedback I received at local poetry workshops and from the writing circles I participated in helped me to identify my strengths and weaknesses and to deepen my understanding of the different ways to craft a well-constructed poem.  In short, my involvement in the Ottawa poetry community did more than change the way I approached my work.  It effectively became my approach to writing poetry.

Q: What are you working on now?

I've been distracted from writing for several years now, but soon to be in the works is a small collection of poems in celebration of the revered mystic, Saint Gertrude the Great.  Saint Gertrude was born in 1256 and at the age of five she was placed in the care of the Benedictine nuns at Helfta in Saxony, where she studied under Mechtilde of Hackeborn.  She eventually became a nun herself and during her lifetime experienced numerous visions.  These visions and her spiritual instructions are recorded in five books that in recent years have attracted renewed theological study and interpretation.  Thanks for asking.  Wish me luck.

[Photo left to right: Dean, the Running Man, and James Joyce in Dublin.  Courtesy of Françoise Steadman.]

Six Questions interview #154 : Mark Bourrie

Mark Bourrie, BA (Waterloo, History) MJ (Carleton journalism), PhD (Ottawa, History) JD (Ottawa, Common Law) wrote for the Globe and Mail from 1978 to 1989 and for the Toronto Star from 1989 to 2004. He also contributed to other newspapers and major magazines in Canada and the United Kingdom.

He was a member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery from 1994 to 2018.

In 2018, he was called to the bar and now practices law in association with former Ontario Ombudsman Andre Marin.

He taught media history and journalism at Concordia University, history at Carleton University and Canadian Studies at the University of Ottawa.

Mark is the author of 14 books. The most recent is Big Men Fear Me: The Fast Life and Quick Death of Canada's Biggest Media Mogul. His 2019 book Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre Radisson, was a Canadian best-seller, winner of the $30,000 RBC Charles Taylor Prize for literary excellence, was short-listed for the Ottawa city book award, and was a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book. His 2015 book Kill the Messenger: Stephen Harper’s Assault on Your Right to Know, was placed on the Globe and Mail list of Top 100 books of that year. The Fog of War: Censorship of Canada’s Media in The Second World War, an adaption of his PhD thesis, reached No. 6 on Maclean’s magazine’s best-seller list in 2012.

Mark has won several major media awards, including a National Magazine Award, and has been nominated for several others.

His academic writing in history and law has been published in Canada and The Second World War: Essays in Honour of Terry Copp (Geoff Hayes et al, eds, Wilfrid Laurier Press, 2012), the Global Media Journal and the Canadian Journal of Communication, The Canadian Journal of Commercial Arbitration and The Journal of Parliamentary Law.

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

Since 1994. I wanted to write about Parliament, and my wife’s father and sisters were here. I thought it was an interesting, beautiful place.

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

I started as a newspaper reporter. I had written a commissioned book about a small village on Georgian Bay and had a contract for a collection of Great Lakes maritime disaster stories before I moved to Ottawa. My contacts with Ottawa’s writing community have been, for the most part, limited to historians and people who write about politics. I came across them quickly in my research work and met some fiction writers through Ottawa Magazine, where I was a contributing editor for a long time.

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

Writing – the actual putting words to paper -- is a solitary practice. That’s why it’s even more important to have a community, or at least a circle of friends who understand what you’re doing. I don’t see other writers every day, but I am always happy to run into them or be at their events. Colleagues reaffirm your work and value.

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

Ottawa allows me to pitch projects that simply can’t be done anywhere else. I would never have been able to write Big Men Fear Me as a commercial project if I did not have fast and repeat access to Library and Archives Canada. In terms of the community, Ottawa lacks for nothing except a commercial non-fiction publishing house. We really need an Ottawa-based national publisher that can get books into independent book stores and the major chain across Canada.

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’ve written a little book on the Parliament buildings and wrote the text for Malak’s Parliament book. I also wrote a critique of Stephen Harper’s information control, published by HarperCollins in 2015 as Kill the Messengers. My latest book is really a Toronto story, but about half of the material in it came from Library and Archives Canada, often buried deep in the personal papers of political actors of the 1930s and 1940s. That kind of work requires a lot of time in the archives.

Q: What are you working on now? 

A biography of the 17^th century Jesuit missionary Jean de Brebeuf called Echon.

 

Six Questions interview #153 : Selim Ulug

Selim Ulug has lived in Ottawa for decades. In 2017, his Doctor Who short story “Landbound” was published by Big Finish Productions as an audio play. Big Finish then published Selim’s second Doctor Who audio story, “Battle Scars” in 2019. Selim is the author of the self-published short story collection, Something Special. He recently published his second collection, The Woman in Red.

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

I’ve been in Ottawa most of my life. My family moved here from Toronto while I was in high school and I’ve been here ever since, aside from a few years in graduate school.

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

I have always enjoyed writing, and even while quite young I wrote sketches about weird and wonderful adventures. Later in life, I worked for a few years as a free-lance technical writer. Though very different to writing fiction, I enjoyed this work greatly, and it reinforced my plan to spend more time writing.  Along the way, I started writing fan fiction, which provided a wonderful opportunity to develop my skills. After the Doctor Who stories were published, I self-published two collections of original stories. Sad to say, I’m not involved with the local writing community, something which I intend to correct.  

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

I hope to become more involved with the local community in the near future, and then we’ll see.

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

One thing that Ottawa provides is that the local library will stock your self-published book. I think that’s marvelous. I’ve also greatly enjoyed having the chance to chat with other self-published authors at Ottawa ComicCon.

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? 

Many of my stories are set in Ottawa. Ottawa is a community of communities, and has many great and varied settings for stories. Why set a story in New York or Chicago when it can be set here?

Q: What are you working on now? 

I’m currently finalizing the paperback version of The Woman in Red. My next writing project will be a novel-length thriller called A Familiar Voice, which continues the adventures of a character I introduced in Something Special.

Six Questions interview #152 : Carolyne Van Der Meer

Carolyne Van Der Meer [photo credit: Bryan Gagnon] is a Montreal-based journalist, public relations professional and university lecturer who has published articles, essays, short stories and poems internationally. She is the author of Motherlode: A Mosaic of Dutch Wartime Experience (WLUP, 2014), Journeywoman (Inanna, 2017) and Heart of Goodness: The Life of Marguerite Bourgeoys in 30 Poems | Du coeur à l’âme : La vie de Marguerite Bourgeoys en 30 poèmes (Guernica Editions, 2020). This book, for which she translated her own poems into French, was awarded second prize in the Poetry Category of the Catholic Media Association's 2021 Annual Book Awards and was a finalist in the Specialty Books category of The Word Guild’s 2021 annual Word Awards. Her fourth book, a full-length poetry collection, Sensorial, was released by Inanna in May 2022; and a chapbook, One Week’s Worth but a Lifetime More was published by Local Gems Press in June.

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

I came to Ottawa in 1986 to attend University of Ottawa on a scholarship to study lettres françaises but I graduated in 1990 with B.A. in English Literature. Afterwards, I was offered a job in communications in Montreal—and took it—though I was briefly tempted to move to Toronto to pursue graduate studies in journalism at Ryerson.

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

I always wrote—terrible poetry as a kid—and some mildly better short stories too. In my first year at uOttawa, I started writing for the student newspaper, The Fulcrum. In my second year, I became Features Editor—and went on to Arts Editor in my third year and News Editor in my fourth year. I also started freelancing for a few local publications. I came back to the Ottawa writing scene at the beginning of the pandemic, attending the Tree Reading Series and the Riverbed Reading Series and participating in open mic thanks to the encouragement of my then-publicist for my third book, Ottawa poet and now good friend Margo LaPierre. I still go to Tree! I am currently discussing starting a regular reading series with my brother Gary van der Meer, now an Ottawa resident and the priest at St. John The Evangelist Anglican Church on Somerset Street—at the church. More to come on this!

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? 

Working at The Fulcrum for four years meant that I was part of a broad community of writers—most of them aspiring to become journalists. This was a wonderful place for me to be—and to start figuring out what kind of writer I wanted to be. In terms of my writing life, I have since worked as a magazine journalist, a corporate writer and editor and a PR consultant specializing in content creation. And for the last 15 years or so, I’ve been an active poet, publishing and reading where I can. This has certainly been encouraged and influenced by both the anglophone and francophone poetry scenes in Montreal.

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

Ottawa has a particularly vibrant literary community that is welcoming and open. This is what I am seeing now. In my younger days, it was a breeding ground for the exploration of ideas with the built-in soapbox that was The Fulcrum.

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? 

Absolutely. Working with Margo as my publicist for a year opened my eyes to what the poetry community in Ottawa had to offer. I have since become more familiar with Ottawa poets and publications and have gained an understanding of what they care about and are looking for in terms of publishing opportunities. These are active considerations when I submit my work and when I participate in readings.

Q: What are you working on now? 

Mostly, I am looking for opportunities to read from and talk about my latest book Sensorial while it’s still hot off the press. I also have a finished poetry manuscript that I am beginning to send out to publishers. And a chapbook underway for publication next year. And I have developed a keen interest in the braided essay and am working quietly on these in the background.