Clare Latremouille (July 4, 1964 – November 16, 2022)

2022

My friend, the writer, gardener and early childhood educator Clare Latremouille, otherwise known as Olivia McDonell, or Olivia Clare Latremouille-McDonell, has died, after an extended and repeated battle with cancer. Clare had multiple names over the years, born as Olivia Clare Latremouille, known as Clare Van Berkom by the time we met her in high school, a few years older than the rest of us, with four-year-old son Noah in tow. She was already writing by the time we met her, which further encouraged some of those early attempts by the rest of our small group. It was her fifth time in high school, and even her second in ours, Glengarry District High School in Alexandria, Ontario, as she lived with and then near her aunt and uncle in town. At the time, we even joked that of course she was co-valedictorian when she graduated; she’d had so much more experience being in high school than the rest of us. By the end, she’d had some of the highest marks in the province. She was older, smarter and bolder than the rest of us, with experience we couldn’t even imagine. She was smart, fearless and revelled in silliness; she was brilliantly talented, and seemingly all over the place, expertly moving from one expertise to another. She was even a winner of Carleton University’s high school writing competition during her final high school year, part of a long run of winners from our school, nurtured by our endlessly-patient English teacher, Mr. Robert MacLeod (I won the following year for fiction). She loved children, even running a home daycare for a few years during their time living in Ottawa’s Hintonburg neighbourhood, before attending further school to be able to work as a Registered Early Childhood Educator through the Ottawa Carleton School Board. She lived in such a state of joyful openness. Of care. She was always the first to make sure everyone in the group was taken care of, attended. Made sure you had some food. A beer, maybe. The door was always open. You could always drop by.

2009

She had multiple names, even to the point of, eventually, multiple library cards, whether under her maiden name, or either of her married names. So she could borrow seemingly unlimited stacks of simultaneous books. During their years in Ottawa, she always knew the best thrift stores, and visited them daily. If you were seeking out Clare, there was a run of years that you could just go to the St. Vincent’s on Wellington Street West, any day of the week. There was thrift store where the owner would always provide Clare with baked goods, hidden under the counter. Another, she always knew which staff member would give her the better deals. She knew the schedules of new clothing, new staff, new furniture deliveries. She had trunks filled with toys, costumes, musical instruments, library books and just about anything else you could think of, only some of which related to their running the daycare. She was always collecting, adding or repairing. Once they moved out to the farm, she and Bryan managed and maintained a seemingly-endless garden, and even had a pair of horses, which delighted our young ladies.

We had numerous adventures, more than I could ever recall. Clare and I once climbed up a hill in Kamloops, as I was nearly struck by lightning. We sat up all night with Tom Snyders and Gerry Gilbert in Tom’s Vancouver warehouse, as Gerry danced a jig on the rooftop watching the sun rise over the mountains. That same trip, July 1997, Clare and I landed on George Bowering’s doorstep with a song in our hearts and a handful of six-packs. George ordered pizza; Clare made a salad. We started an informal writers group gathering in the late 1990s, a gathering that evolved into The Peter F Yacht Club, which originally met over drinks to discuss the possibilities of writing, and what we’d been working on (although a lot of those early sessions lapsed into silliness). She gifted me a bowling ball for one of my thirtysomething birthdays, and we repeatedly rolled it down the length of the Carleton Tavern (at least, until the staff stopped us). We sang “To Sir, With Love” loudly over the phone from the Atlantic Hotel Tavern in spring 1989 to Mr. MacLeod, having called him, both collect and anonymously. He knew it was us. We sang songs loudly off Ottawa International Writers Festival hospitality suite balconies at all hours (once convincing Paul Quarrington to join in our singing of Saturday morning cartoon theme songs), inadvertently causing the festival to be barred from multiple downtown hotels. As one of the organizers overheard an elderly couple complain to the front desk about the noise the next morning, they added: “But they were such good singers.”

1988

The Monty Python albums she would play loudly and repeatedly in her apartment in Alexandria, ever prompting Noah to sing along. I remember Noah’s fifth birthday party, and the Creedence Clearwater Revival cover band she wanted to follow around that summer. I remember her fortieth birthday party on Armstrong Avenue, when Noah was twenty-two. Or the party that centred in their front room, having convinced AJ Dolman to play Clare’s accordion, given their admission of lessons as a child. Clare had more musical instruments than just about anyone. We had our guitars, but still picked up her trumpet, her bongo drums, a ukulele. When they drove from Kamloops to Ottawa in the 1990s, having left the café they’d established there, Magpies, not everything they owned could make its way east, but Clare’s mannequin, naturally, was carefully strapped onto the U-haul.

“The last of the living Latremouilles,” she called herself. Except for that distant cousin, the long-time Vancouver radio dj (but we didn’t talk about him). I’ve a stack of photographs from when Clare and I ran through our high school, attempting to convince various of our teachers to pose with the nose glasses we provided (most said yes; at least one sternly but politely refused). I once borrowed her jean jacket so I could look cool, as a group of us made for Montreal for a Peace Concert at the Montreal Forum in 1987. The illustration she made of our pre-concert group in the park, drinking beer and playing guitar with a few dozen others, made its way onto the cover of the zine we invented as part of our high school “writer’s craft” class: assembling poems, stories, drawings. All of it published anonymously, of course. She could fall helpless into fits of giggles, including when dancing at the Carleton Tavern somewhere in the 00s, realizing her friend Joy’s dancing had caused Joy’s pants to fall off, without them noticing. There was an element to our pairing that rendered chaos, a joyous silliness that not everyone else had patience for, akin to six-year-old twins: each encouraging the other.

I published some of her poems in the first issue of my long poem magazine, STANZAS, in 1993, and in a chapbook, not that much later. She’d been working on a poetry manuscript she’d titled “Naked,” some of which sits in a file on my computer. The poems from STANZAS, her “Garden” series, that later fell into her novel, The Desmond Road Book of the Dead (Chaudiere Books, 2006). As the first of the series, “Garden,” reads:

I can make the garden grow, the sun fall up and down in the sky, a man full grown from passion in my tissue, in secret places I hide my fat and wait for rain for rain for rain

In August 2019, the last time I saw them, not long before Covid: an afternoon visiting Clare and Bryan on their farm in North Glengarry, a few miles east of the McLennan homestead, as my young ladies admired their two horses, and later accidentally stomped on a hive of bees at the end of the yard. At least we discovered neither young lady allergic, once they both stung. Clare offered them colouring, toys. They played a football game on the porch, and she delighted in them both.

How am I supposed to experience a world that Clare Latremouille no longer occupies? I shall have to be attentive enough for the both of us, I suppose. I shall have to be silly enough. An image in my head of the remaining members of Monty Python at Graham Chapman’s graveside, the first of the troupe to die: every one of them standing with pants at their ankles.

Condolences to her husband Bryan, sons Noah and Sam, her whirlwind of cousins and anyone else who was fortunate enough to fall into her orbit. I look forward to the stories still to come. I suspect they are many.

Ongoing notes: late August, 2019

Where has it all gone? I feel like summer barely began.

Here's what the young ladies looked like a week-plus ago, with Clare Latremouille's horses.

Northampton MA: Zoe Tuck was good enough to send along a copy of her recent chapbook Soft Investigations (Daily Mayhem Books, 2019), a small collection made up of the prose/essay-poem “[Typical Trans Kenkyusha Sortes]” (a piece that won the Stacy Doris Prize and first appeared in Fourteen Hills: The SFSU Review), the extended/fragmented lyric “Fly into a page,” and the lyric accumulation “Friday 19 April 2019.” The first piece really struck my attention for how she manages to weave together references to Community, Robert Duncan, Berkeley Breathed, Roland Barthes and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, among others, in a way that plays with multiple directions, odd connections and the direct line of thought. As she writes:

I don’t want to be lonely, even in my poems—especially in my poems, so I started to fill them with quotes from other artists. Didn’t you know that was coming next? Like when Troy in “Community” says that he gets lonely in the shower. That’s when I listen to podcasts about the death of the author or dance in translation and I struggle to make out the tinny sound of my phones speaker over the whirr of the ventilation fan while I lather my armpits with peppermint soap.

The other day I decided that I would hold up Roland Barthes as my model because he’s smart and he writes purdy. And who hates Roland Barthes? Aside from that New Yorker reviewer with the bee in his bonnet (you have read 1 of 4 free articles for this month).

2 and a half years of grad school and I still don’t want to be a man and something vague about phenomenology.

San Francisco CA: I only discovered recently that Canadian poet Lisa Robertson had a chapbook out with American publisher Krupskaya, her Starlings (2017). Starlings is a suite of poems that is “one part of wide rime,” a project that, as her author biography writes, “is her ongoing lyric study of troubadour poetics.” Did I mention that the thirty-page chapbook is also available online through their website as a free pdf download?

Yesterday I cried. It was artless and good.

Spring has its own agony, truly

It involves convolution

For the nudity of one kiss

Joy suffers measure

How tiring it is to disagree with everything!

Then we go visiting, throw our tender runners

Over forest-rim

Starlings. We are breaking into a vast derelict space.

We are the Starling scene in Sterne’s Sentimental Journey.

A caged Starling is repeating in the voice of a Child “I cannot get out.”

I’m fascinated by Roberston’s exploration into some of the origins of contemporary lyric through the tradition of the troubadour, something that easily links to her earlier work on the pastoral, but one that isn’t always explored by those engaged with more experimental types of writing.

some were at the edge of language to

couldn’t live. Some were at the core of

language so couldn’t live either. What if

we forget about language, move into

the natural history of the idea

of guts? Guts or rosewater, very

similar. Rosewater or rime. Uncountrying

by means of rosewater. To make a natural history

of rosewater, penetrate

borders

San Francisco/Santa Barbara CA: The first I’ve seen by Santa Barbara poet, editor and country singer Julian Talamantez Brolaski is the chapbook JULIAN (Krupskaya, 2017), clearly missing out on numerous full-length titles, including gowanus atropolis (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011), Advice for Lovers (2012) and Of Mongrelitude (Wave Books, 2017). There is some thoughtful play in the language of Brolanski’s poems, composing direct statements that shift, switch, bait and twist, including the poem “butterflies are stupid,” the title of which caught my attention immediately:

a butterfly is an example of an idiotic image

not one to idolatrize

they are former worms I guess, not-worms

I was telling nick yesterday about the dangers of idolatry

I gave the example of a butterly like

oh I saw a butterfly you saw a butterfly isnt it magical like

making fun of myself

then I gave another example to holi over coffee at the good earth

he “often” talks about tattoos people shouldn’t get

especially if they don’t have any tattoos yet

I said yeah like a butterfly on your neck

he said oh weird you say so the lyft driver I had yesterday had a butterfly

tattooed on his neck, here, he indicated the throte

and no other tattoos at all at all

then for some reason I was moved to tell you my own

story about the butterfly landing on me

again and again while I was in a patch of sun and outlifted my limbs

I compared it to the rat-dove and its wing

that literally swept over me touched my head touched my hair

like beaudelaire’s wind of the wing of madness

the word he uses is ‘I’imbécilité’  it turns out

the wind of the wing of imbecility or idiocy

but a butterfly is an example of a thing not to idolatrize

___

(wrong [upward arrow emoji]

but you can tell i kind of know it

hypocrite   like vernon telling of his vision

flying above all the other little christians at the campfire

just dying in retrospect in his own way to be proved wrong)

Arc walks, 2018 : Hintonburg,

photo pilfered from the internet ; not actually from the event

This is the text of the penultimate of four “Arc Walks” [see links to the whole series--Centretown, Glebe, Hintonburg and the Byward Market--as it appears here, including post-walk texts, notifications on the final walk and links to the poem handouts] I’d been commissioned to do this year, thanks very much to Arc Poetry Magazine and the Community Foundation. The third walk, through Hintonburg, sat in the midst of the wind and the cold and the snow, so the walk ended up being theoretical, held in the upstairs of the Carleton Tavern, as Blaine Marchand pointed in various directions to illustrate different locations (“imagine you are on Wellington Street West right now…). Thanks very much to Blaine Marchand, Anita Lahey, Steve Zytveld, Clare Latremouille, Colin Morton, Craig Poile, Paul Tyler, Stephanie Bolster, Merise Brebner and others who provided some details I might not otherwise have known, and to Marchand and Claire Farley, who were good enough to read (a poem of theirs, alongside a poem by, respectively, Diana Brebner and Anita Lahey). And to the small, shivering crowd! The final walk will be on December 8th in the Byward Market; keep an eye on my link here for confirmation on where we shall be meeting to begin that one.

WALK THREE:

One might say that Hintonburg has had infestations of poets for years, living lives of quiet desperation, even amid increasing gentrification. One of Michael Dennis’ first apartments in Ottawa during the early 1980s was on Spadina Avenue, as was poet Wanda O’Connor’s last apartment, circa 2006, where she held poetry salons in her apartment’s unfinished attic. O’Connor authored a handful of self-published poetry chapbooks as well as a title through above/ground press before heading to Montreal to participate in Concorida’s Creative Writing Program. Marianne Bluger (1945-2005) lived on Clarendon Avenue, in a house since torn down and replaced, as Blaine Marchand says, “by a monstrosity.” During her medical studies in Montreal, Bluger took poetry classes with the poet Louis Dudek. She eventually moved to Ottawa where she raised two children as a single mother, and published numerous books of poetry, including Summer Grass (Brick Books, 1992), Tamarack & Clearcut (Carleton University Press, 1996), Scissor, Paper, Woman (Penumbra Press, 2000) and the posthumous Nude with Scar (Penumbra Press, 2006). More recently, poet and editor Pearl Pirie also lived relatively close, spending half a decade at 202 Hinton Avenue North until 2017, when she and her husband Brian, a performer in multiple of jwcurry’s Messagio Galore sound ensembles, relocated across the river into rural Quebec, to a house they built themselves. Jean Van Loon, who, until recently, was director of The TREE Reading Series, and is the author of Building on River (Cormorant Books, 2018), a poetry debut focused on and around Ottawa’s J.R. Booth, lives on Mayfair Avenue. Blaine Marchand, discussed during both my Centretown and Glebe walks, lives on Warren Avenue, and has, as he says, for 36 years.

FIRST STOP: 1242 Wellington Street West: Our first official stop is the site of the former Collected Works Bookstore and Coffeeshop (1997-2012). As well as being a focal point for numerous literary readings and events, Collected Works hosted a series of writing workshops conducted by local writers, including multiple sessions run by the poet Diana Brebner (1956-2001). Brebner was an incredibly supportive mentor to younger writers, including myself, when we would meet for coffee in the Glebe circa 1993-95, and talk about poetry and exchange tales of our children. She lived just north of the Civic Hospital, at 21 Sims, with her huband and two daughters from October 1992 to February 1999, before she briefly relocated to Sherbrooke Avenue, and finally to an apartment building at 420 Parkdale, right next to the old fire hall, where she lived until she succumbed to cancer in 2001.

Brebner, a proponent of the sonnet during a particularly fallow period for the form, won the CBC Poetry Contest in 1992, and published three trade poetry collections with Netherlandic Press: Radiant Life Forms (1990), The Golden Lotus (1993) and Flora & Fauna (1996). Stephanie Bolster, a poet Brebner had mentored during their shared Ottawa time, edited Brebner’s posthumous The Ishtar Gate: Last and Selected Poems (2004) for McGill-Queen’s Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series. Here’s a poem from her second collection, The Golden Lotus:

The Perfect Garden

for Blaine

Nothing grows in asphalt. But here I 

am trying to grow something, as well

as nothing. Each year some hibiscus

appears, either side of my doorway:

blood-red soldiers, or are they angels?

And the violets, quietly given to my

little daughter, by her dying friend

(a woman of my present age) three years

past. They appear in cinder-blocks

again, and again. Some things will not

forget how they came up from emptiness:

bluebells (called weeds and torn up), lily-

-of-the-valley (between concrete wall

And asphalt plane) green asymptotes

never quite giving up the ghost, never

blue morning-glory on the Frost fence,

and Siberian irises up against the invisible

walls, and old lilac invading the thick

black lie which says: death, which

says: nothing is perfect, or even close.

After Brebner became too ill to continue, the workshops were run by a couple of different poets, including Bolster, before I started conducting my own workshop sessions, which ran throughout the remainder of the store’s existence. After the store closed, I continued running poetry workshops upstairs at the Carleton Tavern, before shifting to our house on Alta Vista Drive. Over the years, participants in the poetry workshops included numerous writers who have since gone on to impressive publishing cvs, including Una McDonnell, Anita Lahey and S. Lesley Buxton, all of whom met in Diana Brebner’s workshops. Poets in my own sessions, which still occur occasionally, have included Pearl Pirie, Sandra Ridley, Amanda Earl, Marcus McCann, Frances Boyle, Suzannah Showler, Roland Prevost, Claire Farley, Nina Jane Drystek, Chris Johnston, natalie hanna and Catriona Wright. Former bookstore owners Craig Poile and Christopher Smith still live in the neighbourhood, on Hamilton Avenue North, and Poile, a poet, playwright and theatre producer, won both the Archibald Lampman Award and the Ottawa Book Award for his second full-length poetry collection, True Concessions (Goose Lane, 2009).

In 2002, Arc Poetry Magazine founded The Diana Brebner Prize. Awarded each year for the best poem written by a National Capital Region poet not yet been published in book form, winners over the years have included Conyer Clayton, Claire Farley, Sneha Madhavan-Reese, Anne Marie Todkill, Marilyn Irwin, Lauren Turner, Jenny Haysom, Robyn Jeffrey, Frances Boyle, Rhonda Douglas, Sylvia Adams, Michael Blouin and Mary Trafford, many of whom have gone on to produce first full-length books.

Collected Works is also where I first met my dear wife, Christine McNair, when she participated in one of my poetry workshops during the summer of 2008. After moving from Toronto earlier that spring, she first came through the store for the sake of the Canadian Author’s Association, which were hosting gatherings within the space. Since those days, she has gone on to publish two poetry collections, including her second, Charm (Book*hug, 2017), which recently won the Archibald Lampman Award, an annual prize for the best book of poetry by an Ottawa-area resident.

SECOND STOP: Wellington Street West and Huron: Paul Tyler, author of the Archibald Lampman-winning poetry debut, A Short History of Forgetting (Gaspereau Press, 2010), lived at 73 Huron from 2004 to 2012 before relocating to the Glebe. During some of the same years, from 2003 to 2008 or so, he was also on the Arc Poetry Magazine editorial board, before spending a few years as a member of their “advisory board.” Another writer on the same street during that period was poet and editor Anita Lahey, who lived on Huron Avenue before relocating briefly to Fairmount Avenue. While in Ottawa, she published two poetry collections—Out to Dry in Cape Breton (2006), nominated for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and the Ottawa Book Award, and Spinning Side Kick (2011)—both of which were published by Véhicule Press’ Signal Editions imprint. In 2004, Lahey inherited the mantle of editor for Arc Poetry Magazine from Rita Donovan and longtime editor John Barton, a position she held until 2011, when she left Ottawa to head east, and eventually west. She currently lives in Victoria, B.C., where she continues her work as a poet, journalist and editor, having published a third book, The Mystery Shopping Cart: Essays on Poetry and Culture (Palimpsest Press, 2013). More recently, she changed positions from assistant editor to series editor for Best Canadian Poetry, an annual anthology produced the past decade-plus by Tightrope Books, scheduled to shift to Biblioasis as of 2019. During Lahey’s tenure at Arc, assisted in large part by Reviews Editor Matthew Holmes, the magazine saw numerous expansions, including one of format, as well as the Arc Poetry Annual and the Arc Poet-in-Residence program, making Arc the only Canadian literary journal to host a virtual residency. From her debut, Out to Dry in Cape Breton, composed during her Ottawa period, comes a poem on The Prince of Wales Bridge, a bridge that has also been a favourite of Ottawa poet, publisher, collector and bpNichol bibliographer jwcurry. A bit east of where we are now, The Prince of Wales Bridge is an abandoned rail bridge on the Ottawa River, just north of the boundaries of the repurposed O-Train line. Constructed in 1880 as one of the few crossings of the Ottawa River into Quebec, it connects the south channel of the Ottawa River to Lemieux Island before crossing the northern channel into Gatineau. In February of this year, according to the Ottawa Citizen, the Canadian Transportation Agency ruled that the City of Ottawa “must restore the Prince of Wales Bridge and the railway that approaches it in the next 12 months or formally discontinue the operations [.]” The City is, of course, fighting the decision, saying that the timeline is impossible.

ABANDONED RAILWAY BRIDGE

OVER THE OTTAWA

Everything is designed to remind us of our smallness. We walk

to prove it doesn’t matter, trespass on the CPR line, tromp

into its black-trellised hovering on narrow planks god-knows

how old. Metal arms criss-cross, criss-cross; their taunting,

their gaps. The river tarries beneath puckered skin. There is no alone,

not here. November hurls itself at us, elbows and knees drawn. Pigeons

fuss and coo; clouds stare back; somewhere is a man who fitted rocks

into pillars, laid rails, hammered steel and died. There were men in canoes

who didn’t stand a chance. They whisper back and forth. The dead

want peace, but only sometimes. Kids have been here wielding

cans of paint, accusations: How could you want more than this? Their uneven

letters lie whitely, backed gainst flagging sun. A scrubby shore

calls to one you left behind. Midway, the rope, lashed to a jutting

beam. Twenty feet of braided yellow fixed to the sky, fretting

over water. Evidence of swimmers, or worse. Someone climbed

and clung to tie that far-off end. The sky sweeps the river

roughly, without pity. The question is whether to exist in two

places or one. Keep keeping all you’ve amassed or fling it off

this old bridge. Teeter on rotting boards, tethered by hope.

Or tautly arc into glory and back, glory and back, each triumph

less graspable than the last, until, wind-whipped, with calloused

palms, you yo-yo about, doodling on little sheets of air. In wonder

resides no footing; kicking won’t get you home. You’re bound

to blackening yellow, nighttime’s impressive arrivals, the immoveable

bridge with its slime-plastered legs. Ward off, longly and without

sound, that sweaty, red-palmed slippage as you undulate

with memories of height, the wooden, underfoot sureness that was.

THIRD STOP: 1233 Wellington Street West: Poet and fiction writer Elisabeth Harvor lived for years in an apartment building across from the Rosemount Library, before relocating to one of the condos above the Great Canadian Theatre Company. A poet, short story writer and novelist, she was the first and seemingly last writer in residence through Carleton University’s English Department in 1993, a position the Department shared with the Ottawa Public Library. She won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for best book of poetry by a Canadian writer for her 1992 collection, A Fortress of Chairs (Vehicule Press), was nominated for a Governor General’s Award for her short story collection Let Me Be the One (1996), and her first novel, Excessive Joy Injures the Heart (Penguin, 2010), was chosen one of the ten best books of the year by The Toronto Star. That same year, she also won the Alden Nowlan Award. In 2003, she won the Marian Engel Award, and in 2004 The Malahat Review’s Novella Prize. In 2015, she placed second in Prairie Fire’s fiction prize. Her most recent poetry title is her third, An Open Door in the Landscape (2010).

FOURTH STOP: 1084 Wellington Street West: From 2011 to 2012, The Dusty Owl Reading Series was held at the Elmdale Tavern, surrounded by a plethora of rock memorabilia and posters from decades of musical performances. Originally built in 1909 as a general store, the tavern was purchased and repurposed as the Elmdale Oyster House and Tavern in the fall of 2012, becoming part of a handful of Whalesbone Oyster Houses in Ottawa.

Cathy hosting ; photo by Pearl Pirie

Dusty Owl was founded by Steve Zytveld, who had emerged from the Carleton Literary Society at Carleton University, a group that brought Michael Ondaatje to read on campus in March, 1995. Zytveld and his wife Cathy Macdonald-Zytveld ran Dusty Owl as a reading series hosting featured readers and an extensive open set, providing a home to poets, fiction writers, spoken word performers and musicians, and even hosted a series of benefits for the food bank, as well as at least one performance (where everyone who showed up was given a role) of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream. To get a sense of the tone of the series, I might mention that there was much giggling, for example, whenever the stage direction “Enter Bottom” was read aloud. Dusty Owl also produced a series of chapbooks in the mid-2000s, curated by Dusty Owl associate Kate Hunt, including titles by myself, Roland Prevost, DeAnne Smith (who has since made a name for herself as a stand-up comedian, writer and performer) and novelist L. Brent Robillard. I long described Dusty Owl as “not the best reading series in town, but certainly the most fun.” Dusty Owl could boast an incredibly welcoming, lively and casual atmosphere, especially as Zytveld would often host sporting vintage aviator pilot goggles, referring to these as his “poetry goggles.”

Originally held at the former Café Wim (537 Sussex Drive, the current home of Social) from 1996 to 1999, The Dusty Owl Reading Series reemerged in Centretown from 2004 to 2010. When Zytveld was forced to step back to begin a Masters of Divinity Degree at St. Paul University in 2011, Macdonald-Zytveld took over the series, and for a brief period, readings were co-hosted by myself and held upstairs at the Carleton Tavern before relocating here, where Zytveld managed to appear on occasion to host. Once the Elmdale was purchased to be repurposed, Dusty Owl lost another home, and went on haitus.

FIFTH STOP: 188 Armstrong Avenue: Clare Latremouille lived here from 2001 to 2015, during the time when Ottawa publisher Chaudiere Books published her first novel, The Desmond Road Book of the Dead (2006), as part of their debut quartet of literary titles. Referring to herself as a “displaced British Columbian,” she returned to Ottawa in the late 1990s after a decade out west, including some time in Vancouver, as well as her hometown of Kamloops. She has published poetry in numerous anthologies, including Written in the Skin (Insomniac Press, 1998) and Shadowy Technicians: New Ottawa Poets (Broken Jaw Press, 2000), and even published a small chapbook with above/ground press: I will write a poem for you. Now: (1995). I first met Latremouille in as a teenager, attending Glengarry District High School in Alexandria, Ontario, as a small handful of us poked at writing poems and short stories, even going so far as to start producing a small literary journal through our English teacher. Some of our classmates published within the pages of our Zine included Ottawa musician Chris Page, known since as frontman to bands such as Camp Radio, Expanda Fuzz and The Stand GT, as well as four solo albums, and playwright, theatre director and Concordia professor Louis Patrick Leroux, who not only founded Ottawa’s Théâtre la Catapulte in the 1990s, but had twenty-three of his plays produced by the time he was twenty-three years old. It was actually through Leroux that Stephanie Bolster first came to Ottawa in 1995, after first meeting each other at the Banff Writing Studio in 1994. They now live in Montreal with their two daughters.

A decade or so after our high school years, Latremouille was a founding member of The Peter F. Yacht Club, an informal writer’s group I first organized in the late 1990s as a conversation between those of us who were writing and submitting and reading. During those first few years, it was far more of a social gathering, not evolving into an occasional journal until 2003, with early members including b stephen harding, Latremouille, Stephen Brockwell, Anita Dolman, James Moran, jwcurry, Jennifer Mulligan and Laurie Fuhr. Since then, issues have been intermittent, but continue, with an issue produced annually as a handout as part of VERSeFest. Since 2015, Latremouille and her family have lived on a large wooded property in North Glengarry.

SIXTH STOP: 220 Armstrong Avenue: Dennis Tourbin (1946-1998) was a lively and engaged poet, painter, performance artist, writer and art and poetry-magazine publisher. As I mentioned during my first walk, Dennis Tourbin was one of a handful of writers to emerge in Ottawa from Peterborough in the early 1980s, alongside Michael Dennis and the late Riley Tench. Further Peterborough writers from the same period, including Maggie Helwig and Yann Martel, headed west, to Toronto and Saskatchewan, respectively. One of the founders of St. Catharines, Ontario’s Niagara Artists’ Center, Dennis Tourbin left Peterborough for Ottawa in 1983, where he eventually became Director of Gallery 101 (during a period that included Rob Manery and Louis Cabri’s The Transparency Machine poetry and performance series), and published a collection of fiction, The Port Dalhousie Stories (1987) through Coach House Press, as well as multiple poetry titles with small and micro presses, including two poetry chapbooks (including one posthumously) with above/ground press. Predominantly known as a painter, he was larger-than-life, uniquely colourful and engaged with the world around him, connecting a series of literary and artistic communities throughout Ottawa and beyond.

Tourbin spent decades focused on and fascinated with the 1970 October Crisis, producing numerous watercolours, artist books, word paintings, performance art, and videos incorporating headlines and imagery from a sequence of events still seen as politically charged. As The Canadian Encyclopedia writes: “The October Crisis began 5 October 1970 with the kidnapping of James Cross, the British trade commissioner in Montréal, by members of the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ). It rapidly devolved into the most serious terrorist act carried out on Canadian soil after another official, Minister of Immigration and Minister of Labour Pierre Laporte, was kidnapped and killed. The crisis shook the career of recently elected Liberal Premier Robert Bourassa, who solicited federal help along with Montréal Mayor Jean Drapeau. This help would lead to the only invocation of the War Measures Act during peacetime in Canadian history.” National Gallery director Shirley Thomson famously cancelled a long-awaited solo exhibition of black-ink drawings on the October Crisis by Tourbin in 1995, due to the pending referendum in Quebec, a decision that was loudly and publicly condemned by the arts community in Ottawa and beyond. Scheduled to be paired with an exhibition of his large-scale paintings on the same subject at the Ottawa Art Gallery, an exhibition which went ahead as planned, the outcry at the cancellation helped turn Tourbin, as Paul Gessell wrote, “into a national star.” Seven years later, Thomson was quoted as saying: “I think I will never know if I made the right decision or not.”

Fascinated by how image could be shaped and presented, one could say that bulk of his work engaged with how media, whether television or newspapers, helps to create, and not simply replicate, reality. Here is a poem from his posthumous THE STREAM and other poems (above/ground press, 2014), a chapbook produced to coincide with a retrospective of his work at the Carleton University Art Gallery.

Real Television

I don’t want movies.

I don’t want life.

I want real wind

to determine

the wonder of

the next sentence.

Sentence,

not a criminal sentence,

a natural, natural

sentence.

I want life

not movies.

I want life to tell me…

I want to swim

in pools of aqua

coloured water,

lights flashing,

dreams of Olympic glory.

One step closer to,

one step closer to

the wonder

of a time

changed by plazas

and shopping malls.

I want to swim in dreams,

in night life,

night time, darkness…

I want to swim.

I want to live.

I want television

to be the only thing

in my life.

SEVENTH STOP: Parkdale Park: In June 2015, a collaboration of a handful of Ottawa-area writers organizations, including The Ottawa Independent Writers, l’Association desauteures et auteurs de l’Ontario français, the Capital Crime Writers, the Ottawa Science Fiction Society and the Ottawa Storytellers collaborated to organize the first annual Prose in the Park as a single all-day outdoor book fair featuring readings and panels. ​The festival has been held every year since, with the exception of 2018, but promises to return for June 2019. Not only held as an event for both French and English publishers, writers and panels, Prose in the Park provides a marked difference from events such as the Ottawa International Writers Festival or the ottawa small press book fair for its focus on genre publishers and writers, as well as self-published authors.

EIGHTH STOP: The Carleton Tavern has been home to literary activity going back years, including my own Factory Reading Series for the past eighteen years or so (a reading series I founded in Centretown back in January, 1993), as well as the semi-annual readings as part of the ottawa small press book fair. Other events have been held here as well, including the aforementioned stretch of readings hosted by the Dusty Owl Reading Series, and individual readings hosted by Brick Books, all of which occurred on the second floor, as well as years’ worth of local theatre on the main floor. For years, my poetry workshops at Collected Works would regularly retire here, post-workshop, for libations and conversation, which I suggest that we do as well.