Manahil Bandukwala is an Ottawa-based writer, editor, and
visual artist. She is the author of two chapbooks, Paper Doll (2019) and Pipe
Rose (2018). She is on the editorial team of Canthius, a feminist literary magazine. She was longlisted for the
2019 CBC Poetry Prize, was the 2019 winner of Room magazine’s Emerging Writer
Award. See her work on manahils.com.
Q: How long
have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?
I’ve been in
Ottawa since 2014, and came here for university at Carleton – and I’m finishing
up my degree this year!
Q: How did
you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community
here?
The two are
kind of tied together. In my second year at Carleton, I got involved with
In/Words Magazine, and that really bridged the space between university and
community. I started going to readings, listening to poets and eventually read
at open mics. To read at open mics, I had to write stuff I liked enough. A book
that has really influenced my writing is Bottles
and Bones by Ayesha Chatterjee, and I first encountered Ayesha’s work at
Tree, and then at Sawdust.
Q: How did
being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at
all?
Five years
ago my conception of writing was of sitting holed up in a room producing ideas
out of nothing. Now I see writing as a process, a form of growth, symbiotic
with everything around.
Q: What do
you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa
provide, or allow?
I have a
beautiful memory of meeting for brunch at the Manx before Versefest a couple of
years ago with Sarah MacDonnell and Claire Farley. This was before I got
involved with Canthius, and I didn’t know either of them very well, but they
invited me along anyways.
I can’t say much
about what I see in other places because my only experience in a writing
community is Ottawa, but this is what I see Ottawa provide.
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?
In 2018, I
worked with Conyer Clayton to publish her chapbook, Mitosis, through In/Words Magazine & Press. It was launched
alongside a sister album, If the river
stood still by Conyer and Nathanael Larochette. The project was funded by
the City of Ottawa, and was very much a product of the community. I first heard
Conyer read an excerpt from Mitosis at
In/Words, then as a poetry-music collaboration at Sawdust. I pitched the idea
of getting funding to publish a chapbook-album collab, and there we were!
The project was
my first dive into collaborating with another artist. It was a super fun
process, from picking out cover cardstock to making illustrations to getting
together for a bookbinding hangout. The act of writing, editing, and submitting
can be a very isolating process, so collaborating with others is a huge part of
enjoying being a writer. I don’t know if I would be writing so consistently and
passionately if it weren’t for community.
Q: What are
you working on now?
My winter
break has been my sister Nimra and I working on our literary-visual project, Reth aur Reghistan.
We researched folklore in Karachi and the province of Sindh in August 2019, and
have now started turning that research into creative media. Our plan is to
publish a book of poetry and sculptures inspired by our findings.
We’ve made
about 25 sculptures from found materials like cloth, shells, dried flowers, and
sticks so far, with plans to make more. It was a lot of fun seeing how the
materials we had could visualize characters, scenes, and themes from the story.
We’ve shared a few samples of sculptures
on our website. Nimra and I both love our sculpture of Banbh and Manh, twin
creatures who are half-female, half-hellish – so much so that it’s the first
image on the website.
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