Mark Frutkin has
published sixteen books of fiction, poetry and nonfiction. His most recent
novel, The Rising Tide (Porcupine’s
Quill, 2018), set in Venice in 1769. His recent collection of poetry, Hermit Thrush, was shortlisted for the
Ottawa Book Award. His novel, Fabrizio’s
Return, won the Trillium Award and the Sunburst Prize, and was shortlisted
for the Commonwealth Prize (Canada/Caribbean region). His novel, Atmospheres Apollinaire, was a finalist
for the Governor General’s Award for fiction.
Q: How long have you
been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?
I’ve been in the
Ottawa area since 1970 when I came to Canada as a draft resister from the U.S.
during the Vietnam War. My mother was born and raised in Toronto so I knew
Canada well, having spent many vacations at relatives’ cottages on Georgian
Bay. When I first moved to the Ottawa area, I lived on a farm in the Gatineau
Hills near Wolf Lake, in a log cabin with no electricity or running water. At
the farm, I started writing a lot, mostly poetry and short stories, and
publishing in small Canadian literary magazines. After ten glorious years
there, I moved to Ottawa and lived with friends in Sandy Hill.
Q: How did you first
get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?
When I moved into
town, I started dating a woman who worked for a small arts publication called
the Ottawa Review. She helped me land a position there as the visual
arts and literary reviewer so I ended up writing reviews about a lot of Ottawa
artists and writers, their exhibitions and their books. Eventually I ended up
teaching creative writing at University of Ottawa and Carleton University, and
became the editor of Arc Poetry magazine (co-editor, actually, with John Bell),
at the request of Christopher Levenson, the founder of Arc who was stepping
down.
Q: How did being in
such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?
That’s hard to say.
I’m sure the many writers I met in Ottawa certainly affected how and what I
write, but it’s a bit difficult to measure. One thing I did learn was that you
don’t have to be famous to be a good writer. Many writers I met and read were excellent
and yet they were often little known outside Ottawa and the Ottawa writing
community.
Q: What do you see
happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or
allow?
This is a difficult
question to address since I haven’t lived anywhere else since 1970 except
Ottawa and area so I’m not really that up on what’s going on in Toronto,
Vancouver, Montreal or NYC, let alone Regina and Winnipeg. What Ottawa does
provide is lots of down time in the winter, when there is plenty of opportunity
to read and write (unless you’re an inveterate skier or ice skater, which I’m
not). Ottawa also happens to be extremely rich in poets which I think is
interesting. Lots of good poets here, lots of good poetry activity. Maybe, just
maybe, it has something to do with the fact that a government town is a place
that works with words and language so many many people here are engaged in
writing for work, and that somehow spills over into poetic expression. That’s
my theory, anyway.
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 think the most
relevant project for me was Erratic North, my memoir about living in the
country and being a draft resister. The book wasn’t specifically about Ottawa
but about the Ottawa area, the Gatineau Hills, Wakefield, Wolf Lake and so on.
The other influence of Ottawa is the closeness to the natural world. It’s easy
to get out of Ottawa into the bush, with Gatineau Park nearby. I think that
world of nature and the ever-present power of the weather here has had a strong
influence on my poetry in particular.
Q: What are you
working on now?
I’m always working
on three things at a time: a novel, poetry and essays. I have a novel coming
out with Porcupine’s Quill in Spring 2021 titled The Artist and the Assassin
based on the life and mysterious death of the famous Italian painter,
Caravaggio. I’ll be working on edits of that in the next year. I’ll probably
try to publish a new poetry collection sometime in the next year or so, and the
same goes for a new essay collection (titled, The Walled Garden). The
novel I’m working on at present is set in Tang Dynasty China.
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