Anita Lahey's memoir, The Last Goldfish: a true tale of friendship,
is forthcoming from Biblioasis in April 2020. A poet, journalist, essayist and
the series editor of Biblioasis’ annual anthology, Best Canadian Poetry, Anita's other books include The Mystery Shopping Cart: Essays on Poetry
and Culture (Palimpsest Press, 2013) and two Véhicule Press poetry
collections: Spinning Side Kick and Out to Dry in Cape Breton. The latter
was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and the Ottawa Book Award.
Anita’s magazine journalism has received several National Magazine Award
honourable mentions. Anita lives in Ottawa.
Q:
How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?
The
first time I moved here, I came from Toronto in my early 20s (in the early 90s)
with my boyfriend, who was going to teachers’ college at Ottawa U. You could
say I came to Ottawa for love. I came back again, when I was a just little
older, for a different love.
I
once wrote a poem about why people wind up in Ottawa. At least, it’s partly
about that, and you’d be surprised how often the answer to that question is “love,”
or some variation (“a government job” for one half of a partnership, e.g.;
“love” for the other half). For awhile, I went around saying to whomever would
listen: you’d never think it, especially
given the way the rest of the country derides Ottawa as the seat of politics,
etc., but this place is just crammed with people who came here for love; that’s
part of its hidden personality, its secret power. The poem is in my book Spinning Side Kick and is called “Time
and Place.” Susan Gillis, that wonderful poet and discusser of poems, posted it
on her blog, Concrete & River, not that long ago: https://susangillis.blogspot.com/2014/03/anita-lahey-poem.html.
I
moved back to Ottawa most recently in the summer of 2019, after 11 years living
in other places (Montreal, Fredericton, Toronto and Victoria). I missed being
here, so this time, having convinced my family it would make good sense for us
all, I came back for love of the city itself.
Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and
subsequently, the writing community here?
I started out as a journalist, writing for
magazines, after studying to do that very thing in the journalism program at
Ryerson University. I still write for magazines, though I do far less
journalism than I used to, in part because literary work keeps edging it out.
I always intended to write creatively. My first
plan was to write stories. In the late 90s, I decided to see if I could sign up
for a class Ottawa author Diana Brebner was teaching at Collected Works
Bookstore, which was in my neighbourhood. Diana’s course was to be in
“short-short fiction and poetry”. I
called her and said I wanted to sign up for her course, but I was mainly
interested in fiction, not poetry. She said, “Let’s just see what happens.”
What happened was, Diana discovered the latent poet in me, and taught her how
to begin to work at her craft.
A little later, some time after publishing my first
poem in its pages, I was invited by then-co-editor John Barton to volunteer
with Arc Poetry Magazine.
These two events, these two people, quite literally
changed my life.
Q: How did being in such a community of writers
shift your thinking about writing, if at all?
Aside from the fact that I rediscovered the poet in
me through the help of other local writers, getting involved with Arc solidified for me the way any kind
of art ferments in community: the more you encounter the work of others, share
your work with others, get to know the real people behind writing that you
love, the more you feel buoyed up by all these creative minds, all this making
going on around you. So when you sit down to write, when you turn to that space
of solitude where stuff happens, you subconsciously know that when you
re-emerge—with, perhaps, something newly made worth sharing—there will be
others there who care about what happened while you were “gone.” Diana Brebner
once told us, in a class, that “No one cares if you write this poem.” She meant
that no one is out there tapping their watches, waiting for the poems to
arrive. That we must make the poems because we need to, by our own imperatives,
not to please anyone else. And that we can’t expect a pat on the head or any
reward for having done so. She was right about all that.
But finding a community of writers takes the sting,
and even the absolute, out of her statement. For there are people who will care if I go to them and say, I made a new
poem, would you like to read it? And likewise, I care about the creations of
the writers whose work moves and speaks to me. If you’re lucky, your community
also pushes you—not just to write, but to write better. I found that here, and
it made all the difference. Sometimes we worry that poets are just writing for
other poets—but we are, together, being true to a craft that we care about. If
the wider world is not always moved to care, does it matter? It’s a privilege
to be able to pursue a craft, whether as your main occupation or in the margins
of your days—it deepens one’s experience of life. It lends meaning to routine
and can be wielded in the face of the troubles that loom, in our private
spheres and beyond. I may have instinctively reached for this kind of
understanding before, but finding a community of writers such as what exists in
here Ottawa has allowed me to know it, and be reminded of it as required.
Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t
see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?
I hesitate to compare. I don’t want to sing
Ottawa’s praises as the expense of other communities. I’ve lived over the past
11 years in Montreal, Fredericton, Toronto and Victoria. The writing
communities in each place are robust. I know some people experience otherwise
depending where they go, and it may just be my own luck, but I found them all
welcoming, chock full of people interested in engaging, sharing, making space
for new voices, for evermore kin addicted to the powers of language. I have
left friends, including dear writing companions, behind in each of these cities
and towns. But of course every place also has its histories, its little
strifes, its politics, its tenor, its size. Here in Ottawa I find space: room
to hide or engage as one chooses or needs; room to experiment and push at the
edges of craft. It feels as if the outside world has no expectation of us here
as creators. We are not considered hip; we are not in the thick of the “game”
of the publishing industry; we are not presumed to be sophisticated or
provincial, avant-garde or traditional, or any one thing in particular. I think
this allows us to be ourselves, to follow our instincts and just try to make
what wants and needs to be made. I also feel, among the writers here, a
live-and-let-live attitude regarding the endless variety of ways we each
approach our craft: there is no pressure to follow a path someone else has
deemed most worthy. I’m sure, though, there are people who find such openness
and warmth in many places, including those listed above, so I don’t want to
claim it as an Ottawa characteristic. It’s how I feel here.
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 I kind of answered this above. But also, a
good portion of poems in each of my two books (Out to Dry in Cape Breton and Spinning
Side Kick) are set in Ottawa, particularly in my old neighbourhood of
Hintonburg. Now I live in a different part of town, so we’ll see how that plays
out in the coming years.
Q:
What are you working on now?
I
am slowly putting together a new manuscript of poems. They are, in part, winter
poems: pleading-with-winter poems, written from a not very unusual place these
days: climate change anxiety. They also began, though, when we were living out
west, and I found the absence of winter as I had always known it to be an
astonishingly huge and meaningful form of absence, an ache. Within this
manuscript is also a group of poems retelling and reimagining a wildfire that,
in 1976, burned down much of the Cape Breton village where my father grew up. I
was a young child at the time and have carried the fire and stories about it
with me my entire life. Wildfires, like the changing winter, are awfully top of
mind these days, but this fire preceded all this new context: it was just a
fire. Even just a fire leaves scars,
though.
These
fire poems are also part of another project, a collaboration with artist
Pauline Conley: the graphic novel-in-verse, Clarence
the Welder and the Great Fire of Main-à-Dieu. This book, which also contains
some songs and some rhyming dialogue, goes further than the poems themselves
and what facts we know about the fire to imagine a fictional tale around the
fire’s legacy: its chief protagonists include the two boys blamed for starting
the fire, reunited 40 years later. We are still in-progress on this book, which
has been years in the making, and a wild creative ride! Working on this has
been a revelation: to see the characters come to life on the page visually—to
see Pauline’s vision animate the poems and the voices within them—is like being
witness to a kind of magic.
Finally,
my memoir The Last Goldfish: a True Tale
of Friendship will be published this spring by Biblioasis. This book has
been more than two decades in the making and I’m so happy it is finally making
its way into the world!
No comments:
Post a Comment