John Barton’s twenty-six
books, chapbooks, and critical works include Polari, For the Boy with the
Eyes of the Virgin: Selected Poems, Seminal:
The Anthology of Canada’s Gay-Male Poets, and We Are Not Avatars: Essays, Memoirs, Manifestos. In the fall of 2020,
he will publish Lost Family: A Memoir (sonnets)
with Signal Editions and The Essential
Derk Wynand with Porcupine’s Quill. He lives in Victoria, where he is the
city’s fifth poet laureate.
Q: How long were you in
Ottawa, and what first brought you here? What took you away?
I lived in Ottawa from 1985
until the beginning of 2004. I temporarily moved there in the summer of 1985 to
work as a librarian for what is now the Canadian Museum of History. I moved there
permanently the following summer upon completing my library training at the
University of Western Ontario in London and, except for a stint at the
Department of Global Affairs library, for the next seventeen years I worked at four
national museums, at first as a librarian and later in publishing. In January
2004, I left Ottawa to become the editor of The
Malahat Review in Victoria, a post I held until January 2018.
Q: How did you first get
involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?
I began writing in high
school in Calgary, where I grew up. I obtained an undergraduate degree in creative
writing from the University of Victoria in 1981, the same year I published A Poor Photographer, my first book of
poems. When I settled in Ottawa, it took me a year to find my feet as a poet.
In the spring of 1987, I attended a poetry reading during the Ottawa Valley
Writers Festival and re-introduced myself to Christopher Levenson, who was
either the emcee or one of the readers and whom I had first met on one of his
visits to Victoria earlier in the decade. He kindly invited me to join the
monthly poetry group that he coordinated and also onto the board of Arc, where he wanted to take advantage
of my skills as a librarian to automate the circulation records, which up until
then were maintained on 4 x 5 index cards. Through the poetry group, I found a
community of writers that included Blaine Marchand, Colin Morton, Susan
McMaster, Sandra Nichols, and Nadine McInnis, and, through Arc, I discovered my career-long passion for editing literary
magazines. To put it simply, Chris changed my life.
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?
When I first became part of
the Ottawa writing community in the mid-1980s, what struck me most about it was
how refreshingly non-hierarchical it was. The writers I met may have enjoyed
different degrees of success, but I had no sense of anyone perceiving
themselves to be anyone’s better. As the co-editor of Arc), I was aware of the role the magazine played. Because of the community’s size, I felt that I could never guarantee
that local writers would be published in the magazine, but I did make a
commitment to review their books. There was always an annual omnibus review of
all the local collections of poetry published over the previous calendar year.
Also, when the future of the Archibald Lampman Award came into question, I
brought it under Arc’s umbrella. When
I moved back to Victoria, I made an effort to re-integrate the more nationally
focused Malahat into the city’s local writing
scene after years of being more remote.
Q: What did you see
happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What did Ottawa provide, or
allow?
Ottawa, being a city of
public servants, is a city of capable organizers. Writers, having honed their
administrative skills in paid work, applied them to their literary pursuits,
like editing magazines and books, the running of reading series, the mounting
of festivals. Certainly, everything I learned on the job as a librarian and in museum
publishing benefited Arc and the Tree
Reading Series, which I curated for a couple of years in the late 1980s, and I
am sure that the same was true for other writers who had day jobs in the federal
government’s employ.
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?
Nearly all the books of
poems I published after moving to Ottawa in the mid-1980s contain poems
inspired about landscapes or about events that took place there. My work has been
less changed by the city than inspired by it. Though I moved to west coast
sixteen years ago, writing about Ottawa continues to be an aspect of my
practice. I came out as a gay
man there and made livelong friends there inside and outside the literary
community. I always joke that I lived in Ottawa through the years of my prime,
but didn’t notice. It’s only in retrospect that I came to realize this, and
this realization necessarily informs my work.
Q: What are you working on
now?
I
am preparing my twelfth book of poems, Lost
Family: A Memoir, for publication with Signal Editions in the fall of 2020.
It is an autobiography in sonnets and, unsurprisingly, several document my
years in Ottawa.
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