Abby Paige
is a writer and theater maker whose writing has recently appeared in Arc Poetry Magazine, Room Magazine, The Montreal Review of Books, PRISM
International, and Résonance. Her
work will also be included in the 2020 Best
Canadian Poetry Anthology. She recently won the 2020 Harbor Review Editor’s
Prize for her chapbook, Clean Margins.
Her previous chapbook, Other Brief Discourses,
was published by Ottawa’s above/ground press in 2013. You can learn more about
her work at her website: http://www.abbypaige.com
Q: How long were you in
Ottawa, and what first brought you here? What took you away?
I passed through Ottawa on a
cloud of breast milk and diaper rash. My husband is an itinerant scientist and
worked for a time for the federal government, which is what brought us to
Ottawa in 2011. I was pregnant when we moved, so my memories of that time are
sort of bleary and tinted by post-partum depression, but the major life events that
took place and the cherished friendships that began there mean that Ottawa will
always have its hooks in me. We stayed for about four years, until science took
us on to New Brunswick.
Q:
How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing
community here?
I’ve always written, but it
took me a while to figure out who I am as a writer. My academic interests were
eclectic, and for a long time I couldn’t figure out whether I wanted to be a
poet or a comedian. That’s not metaphorical, those were really the choices I
was working with. I performed stand-up and sketch comedy during my twenties,
and I wrote poetry during that time, too, but deciding to get my MFA was how I
started taking myself seriously as a writer. That was a couple of years before
I got to Ottawa.
Just before we moved, I was
touring a solo show that I had written about the descendants of French-Canadian
immigrants in New England; freelancing, doing work for software companies,
museums, and non-profits; and writing poems and book reviews. I had been very
productive creatively for a few years, and when I was pregnant I was sort of
petrified about how I would keep that up while mothering. I also wanted to be
proactive about making connections in my new city, so I started by submitting
work to local publications, and I had some success, which led to invitations to
readings. I couldn’t necessarily participate in the ways I wanted to with an
infant at home, but I really loved going to readings at that time and
discovering the local ecosystem of writers.
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?
The
lack of pretension in the Ottawa writing community was just what I needed at
that moment in my life. I felt like I could stumble into a reading, have a beer,
stay up past my bedtime, and enjoy other people’s poetry without having to
perform some kind of poetic social ritual that I wasn’t capable of at the time.
I’m grateful for that, and I think it helped me to keep going at a time when
writing was difficult. It helped me to reconnect with the idea that writers are
people who write, so all I had to do to stay a writer was to keep writing. That
idea has carried me through some tough days.
Q: What
did you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What did Ottawa
provide, or allow?
What I appreciated most about
the writing community in Ottawa is that it was easy to participate. In many
places, people are concerned about protecting turf in a way that’s exhausting
to try to penetrate, but I found Ottawa writers to be really invested in the
health of their community and happy to have new people join in. There was a
sense that everyone was working together to foster a creative ecosystem. There
was a sense of abundance that was refreshing.
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?
I immigrated to Canada from
the United States, and my time in Ottawa deepened my relationship to Canada and
my understanding of Canadian culture. In some ways, it magnified for me those
things about myself that are not
Canadian. That certainly continues to influence my work, especially since my
work often ends up dealing with borders and identity. As an English-speaking
descendant of francophone people, I’m fascinated by the ways language and
culture define and defy each other. That’s at work all the time in Ottawa,
since bilingualism is something people are constantly confronted with. I think
it’s something the rest of Canada should aspire to.
Q: What are you working on
now?
These
days, I’m pandemicking pretty hard. Three months of home schooling a
third-grader has knocked me back to the early days of parenting, when I had to
scramble to find the time and space to write. I’m dreaming of a day when we’ll
have access to childcare again. In the meantime, I’m working on a few things
related to Franco-American history, which is one of the orbits my work often
travels in. I’m preparing my solo plays, which deal with that topic, for
publication by a press in the United States, and, happily, I just had a new
chapbook of poems come out on-line (https://www.harbor-review.com/clean-margins).
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