Mary
Lee Bragg
spent her childhood in rural southern Alberta and was educated in Calgary. She
now lives in Ottawa, where she had a career in the public service focussing on
official languages. Her award-winning poetry and short fiction have appeared in
literary magazines and ezines in Canada, the United States and Cuba. She has
published the novel Shooting Angels and the poetry chapbooks How
Women Work and Winter Music. Her first poetry collection, The Landscape That Isn’t There, was
published in 2019.
Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you
here?
I’ve lived in Ottawa since 1981. I moved here with my family to
take a job with the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages, and ended
up working there for 20 years. I had worked in regional offices of what was
then the Department of Secretary of State, but regional jobs tend to involve a
lot of travel, and promotional opportunities are limited. I had a young family
and a lot of ambition, so Ottawa looked like a good place to work and live. The
work was good, but after almost 40 years here, I have to say the living is even
better.
Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently,
the writing community here?
I’ve always been an avid reader, and interested in writing. The first poem I wrote, when I was in Grade
Two, rhymes the words “snow” and “blow”, “white” and “night”. That was the
first of a many poems about the weather. I met my husband, Colin Morton, while
we were working on the university poetry magazine at the University of Calgary
in the 1960s. Both of us hung around
with W. O. Mitchell, who was the writer in residence at the time. I started
keeping a journal around then, and have kept it up ever since.
For the first few years after we moved to Ottawa, I was very
focused on my career. Colin got acquainted with other poets through the Tree
reading series and Christopher Levenson’s poetry writing group. I met Susan
McMaster, Blaine Marchand, John Barton and other writers through him. Colin and
Susan McMaster, with her brother Andrew McClure, formed a performance poetry
group called First Draft. I attended many of their performances, chanted in a
few choruses and wrote a few bits which they performed once.
I read a lot of fiction, so that’s what I opted to write. In the mid-Eighties, I started taking fiction
writing courses through the University of Ottawa, and did in-residence
workshops with Diane Schoemperlen at the Kingston School of Writing, and with
Frances Itani at Bridgewater. Those classes spun off into workshops with
members like Nadine McInnis and Sandra Nicholls. In the early 90s, one of my
short stories won a prize from the Ottawa Citizen, after which I almost
immediately switched to writing novels. During the 1990s, I wrote three novels,
including Shooting Angels, which was published in 2004.
My writing life took a turn after I retired from the public
service in 2006. I was fully prepared to
sit down and write another novel, but somehow the ideas and the words just
didn’t flow. Some time in this period, I
wrote an email to Susan McMaster in which I talk about where we are in our
lives, and compare us to peonies. She
replied that with a few line breaks and some tweaks, that email would make a
beautiful poem. I worked on it, and the email turned into the poem “Peony
Moment”, which appears in the chapbook How Women Work. I looked again at
my journal, and my contributions to online discussion lists, and realized that
short forms have a lot to offer, and that I was already working in them.
I joined Barbara Myers’s poetry group and took a workshop with
Miller Adams. There I got better acquainted with Frances Boyle and Lise
Rochefort, and joined the group they had started, the Ruby Tuesdays.
Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your
thinking about writing, if at all?
I’ve been working with the Rubies’ since 2012, and have found it a
great way to actually finish the short bits that I write. Not only finish, as
in polish, but submit for publication, and collect into a book. The Rubies have
provided a great incentive and structure to take the work to the next level. A
lot of that comes from watching other people struggle with their material, and
talking about the process. Working within a group where there is consistent
feedback about my own work and an opportunity to see other people’s work in
process, I’ve gotten to appreciate how poetry connects us to one another.
Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere
else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?
I don’t have a good idea of what’s happening anywhere else, except
in Victoria, where we spent the last two winters. I think Ottawa has an advantage in its size:
the community is large enough to be diverse, but not so large that it’s divided
and factional. I hear writers in Ottawa
express a strong sense of responsibility toward the literary community, in
comments like “Whose turn is it to run Tree?”
Ottawa also provides writers with opportunities to make a living
writing. Not necessarily creative writing, but there’s a lot to be said for
learning to string coherent sentences together, even if it is in deathless
prose like Language of Work in the National Capital Region. (Which remains my most-read publication,
ever.)
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?
My novel Shooting Angels is set in Ottawa on the eve of the
1995 referendum in Quebec. I put all the Ottawa things in it: Parliament Hill,
skating on the canal, going to the cottage in black fly season.
Two years ago, I had congestive heart failure and had open-heart
surgery at the Ottawa Heart Institute. In the lead-up to surgery, I was locked
down as tightly as we all were at the beginning of the Covid pandemic. No
stores, no restaurants, no movies, stay away from children, no stress, no
alcohol, caffeine, smoking, etc. I couldn’t attend meetings of the Rubies, but
wrote a series of poems about the experience, which I shared with them
online. That suite of poems is now the
centre of my collection, The Landscape That Isn’t There. Writing those
poems, and sharing them with the Rubies and with Colin, Susan and Blaine helped
me keep calm and focused during a very difficult time.
I don’t know whether Ottawa has influenced my approach to my work.
I’m not sure I’d be writing if I weren’t in an environment full of
writers. I’m quite sure I wouldn’t be
publishing if I weren’t in a group like the Rubies.
Q: What are you working on now?
I have realized that retirement is not the time for me to take on
a long project, like a novel. I needed
to switch gears and write poetry in this phase of my life at least partly
because you can finish a poem fairly quickly. The novel tends to be structured
and planned: you start out with a clear idea of where you want to end and
proceed to go there. Poetry is more open-ended and invites you to engage in
what’s going on around you now. Writing poetry allows me to find out what I
REALLY want to write about.
The short answer to this question is: poems.
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