Nadine McInnis is the author of six books of poetry, one
book of literary criticism on the poetry of Dorothy Livesay and two books of
short stories. She is a two-time winner
of the Ottawa Book Award, for The Litmus
Body and for her most recent book, Delirium
for Solo Harp, and has been short-listed for many literary awards through
the years, including the Pat Lowther Award for Two Hemispheres, the Frank O’Hara International Short Fiction prize
for Blood Secrets, the Danuta Gleed
Award for Quicksilver, the Re-Lit
Award, National Silver Medal for Poetry
from the Canadian Authors Association and the People’s Choice Award.
Q: How long were you in Ottawa, and what first brought you
here? What took you away?
Ottawa was home for most of my life. My father was in the military when I was a
child so we moved up and down the corridor of Belleville, Toronto and Ottawa
through my childhood. We settled in
Ottawa for good when he left the military. I went to high school and university
there, then left for northern Saskatchewan where I lived on Thunderchild
Reserve for two years, then on a farm outside of Livelong for two years. My Saskatchewan years were very formative for
me as a poet, with my first book, Shaking the Dreamland Tree, being written
there and published by Coteau Books. I
then returned to Ottawa to do a Masters and to write while my children were
pre-schoolers. I stayed for another
thirty-some years, working, writing, and enjoying everything the city offers
before moving to Chemainus, Vancouver Island in the summer of 2019. My daughter was always drawn to the west,
perhaps because she was born in Saskatchewan.
She seems settled in Vancouver and once she had a baby, I wanted to be
closer. Plus my husband and I are big hikers and we can do that year round on
the island. And I was parched for access to salt water. My background is Nova Scotian, for many
generations. We also own a house on the
island of Grand Manan in the Bay of Fundy so it was a bit of a toss-up whether
we would settle more permanently east or west.
As I’ve gotten older I need to be near the ocean.
Q: How did you first get involved
in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?
I started writing poetry, quite
obsessively, when I was 16. The 1970s
were the era of great singer/songwriters so poetry seemed to be the current
that drove the whole era. My family was
not literary oriented at all so high school teachers were important for
providing books and even reading my adolescent musings. When I was 19 I met Dorothy Livesay who was
writer-in-residence at the University of Ottawa. She asked me to come to Winnipeg to be her
assistant. My two summers with her in
Winnipeg really consolidated my knowledge of Canadian poetry and the
determination and grit it would take if I wanted to follow the same path. I attended the Banff Centre for the Arts when
I was 20, which further deepened my knowledge and practice. It wasn’t until my return to Ottawa after
Saskatchewan that I met other publishing writers in Ottawa. I went to a Carleton University International
Women’s Day poetry circle in 1986 where I met Susan McMaster and Ronnie
Brown. I think it was Susan who invited
me into a workshop group where I met quite a few other poets. That group included Sandra Nicholls, John
Barton, Chris Levinson, Blaine Marchand, Stephanie Bolster later on. Sandra is still a close friend. John and I took on co-editing Arc magazine
from Chris Levinson. That’s a great way
to read a wide variety of poetry from all over the country. We also did quite a bit of solicitation for
themed issues.
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?
That first decade back in Ottawa
were my most intense years of poetic growth and practice. I would say that my cohort at the time were
committed to emotional and realistic poetry rather than language-based or
theoretical poetry. I’m not sure I would
have followed the latter path anyway, but the emotional core of poetry and the
commitment to clarity and even to story within poetry reinforced what mattered
most to me and probably were also significant in my development as a writer of
short fiction. Short fiction followed
poetry by at least a decade with my first book, Quicksilver, published when I
was in my forties.
Q: What did you see happening here
that you don’t see anywhere else? What did Ottawa provide, or allow?
Ottawa has a varied and active
literary community recognized across the country, both English-language and
French-language. It’s a centre for the
country and also off to the side, which I think suits writers very well. Even the landscape of Ottawa is a kind of
borderland, with the Gatineau Hills thrusting Canadian Shield onto the valley
flats where Ottawa is built. The three
rivers couldn’t be more different in character.
The community is like that too… many different threads, but private
enough that writers can weave their own styles.
I like that Ottawa isn’t the centre of publishing and even that it has a
reputation for being boring. It’s not a
show-offy kind of place. Deals may not
be made there, but that leaves certain kinds of writers quite free. It’s also small enough that one person can
make a difference. You’re a good example
of that, rob. Your commitment to
small-press publishing and profiling Ottawa writers has enriched the city for
many years.
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?
Ottawa’s temperament probably suits my writing quite
well. I don’t like to be in the
spotlight and the emotion in my writing underpins everything but isn’t a
shout-out-loud kind of energy. I like
layers, of language, of metaphor, of psychological truth. I like conflicts between the unconscious and
the conscious, between the body and the mind.
I like how nothing can be resolved but recognition of those layers
brings richness to life. I also used the
landscape of Ottawa extensively in my writing.
Rivers figure in both my poetry and fiction. And I do miss the literary
community in Ottawa. I was in and out of different writing groups through the
years, both in poetry and fiction. Now
that I’m retired from teaching at Algonquin College, I would have been able to
really enjoy all the readings and festivals there, but one gains and loses all
through life.
Q: What are you working on now?
Retiring and moving are great disruptors I must say. I’m working on both poems and short stories
at the moment but it’s hard to say that they are coalescing around particular
themes. I seem to be writing poems about trees, which I guess is appropriate to
Vancouver Island. The stories,
strangely, are all set in the west so far and are about young people and how
difficult it is to find your way these days.
They are both rural and urban in setting, which is also
appropriate. Usually writing lags by
years before new landscapes enter but I’m already in BC in the stories.
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