Pearl
Pirie’s 4th poetry collection is footlights (October 2020, Radiant
Press). She has run phafours press for over a decade and put out nearly 4 dozen
titles with it. Her author site is at www.pearlpirie.com. You may find her on twitter @pesbo and help
her reach 2000 followers and find out about wildflowers, mushrooms and leftist
randomalia.
Q:
How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?
I
came to Ottawa for university in August, 1991. I have lived. volunteered and/or
worked in Ottawa since.
Q:
How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing
community here?
I
was writing before I arrived but at a disconnect from the contemporary scene.
Within the first months of arriving I encountered the Bywords schedule and
tentatively wall-flowered at Sasquatch and Tree, picked up Poem broadsides, and
later saw rob mclennan writing in a bookstore window. After a workshop that
grew out of Christopher Levenson poetry course fell into splinters, I hung with
the Omnigothic Neo-Futurists for a bit. When I joined rob mclennan’s workshop
about 20 years ago I started talking with more poets and attending more events
are his gentle coaxing.
Q:
How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing,
if at all?
Being
steeped in the 1800s, I was introduced to poetry of this century, or rather,
the 1900s. I realized people could write playfully and in language without
meaning, and of their own lives without a poet voice authority. It was my first
glimpse of the Avant Garde, which I liked much more than lyrical.
Q:
What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does
Ottawa provide, or allow?
There’s
sound poetry here. That’s a boon.
When
I arrived it was a boom time of book publishers most of which has since busted.
Small presses are still at a higher than usual density, probably owing to all
the universities feeding new poets into the community. The agency of owning the
means of production gives energy and power to people compared to small rural
and urban areas where people petition to gatekeepers. Models of people you know
electing to be gatekeepers gives a sense of personal power.
Some
cities I’ve toured seem cold and cynical. Ottawa seems friendlier but maybe
that’s because I have friends here. Ottawa is at the cross-roads of Montreal
and Toronto with the benefits of a larger city for art-presence of a capital.
It seems a gentle stopping place without the harsh feuds and divides between
sub-communities of literature that mark some cities where you can feel the
tension and cliques in a reading room. Was it like this here before VERSeFest?
Do
you suppose all our green areas and rivers and the canal mellow the spirits?
Slower bus service gives more interstitial time? We are close to politics but
perhaps no less than Toronto protests that would raise consciousness of poets.
Pub-keepers on bus routes who encouraged events make a huge difference. Cheap
accessible venues allow people to cross-pollinate. Poetry is easily shouldered
out by venues who charge. Back when the International Writers Fest had a whack
of poetry people could congregate easily in informal writers suites. I don’t
know how much that happens in other cities.
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?
Working
with Michèle Provost a couple times as a group we responded ekphrastically to
her art out of which came chapbooks and a short story. The projects challenged
with timeline for content and performance of work. I’ve done a gratitude
project in poetry of people, mostly local poets.
The
community formed me so yes, it changes me. I’ve been in 5 workshop groups here.
All the writing community I’ve been exposed to and interacted with and the
friends I’ve made—I’m a composite of everyone.
Q:
What are you working on now?
I’m
working on an urban fantasy novel. Defying Gravity is set in Jayde’s
supernatural Montreal. Jayde Friessen’s Vancouver mother is fae, her father a
Werewolf, but Jayde was born mundane. She is a queer stone mason in her best,
quiet life, planning Al and Dom’s wedding, until someone starts shooting her
and her friend Penny with skewers which disappear. And her girlfriend
disappears. Then Penny does. When community comes together against street
harassment in overdrive the protagonist learns she has powers she didn’t know
she had.
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