Six Questions interview #46 : Jennifer Baker

Jennifer Baker lives and works in Ottawa. Her first chapbook, Abject Lessons, was published in 2014 by above/ground press and her creative writing and reviews have appeared in various literary publications including Dusie, Ottawater, The Bull Calf, and The Journal of Canadian Poetry and Canadian Literature. Her article, ““Resituating Kroetsch: Accident and the Provisional Georgic in Robert Kroetsch’s ‘The Ledger,’” was recently published in Kroetsch:Novelist-Essayist-Poet (2020). 

Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?

I’ve lived in Ottawa for exactly a decade, now, which feels hard to believe! I came here to do my PhD at the University of Ottawa and stayed because it wasn’t Exeter.

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?

It feels like I’ve always been writing. I started with long, rambling stories about Dusty and Dirty, my childhood cat and her stray best friend, who held seances in our garage to call up William “Tiger” Dunlop’s ghost dog to have adventures. (Dunlop was one of the founding settler-colonizers of Goderich, Ontario with the Canada Company, and an ambiguously shaded recurring character). Like any angsty kid who went through a goth phase, I graduated from writing rhyming poems that pleased adults into writing lyric poems about my many feelings. I wrote both prose and poetry well into my 20s, but my writing was mostly influenced by fiction writers like Alice Munro. I was searching for ways to express the latent observations I had about rural southwestern Ontario once I’d left it for the big city of London (Ontario). Poetry felt too lofty—it was the craft of people who grew up near art galleries and went to fancy wine-tasting parties and went home to houses built with studies. It wasn’t until the latter half of my undergraduate degree that I started thinking seriously about poetics as a tradition I wanted to be involved in.

It’s a little embarrassing to admit now that we know each other, but I read Phil Hall for the first time in the fourth year of my Undergraduate degree at Western, and it was the first time I had heard a voice from rural Ontario in poetics that I connected with. I included Why I Haven’t Written in my Master’s thesis at Concordia, but at that time I was far too shy to join Concordia’s writing community to further develop my own craft (for better or worse). I happened to come to the University of Ottawa, where he happened to be writer-in-residence, and I wrote some poems for the first time in years, and remembered for the first time the feeling of taking my foot off the break and letting myself say something. Phil’s kindness brought me to the Ottawa writing community, though I think my involvement is best described as brief and periodic. I have always had a hard time deciding where I want to belong, or maybe I just have a hard time belonging. I’ve been thinking of all the ways in which I feel community is both a vital and necessary thing and of all the ways in which for me it has always felt like a fraught set of impossible restrictions, responsibilities, embarrassments, and personal failures rather than a supportive refuge. I haven’t worked all of that out for myself yet, but I do feel lots of affection for many people involved in the Ottawa literary scene.

Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?

Ottawa’s writing community is the first community in which I felt welcomed and the one that demystified the world of small press publishing which, until rob published Abject Lessons and I met more people, had seemed a secret society to me. I learned a lot from my short time with Arc as their Reviews Editor, and all the people who tirelessly work to keep small presses, magazines, and events afloat here. My academic ideas of tradition and influence have shifted more intimately to affinities and affections.

Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?

Ottawa feels smaller, but relative to its size, it feels less dominated by academic departments than writing communities in, I guess, what you might call the coterie cities like Toronto and Montreal. I think that’s a good thing. You can also know “the community” here and still discover lots of other places where poetics and lively literary and literary-adjacent events happen. Despite my decade here, I feel like before the pandemic I was only starting to discover the depth and breadth of creative and collaborative activity in this city.

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?

I haven’t written anything that’s engaged directly with the writing community here, but the city itself has started creeping into my poems. Most recently, Jeff Blackman published a short poem in his pandemic ‘zine These Days about my and David Currie’s lofty observations of the guy who lives full-time on on Cummings Island, a tiny island in the Rideau river across from our balcony.

Q: What are you working on now?

I’m reading toward some side-projects that have partially materialized: I have been lucky enough to have been trusted with some important family artefacts, like my great-great grandmother’s diaries from the 1920s and 30s, and the Ontario School readers passed through the community to my grandfather when he attended a one-room elementary school, with marginalia written and doodled by bored relatives as schoolchildren. So I’ve been working on some found poems that centre those histories and pieces, but I have a feeling once I put them beside some of my other poems, they will all pull me toward the same place. It takes me a long time to digest anything. I’m someone you might describe has “having bit off more than she could chew.”

Very slowly, though, I think I’m turning to a manuscript project. I’ve noticed a thread developing in the poems I’ve written about the mechanics of abuse (of ourselves, others, nonhuman life), responsibility, and compassionate accountability. I’m slowly following that thread from the abuse I endured as a teenager through to exploring the dynamics of abuse in settler-Canadian histories and stories and ontologies, and the mysteries of my family’s settler history and the responsibilities that come from that history. I don’t know. I feel like I’m on the cusp of being able to express it all, but I also wrote a 400ish page dissertation roughly around this topic and feel like I haven’t figured it out how to express it. What can you do but keep trying?