Warren works in the film & tv industry and spends much of his earnings on storage lockers to house his rather enormous collection of poetry books, chapbooks, broadsides & ephemera.
He enjoys travelling, fine dining, watching squirrels, hummingbirds & clouds, & spending time with his partner Dana.
He has authored a dozen chapbooks over the last 27 yrs. & has abandoned more of his writing projects than anyone would care to admit.
Q: How long were you in Ottawa, and what first brought you here? What took you away?
I moved to Ottawa from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia where my career military dad had been stationed aboard the HMCS Ottawa, a destroyer style Canadian forces naval ship. He received a transfer to the Nation’s capital to work at the DND (Department of National Defence), and at the Upland’s airforce base in 1982, and once again my family relocated as we had done so many times before.
I began the grade eight school year, at Holy Cross elementary school, which as the previous year I was at Sir Robert Borden Jr. High School, seemed like a step backwards. After which I attended Immaculata High School at 211 Bronson Ave. Choosing the school for its uniform wearing semi private prep school look, the large ratio of females to males, and the fact it reminded me so much of the tv show “The Facts of Life”. At just under 6 feet tall, and at 115 lbs soaking wet, I was a awkward 4 eyed grade 9 nerd, who quickly became obsessed with Shakespeare, Romantic poets, Monty Python, SCTV & Saturday Night Live comedy sketches. I had dreams of acting, on stage or in films, and or being a writer, or spy.
While in high school I gravitated towards the downtown punk and artsy crowds. A mall rat spending my time hanging out at art galleries, cafe wim, in bookstores, and at the university campuses of The U of O, and Carleton. Trying to figure out bohemian cool, rebellious outlets & doing crazy things for kicks. While writing out plays, poems, and song lyrics for make believe bands.
After high school, I found myself at Carleton University. My hair long past my shoulders, and I discovered several others into similar passions of poetry, pranks & living life for kicks. I graduated from university, having made many life long friends, and having connected with the local literary scene, forming some friendships that have been like family to me. rob mclennan being one of the most significant of those friends.
Shortly after graduating, and recognizing I had little in the way of employment offerings, as I’m not bilingual, and the ongoing depression from failed relationships, and the brutally cold winters. I packed up and mailed 25 plus boxes of books to my parents new home in Kamloops, and by the winter of 1996 I had got on a greyhound bus, phoned my friend rob from the bus depot on St. Catherine’s and left Ottawa behind.
Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?
I had started writing comedy routines, space plays, jokes, and word play dialogue for radio plays for my brother & I to perform on a tape recorder I had been given. This was back in 1977-1980 (grades 3,4 & 5). I would draw and write elaborate comics and stories of space explorers, and adventures. I was into UFOs, aliens, Sasquatch, and the odd comic book superhero at the time. As well I had via Monty Python, Wayne & Shuster and the 2 Ronnies developed an interest in poetry, poets, and the playfulness of language.
By high school, I was writing odd little poems, teenage confessional, punk & beat inspired poems & songs. & further to that in my late teens & early 20’s discovered others doing likewise, and was attending poetry readings, studying poetry & poetics at Carleton, and buying poetry books like my life depended on it.
I became friends with poets in the Ottawa community, and poets in Toronto & Montreal, & with the early days of the internet, through sigs and newsgroups poets in the United States & the UK.
Ottawa poets of influence of those early days included; rob mclennan, Seymour Mayne, Robin Hannah, Gwendolyn Guth, John Newlove, John Barton, Nadine McInnis, Robert Craig, Ronnie R. Brown, Juan O’Neill, Dennis Tourbin, Michael Dennis, Patrick White, Catherine Jenkins, Robert Hogg, Dorothy Howard, Jeffrey Mackie & many others I came to know through their books & their public readings. Equally as important were all the poets that gave readings in Ottawa, or those whose readings I attended in Montreal, Toronto, Kingston, Hamilton, & later in 1994 New York City.
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?
My thinking of writing took an abrupt swerve, as I came to know more & more writers, it became evident that although a solitary artistic pursuit, the sharing of it is very much a public communal activity. I realized how much I enjoyed assisting in the promotion of the poetry of others. How I loved hosting, publishing, billeting and simply chatting about poetry & life with other poets.
Ottawa represented for me a coming of age, and place of many firsts:
First public poetry reading.
First time hosting a poetry event.
First literary publication.
First poetry tour.
First poetry slam event.
First radio interview.
First television interview.
So many firsts. Also first sexual awakening. First major heartbreak. First significant rejection. First failures & successes.
With the move to Kamloops, I found myself gathering to me new poetry friends, and the start of a community around a group we dubbed The Kamloops Poets’ Factory. It had many new successes of its own. Including group poetry tours, publication, regular readings & being invited to do high school workshops, and bringing touring poets to Kamloops.
& then onto Vancouver in 2000, where I had already been spending a great deal of time those years before the solo move. The Vancouver literary scenes surrounding SFU, UBC, the literary magazines at Douglas College, the Kootenay School of writing, the downtown poets, those from TISH, Edgewise Electrolit Centre & the poetry slam scene all contributed to my ever developing gestalt poetics and ever expanding poetry addiction.
Q: What did you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What did Ottawa provide, or allow?
What I witnessed in Ottawa was a healthy level of encouragement along with a dose of “ok, so show us what you’ve got. Why should people pay attention?”
Ottawa writers always seemed to turn out for one another, many doing the circuit of launches, reading series, bookstore purchases, and socializing.
I felt the Ottawa literary community, more than any other, always opened its arms to welcome the novice, to listen to what these new voices had to offer. And when I returned to visit Ottawa, I was always amazed by the new voices that developed there; Sandra Ridley, Amanda Earl, Christine McNair, Max Middle, Cameron Anstee, & many more. As well as how the ones I knew from decades earlier had grown, changed, Pearl Pirie being one that completely floored me with her changes.
Ottawa always seemed to allow, to provide unspoken permission. It is the reason there was a reading series in an ice cream shop, poetry busking in the byward market, a reading series at a pub at the end of the universe. Ottawa’s unspoken rule of just go for it, is why lit mags like HostBox, the Skinny, Bywords, GraffitiFish, Missing Jacket, STANZAS, Touch the Donkey, MPD, In/Words, & so many others came into existence, as well as so many small presses.
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?
My earliest chapbooks. My first published poems go back to the 1980’s & 1990’s in Ottawa, and my departure from the Nation’s capital.
In the years & years since leaving, images, concepts, memories from Ottawa, from my youth creep in and occupy my current writing.
I approach each writing venture much like I’m just starting out again. In part as I have had many false starts, many times I’ve thrown in the towel and tossed out pages of notes, pieces of poems torn up and trashed through frustration with myself, always strong with the self doubt, with the inner critic shouting “forget it. No one cares what you think. What you write. You think you’re clever? Even writers of considerable talent hardly anyone gives two shits about. Why do you think people will care?”
& every now & again I say, who cares? Doesn’t matter. & I still write things. Much of which will never make it beyond nightstand words, phrases scribbled down, first drafts in tiny notebooks, or some directly scribed onto iPhone notes.
Q: What are you working on now?
I’m working on a few things. A series of memoir type writings. Keeping it small. Attempting to write 14 sections, 14 entries each, as reels of viewmaster memories. to be potentially published as 14 different chapbooks (perhaps with photos)
- Viewmaster Memoirs -,
dealing with childhood, friends, loves, family, school, travels, significant moments, employment, & various significant people I’ve met who have made a lasting impression on me.
Another is going over and revisiting, rewriting plays and screenplays I wrote treatments or basic outlines and scenes for years & years ago.
And then there are the various books of poetry wallowing in self pity from their abandonment. I will locate them, dust them off, give them a hug, apologize for my mistreatment of them, and encourage them to venture out into the world. Perhaps they may experience further rejection, but I’ll work on them, give them some love, attention, and encouragement to try again. They need to know, I’ll not give up on them. That I shall strive to do better, be better for their sake.
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