Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?
My family moved to Ottawa from New Brunswick when I was young, and I mostly grew up here. I moved away for university in my late teens—to Toronto first, and later Manchester, England—but I came back to Ottawa for work and to be closer to family.
Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?
I loved writing as a child, and my parents sent me to creative writing workshops for children that were hosted through the former Gloucester Public Library system and at an annual conference for budding writers and illustrators held at St. Paul University. As a teenager, I attended Canterbury High School’s Literary Arts Program, which introduced me to a wider literary community in Ottawa.
As an adult, I’ve connected to a writing community through various networks—including the Optional Residency MFA at the University of British Columbia from which I recently graduated (there are many students and alumni of the program in Ottawa). I’ve also met people who write while attending various readings and literary events around the city.
Several years ago, I launched a playwrights’ circle through the Ottawa Little Theatre to foster a community of budding playwrights here—though the group hasn't been active in the last year or so.
Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?
I’ve found it encouraging to see—up close and around me—a breadth of approaches to a writing life. The lines are far blurrier between, say, a pastime, a passion, and a profession, than I used to think. When I was younger, I thought people were either professional writers or amateurs, an idea based on received ideas that leave little room for other, more inventive, possibilities. Instead, the community around me has modelled something far more nuanced, a more sustainable—and inspired—approach to writing that puts less pressure on financial return and places the focus to pursuing one’s own writing obsessions and curiosities.
Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?
To my mind, Ottawa has an exceptionally engaged poetry community—both readers and writers. I often meet people in my day-to-day who love poetry, and who know the local poets as well as poetry practice in the wider world. I’m not sure this degree of engagement exists in other cities of a similar size.
In terms of writing, Ottawa offers me occasions for both solitude and connection. Someplace rural might offer more of the former and a bigger city more of the latter; Ottawa offers something at the crossroads of both. To write, I need both of these modes. I like going for long, quiet walks—along the canal, the Ottawa River, through the arboretum, or in nearby Gatineau Park—to think through my writing projects. I also need a bit of hustle and bustle around me—and while Ottawa doesn’t offer a lot of that, there’s just enough to energize and inspire me.
Ottawa’s also a relatively bilingual city, and I’ve benefited from the sometimes-overlapping French and English literary cultures (though I wish there was more of this—including more work to advance Ottawa’s rich potential as a centre for literary translation).
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’ve been able to test out writing projects before sending them out into the wider world at reading events in Ottawa. Also, in the last few years, on reading the work of peers set in Ottawa, I’ve started to set more of my writing here. Previously, I had the odd, though not uncommon, tendency to set things in places that felt more widely known—Toronto or New York. This is silly because, of course, there have been many great books set in Ottawa; take Carol Shields’ The Stone Diaries, for example—how did I only discover this book last year?
Q: What are you working on now?
I continue to refine my first novel—which I wrote as my MFA thesis, and which centres on the historical purge of LGBTQ employees in government during the Cold War. I’m also starting to outline a second novel and my next play; though I’m hesitant to mention more about these projects—talking too much about a piece before it’s written makes it feel as if it’s already out in the world. And I continue to write poems, increasingly with an eye to compiling them into a cohesive manuscript.
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