Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?
I was actually born in Ottawa. I did move away when I was very young, but eventually returned in my mid-teens and have been here ever since. This presents itself rather oddly, with me being a city boy who’s lived in Ottawa for 40+ years, but who still misses the mountains, the ocean and the trees of Haida Gwaii.
Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?
It’s funny. I’d been interested in the idea of writing ever since I was young – but that mostly just manifested itself as my reading about writing and thinking about writing until the mid/late 1980s, when I finally began to actually do some prose writing. A few years later some friends and I started a writer’s group. It was a monthly-ish, meet at a pub and compare notes and stories sort of thing – as much social as anything else. We didn’t have any sense that there was a local literary community to be part of out there – we were just kind of writing for ourselves, more or less in a void.
Eventually we put together a little journal – a zine (though we wouldn’t have known what that word was at the time) called MPD. Shortly thereafter we stumbled upon the local literary world by way of our introduction to you and Warren Dean Fulton. The whole thing came as something of a revelation, and I know that some of us – myself included – jumped right in. I’m pretty sure that our MPD group had a table at your first small press book fair, and in spite of not being a poetry writer, I began going to readings – TREE, Bard, Warren’s Vanilla and Vogon series, and your Poetry 101 series, amongst others.
Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?
Weirdly – or so it seems in hindsight – the first thing it did was get me to stop writing. Between MPD and the discovery of the small press scene I quickly became far more interested in the production and publishing side of things… and so I let my own writing drop, and focused first on MPD, and then on The Canadian Journal of Contemporary Literary Stuff – a magazine I did with Tamara Fairchild [see my 2017 interview with him on such here] – and then Murderous Signs, a litzine I put out after “Stuff” folded. It was only with Murderous Signs [see my 2015 interview with him on such here] that I began writing again – first just editorial content for the issues, and then towards the end of the zine’s run I began experimenting with poetry and process.
Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?
Having only lived in Ottawa through the course of my writing and writing-adjacent life, it’s hard for me to say. I’ve had some experience and communication with the literary worlds in Montreal and Toronto over the years – though much less so in recent years – and the general impression I’ve gotten is that Ottawa is the right size. We’re big enough to have a fairly robust literary community (at least in non-pandemic times), without being so big that the community fragments and spirals off into a bunch of cliques and camps that don’t talk to each other based on genre, form, philosophy and/or personality.
The Ottawa literary world has also been blessed with a fair bit of ongoing community continuity too, which I suspect is far more important than most people realize. You (as above/ground, and through your various other literary projects, especially the small press fair) have been a presence here since I got into things. The Ottawa International Writers Festival has been going since 1997. Versefest is now 11 years old. The TREE reading series is probably older than any of the folks currently running it. Amanda Earl has been running the Bywords literary calendar since… I’m not sure when. All of these things are important, and all of them give some structure and support to the literary community, and make it easier for new writers and new projects to find their audiences and find their feet.
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 think the single most important engagement I ever had was when visual artist Michèle Provost asked me to join the contingent of writers she was commissioning to respond to her “Abstracts/Resumes” work, which showed at the Ottawa Art Gallery in early 2010. I’d been doing some writing and experimenting on my own for a while at that point, but not with the intention of it really going anywhere… so this pushed me into writing something that was definitely going to end up in front of an audience – and an audience of people I knew, too.
It was a push I needed. There were a couple of more projects like that immediately following – most notably Michèle’s “Roman Feuilleton” exhibition, out of which I did quite a lot of writing, and with some success. All of this served to confirm in my mind that “process poetry” was a general form that I could make work, and left me with the confidence to just keep doing what I wanted to do, the way I wanted to do it.
The other local element that often shows up in my work is hometown literary hero Archibald Lampman’s poetry, which I’ve continued to mine as source material for various projects.
Q: What are you working on now?
Unfortunately,
I tend to work very slowly, to be easily distracted, and to have a bunch of
different projects and ideas on the go and at various stages of incompletion at
any given time…which isn’t always a great combination. At the moment I have a
couple of Archibald Lampman-related projects going as my main focus, as well as
two bodies of collected text that I’d like to do something with. I’m also
involved in a collaborative art/poetry project that has the potential to go somewhere
really interesting.
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