Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?
I moved to Ottawa three years ago to do my master’s degree at Carleton. But I actually grew up in the Ottawa Valley. So in some ways, I’ve always been pretty familiar with the city, even though I’m still getting my feet wet on what it’s actually like to live here. I mean, half my time in Ottawa since the move has been spent under pandemic conditions, which has been a very different way to get to know a place!
Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?
I don’t want this to come off as precocious or annoying, but I was sort of “writing” before I knew how to spell? I know I made some picture book with printer paper, scissors, staples, and pencil drawings when I was somewhere between ages 2 to 4, and literally just put scribbles for where the “text” should go. I couldn’t read, but I was determined to set down my story, I guess! I don’t remember the plot now, just that it was called The Thunderstorm at the End of the Universe and ended with some kind of world-wide utopia? That’s to say, I suppose I was always doomed to be this ridiculous.
To be honest, I can’t really say that I am involved in the Ottawa writing community. My first year here had a pretty narrow focus of just surviving my MA. I met some folks who are involved in the Ottawa scene: Dessa Bayrock, who runs post ghost press, and Deanna Young – at Carleton, actually. And there were the ex-Ottawa poets whom I met down in Peterborough/Nogojiwanong and raved to me about the scene when they found out I was moving here. Justin Million gave me my first real opportunities as a “professional” (whatever that means!) poet through Show and Tell Poetry Series and his and Elisha Rubacha’s bird, buried press. And I also consider Rob Winger a mentor; but then he’s too damn humble to take the compliment!
I’ve also been variously involved in community theatre for over a decade, and nowhere forged me as an artist as much as The Theatre On King (TTOK) back in Peterborough/Nogojiwanong. I talk so much about it, I think it’s why most people here think I’m from there. TTOK is how I met Justin among dozens of other incredible artists and arts supporters. I don’t know who I’d be without them.
But I only started seeking out Ottawa events in the gap year before starting my PhD, which of course lined up perfectly with the first waves of COVID-19. I’ve spent most of the pandemic doing distance workshopping with Morgan Tessier, whom I met in Rob’s fourth-year poetry class at Trent University. She’s helped my growth as a poet more than any other one single person, even if just from encouragement and having to keep up the writing habit. But with the pandemic, I haven’t really had the opportunity to feel landed in the poetry community here (or squandered my earlier opportunities – sorry, Rob W.!). I’d like to be, in time. For now, I usually reach out to Dessa or Helen Robertson whenever I feel like a baby poet just learning to walk and develop object permanence! Although I have to give a shout out to Manahil Bandukwala for being the first editor to be like “hey, I remember your stuff from submission to this other thing!” when she accepted a poem for Canthius’s “Whose Pleasure is it Anyway?” series. So, I’m slowly getting myself planted!
Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?
Oh geez, how do I even answer that? If we’re stretching the question to my years in the Ptbo/Nogo downtown arts scene and the family I still have from the community there, then the answer is infinite. I think everyone’s writing shifts by the people they’re in contact with. Isn’t that just an inevitability? And so when you’re a writer talking to other writers about their writing, and your own writing, of course it’ll have an impact – on our writing, on our perceptions of writing as a practice or as an art form, on ourselves as writers – on ourselves as people, who also happen to write.
I know one thing it’s taken me a ridiculously long time to claim is my status as a “poet” or an “author.” I struggle with these words. I feel they don’t belong to me. I balk at them. But I remember how in the second play I ever had staged, I wrote this joke for the playwright character about how she wasn’t a “playwright” because she’d only written the one thing – a “we’ll see if you keep this up” type of thing. And Kate Story (the show’s director) basically used this against me, to point out that I’m officially a playwright now (and I’ve had two more plays staged by TTOK since that). So that’s something, I guess: owning up to my own body of work and acknowledging that yeah, I am actually doing these things and they do have some impact on the definition of who I am. (Though I’ll still be avoiding saying “I’m a poet” when strangers ask what I “do” in small talk!) I used to try to go by the Stephen Fry verb-over-noun argument – “I’m not an actor, I act; I’m not a writer, I write” – but eventually you realize this is all pretentious semantics and no one cares about grammar anyway.
Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?
Yikes, see – I’m not the best person to ask! I can only repeat what others have told me: that the Ottawa scene is incredibly welcoming and open, that it’s not competitive (or at least not beyond friendly competition), that it’s thriving and active and really a hotspot for poetry. I can’t say I’ve seen anything to contradict that!
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?
Something that I haven’t quite said is that I don’t see the different forms I write in as entirely separable. So, I’m a PhD student now. I write research papers. I also write poetry and plays. I’ve worked a bit as a reporter, and written theatre reviews, publicity copy, and prose fiction. I don’t know how to disconnect my growth as a writer in any of these fields other than to note when I’ve been more focused on which type of writing. So yeah, the poetry I’ve written since moving to Ottawa has – in its own ways – responded to my life here and my work as a grad student. Because I’m not the type of writer who can defend myself against that not happening. So I’ve written poetry to express ideas that aren’t reworkable for academic audiences, or are about me getting to know my nook of the city (one thing the pandemic’s furnished: a real neighbourhood-centric pedestrian culture!), or are just poems I could not have written without being here, doing what I’ve done, and meeting the people I’ve met over the past three years. Maybe that’s a non-answer, or simply an impractical answer, but I try to take my writing as something that morphs organically: I find it hard to chart exact origins or affective conclusions. I just respond.
I guess one thing I’d say I’ve taken from the “community,” given Ottawa spat out Justin Million, is that Justin (though not only him) has really emphasized for me the importance of holding arts work as work. That doesn’t mean it can’t be someone’s hobby, or only getting paid matters. I mean heck, it’s not like even getting paid as a poet is getting “paid” versus the hours spent on drafts and edits and workshops and submissions! But just because $20 for a poem isn’t going to put food in my cupboards doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter.
We can all gripe about how unfortunate it is that capitalism means monetary value is connected to cultural value, but too bad – it is, for the time being, and until people who aren’t in the arts get over seeing the arts along a binary of high luxury commodity or the product of the starved genius rubbing two pennies together to start a fire, we all need to be vocal about taking artists seriously as cultural workers, and paying them accordingly. I’m sure I’m preaching to the crowd, here, but it’s shocking to step outside that arts-bubble for a while and remember that most people really don’t get it. Being a grad student, I’ve had moments of real cognitive dissonance when I’ve had to wonder wait, do these scholars I’m reading or other students I’m talking to not get that they’re writers as much as the literary authors they’re talking about? Or: Does this professor just not have friends who write literature? Did these scholars on literary authorship never think to ask an actual practicing author what they had to say about this? It’s bizarre, to me, and counterintuitive. But I guess that’s some of academia’s own perpetuation of the mythic prestige of the creative writer! Everyone wants to disclaim, “oh, but I don’t do what you do!” (they mean creative writing), but then I don’t write like them either! Does that automatically make what we do all that much different? Maybe yes, but also no.
Q: What are you working on now?
Well,
I think I may be starting to assemble what might become my first chapbook? Yeah,
lots of disclaimers there – don’t hold me to it! A friend pointed out that a
couple works-in-progress poems I’d shared were thematically similar, and I then
got to thinking there are some others from the past year that could fit
together with those, too. Since then, I’ve written three new poems that are
kind of broadly tying together with the others, so…. We’ll see if that goes
anywhere! I’m not used to writing poems with a particular idea for a series in
mind and them actually turning out well, as opposed to cheaper knockoffs of the
one good poem I tried to springboard the suite off of. But, there’s no growth
without experimentation! Beyond that, I’ve been haphazardly working on a new
script, and trying to remind myself that I really ought to be studying….
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