Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?
I’ve lived in Ottawa about 15 years, off and on. I basically ended up here by accident, and subsequently kept trying to escape. But I didn’t escape, and at some point along the way it became home.
Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?
I’ve been writing poetry most of my life, but I largely kept it to myself. I then drifted away from poetry for about a decade, while I got married, had kids, did a PhD, bought a house, etc. It was the pandemic that got me back into it, as I think it did for a lot of people. It was also then that I started engaging more actively with the writing community, but since everything was digital I mostly connected with poets outside of Ottawa who were doing similar work.
I have never been very looped in to the Ottawa writing community. I tend to use formal elements (rhyme and/or metre) and my poetry also often dwells on religious themes—both of which I think have contributed to a bit of an outsider mentality. I’ve tended to engage and collaborate with artists in other media—musicians, painters, theatre people. I have a network of creative people here in Ottawa, but most of them aren’t writers. All that being said, now that I’m more actively working on writing a publishing I’m definitely hoping to engage more with the Ottawa writing community.
Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?
Although I haven’t had consistent involvement with the Ottawa writing community, there have been key moments of engagement that have been very important to my development as a writer. I’d like to particularly acknowledge the contribution of the late Steven Heighton, whom I met when he was writer in residence at the University of Ottawa. I was going through a strange phase of writing exclusively in sonnets (and extremely structured ones). I gave him a big stack of these weird, anachronistic sonnets and asked for feedback. Most people would have (rightfully) written me off, but being the man he was, he read them carefully and thoughtfully, and saw past the weirdness and the stiffness to what was good in them. He gently nudged me out of the formal rut I was in, but also pointed out various elements that had potential. One of the poems had the phrase “the living law” in it. I remember he reacted really strongly to that phrase, telling me THAT was the piece I needed to develop. More than a decade later, I’m pulling together my first manuscript and that is the title.
Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?
I’ll be honest—I’ve always found Ottawa a challenging place to live as a writer. I’ve found other cities, like Vancouver or Montreal, to be much easier places to find a niche as an artist. When I moved here in my 20s, it drove me crazy how the downtown core emptied out at 5. Now I’m one of the people vacating it. But I do think there’s something to a smaller, less obvious arts scene. The people out there creating are really committed, and I’ve come to appreciate that. We have to work it a bit harder, and I think that can pay off in quality.
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 have one poem in particular that responds to my experience of Ottawa. It’s about the slow anguish of my early years in Ottawa, living here but wishing I was elsewhere. It’s one of the poems in which I develop the idea of “the living law,” as prompted by Steven Heighton. It was also inspired in part by Seymour Mayne (another Ottawa poet), who taught me in a course about the Rabbinic tradition that enumerated 613 distinct laws in the Torah. It always seemed so fitting to me that this is the Ottawa area code. You can read the poem here: https://darklybrightpress.com/613-2/
Q: What are you working on now?
As mentioned above,
I’m finishing up my first manuscript. It’s about half new work I’ve written
since the start of the pandemic, and half a selection of poems from my earlier
life. I’m also working on publishing more broadly. I have a poem in in the most
recent issue of Cloud Lake Literary, which is a great little Ontario journal
I’m really excited about. That poem is pretty experimental in its formal
structure, inspired by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, and Alice Oswald.
It’s a good indication of the direction of my current writing. Going forward,
I’m looking for opportunities to keep experimenting a collaborating, both with
other writers and with artists in other media.
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