Q: How long have you been in the Ottawa area, and what first brought you here?
I have been in the Ottawa area since arriving at the General Hospital maternity ward some years ago, not including a ten-year gap in Toronto where I misspent my twenties. Since 1990 I’ve been living in the rural areas both south and east of Ottawa. I enjoy being within striking distance of Ottawa, but a country lifestyle is much more in keeping with my personality and activities.
Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?
I tried my first novel at age eleven in the basement of my childhood home in Elmvale Acres. It turned out that it was much harder to write a novel than I had anticipated at that age. After that I wrote a short story for a teacher at Canterbury High School that the teacher thought was good, so I ended up thinking the same way about it and that may be what started the ball rolling. I did a film production degree in Toronto and that’s what taught me that my interest in film was really an interest in storytelling and I got back to work on novels. It was only twenty-five years until I’d publish my first (Chase and Haven, Coach House). I became involved in the Ottawa writing community by meeting up at a bar with a fellow by the name of rob mclennan during one of the runs of the Tree Reading Series. I had started writing and publishing poetry and that first novel would be accepted soon. I remember that he had recently had a biking accident and had hurt his hand, which I reinjured for him when I shook it. Then we had beer.
Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?
Becoming involved with that reading series opened up a door for me that I had not really realized had been closed. Although this was, as I recall, not terribly long after the invention of the internet and I do remember finding out about a writing and publishing culture involving readings and launches and even cocktail parties and such activities in Toronto and Vancouver and Ottawa that was completely foreign to me in my little 150 year old house in my town of 400 people a half hour outside of Ottawa. I also recall being impressed by the inclusive nature of the Ottawa community and how welcoming and non-judgmental its members were in general. I’ve since been told this is not always the case in other cities! I came to think of writing as something that is done with a sense of both what has come before it and what is happening currently, previous to this writing was for me an almost completely isolated practice, done without conscious influences or context. I became a better writer for it and more interested in, and dedicated to, my craft.
Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?
As I mentioned, Ottawa seemed to me then, and seems to me now, to be a very inclusive community. I recently became aware of the work of Ottawa based poet Conyer Clayton. I read her first book (the award winning We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite, Guernica Editions) and thought “Well, that’s really good.” It’s very likely that I would have left it at that had I not realized that she was in Ottawa. That led to contacting her to congratulate her on her work and that led to her having the lead epigraph in my forthcoming novel I am Billy the Kid (Anvil Press), beating out Michael Ondaatje, bpNichol and Phil Hall for placement. Not bad for a young’un. So, Ottawa, I think, provides a somewhat tight knit community that might be less apparent in larger cities.
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?
My book Wore Down Trust (Pedlar Press) started out life as a single poem. An editor from Arc Magazine was at a reading I did in Ottawa and asked if I had any more similar pieces. I didn’t at the time, but I went home and I wrote some. They ended up published in ARC and then ended up being extended into a book that won The Lampman Award so that’s one example of how Ottawa is integrated into my writing and publishing life. I am Billy the Kid starts in New Mexico and ends up in Lanark County. The book I’m writing now begins in Memphis but involves an RCAF flight sergeant bon and raised in Ottawa. You can take the boy out of the Valley, but… granted I’ve never really left the Valley.
Q: What are you working on now?
After the release of I am Billy the Kid this month I have the sequel to my previous novel (Skin House, Anvil Press, ReLit Award winner and headed for the moon later this year with NASA) coming out as well as a collected poetry “Southbound”. What I’m working on at the moment is a novel entitled “The Wonderful” which has a premise my agent has told me not to share with anyone, but which spans roadside carnival life in Florida, an RCAF gunner in World War Two, Elvis Presley, the bombing of Dresden and the orbital flight of John Glenn, to name just a few of the elements. The story spans forty years and many countries so one thing I’m doing a lot of is research, trying to keep ahead of myself as I write!
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