Six Questions interview #136 : Zoe Dickinson

Zoe Dickinson is a poet and bookseller from Victoria, British Columbia. Her poetry is rooted in the Pacific coastline, with a focus on local ecology and human relationships with nature. She has been published in literary journals such as Existere, Prairie Fire, and Contemporary Verse 2. Her first chapbook, Public Transit, was published in 2015 by Leaf Press, and her second chapbook, intertidal: poems from the littoral zone, is the 2022 winner of the Raven Chapbook competition (available at ravenchapbooks.ca). She is a manager at Russell Books and the Artistic Director of the Planet Earth Poetry Reading Series.

Q: How long were you in Ottawa, and what first brought you here? What took you away? 

I was born in Aylmer (now part of Gatineau), and lived there for my first 18 years. When I graduated high school, I did a typical “how far away can I get?” move and spent a year working at a resort in Banff National Park. Since then I’ve bounced between coasts and finally landed in Victoria, B.C., but Ottawa and the Gatineau Hills will always be a formative landscape for me.

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here? 

I was lucky enough to attend Canterbury High School, a wonderful arts-focused school in Ottawa. I got into their Literary Arts program, and that was my first experience of being part of a writing community. I learned so much about how to give and receive feedback, how to recognize the core of a poem, how to perform poetry for an audience… the list goes on! One of my clearest memories is of someone’s poem up on one of those old transparency projectors. My grade 9 Literary Arts teacher, Mr. Fitz, covered three quarters of the poem with another piece of paper and said, “what if it ended here?” I often think about that when editing my work. What if it ended here? Where, within any particular set of lines on a page, does the poem actually begin and end?

Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all? Have there been subsequent shifts due to where you have lived since? 

I may never have been part of the Ottawa Valley literary community as an adult, but the sense of writing community and rigorous critique that I learned at Canterbury is something I’ve sought out everywhere I’ve lived. For me, poetry is not a solitary act. I’ve never lived somewhere longer than a year or two without finding a poetry critique group to join… which ultimately led me to the Planet Earth Poetry community here in Victoria, and I’m now their Artistic Director!

I do think that participating in Planet Earth Poetry’s weekly readings and open mic produced a shift in my work. It’s one thing to meet regularly with other poets for critique – an absolutely necessary part of  my writing practice – but it’s a whole other level to meet weekly with a constantly shifting group of poets and hear their poems, and have a place to read my works in progress. Nothing illuminates which lines in a poem work, and which don’t, better than reading it out loud to a room full of people!

Q: What did you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What did Ottawa provide, or allow? 

I’m not sure if I’m in the best position to answer this, having more or less only lived there as a child. But certainly Ottawa as a city inspired a lot of my early work; I took three city buses to and from high school every day, to get across the river from Quebec and then across Ottawa to Canterbury. I did a lot of writing and reading on the bus, and a lot of observing. The urban landscape of Ottawa took on an equal importance to the forest of the Gatineau Hills. I’m a poet of place, and the two deepest roots I have are in downtown Ottawa and the Gatineau forest.

Q: Have any of your projects responded directly to your engagements here? How had the city and its community, if at all, changed the way you approached your work? 

Writing on the bus was a habit I took with me to Montreal and then Victoria, and in fact inspired my first chapbook. Public Transit (Leaf Press, 2015) was written entirely on the 21 and 22 routes of BC Transit.

Q: What are you working on now? 

I just began work on what I hope will be a full length collection of poetry about working in retail. Customer service jobs are one of the major pillars of the Canadian economy, but those jobs are largely voiceless. We’re the spoken-to, rarely the speaker: the non-player characters of the shopping world. When you spend your working life being paid to be nice to people, it’s hard to take that persona off and be honest about the experience – and I find that tension really interesting. And after spending the last five years working on a collection that is very zoomed in to the natural world (intertidal: poems from the littoral zone, Raven Chapbooks, 2022), it’s exciting to write more explicitly about humans again.