Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?
I've lived in Ottawa for six years now. I came here to study ancient philosophy at the University of Ottawa – or, more specifically, to study ancient philosophy with Catherine Collobert. She's one of handful of Canadian experts on the philosophers who came before Plato. She's also one of the few academic philosophers in Canada who has engaged passionately with those philosophers as part of the larger "literary" tradition of their time – the world of oral poetry that they both belonged to, and reacted against.
Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?
I started writing in sixth grade, for the sole purpose of filling up notebooks. But my sixth grade teacher, Howard Isaacs, embarked on such a systematic and unrelenting program of praise that he not only turned me from a lazy, daydreaming student to an engaged, attentive one but also turned me into a writer, at least in the minimal practical sense: I've written daily, almost without exception, since I was eleven. It took the guidance of other writers along the way -- especially Jason Dickson and Jan Zwicky, and later Robyn Sarah -- to help me sort out what exactly I wanted to accomplish as a writer, and to figure out ways that I might try to accomplish it.
This question actually made me squirm with shame. I've been given a lot by the Ottawa literary community, and the Canadian literary community in general, and this is a debt that I have yet to repay. First of all, I suppose that my relationship with poetry has always been relatively selfish and solitary. My book would never have found its way into print without the poets that I met along the way, but I've actually known very few poets – I've simply been exceptionally lucky in those few. Anyway, I don't think I realized that I was part of a specific, local community until I received so much unearned kindness from that community – for instance, from Jean Van Loon, who chose to review my book for Arc simply because it was by an unknown Ottawa poet. And the audiences! See, it took me a decade to find a publisher for The Half-Life of Oracles. For that reason, the emotional thrust of the poems can be a bit embarrassing for me – they reflect the perspective of a young woman, with a young woman's self-preoccupation (as opposed to my current poems, which are more in line with a middle-aged woman's self-preoccupation!) The warmth of the audiences at Tree Reading Series and Octopus Books, for instance, made the reading of these sometimes embarrassing poems possible for me (or at least it helped forestall my usual compromise when I'm reading something I've written that embarrasses me – which is to read so quickly and quietly that no one can actually make out what I'm saying.)
Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?
A: I'm going to answer this question by a somewhat indirect route. One of the things that has happened to me in the four years since the publication of The Half-Life of Oracles is that I've realized that I have more poems in me. After some dismal years during which my daily writing practice was just a matter of going through the motions, I've found that there were new things that I wanted to bring together, new ways that I wanted to try bringing them together. I think that as long as The Half-Life of Oracles remained unpublished, I found it difficult to let go of it, to lay aside the need to revise the poems in that collection, along with the tendency to think of any new efforts in relation to them. In part, of course, the publication of the book made it seem a bit silly to edit the poems further (though I did not give up the habit immediately). But I also think that having people read those poems, and respond to them, both gave me the necessary distance from the poems, and also gave them back to me, new. Both of those things have, I suspect, been necessary in finding my footing again as a poet. I can accept that my relationship to poetry is always going to be fairly solitary – even by the standards of poets, I think I lean towards the less sociable end of the spectrum. And yet I think that most writers would agree that some kind of life goes out of your writing if you're really only writing for yourself. During the years when I was going through the motions of writing, I think that's what happened. I'd lost the sense that I had anything worth understanding and communicating in poetry. That's complicated, because it has to do with all sorts of things – for instance, my relationship to poetry, the kinds of things I'd used poetry to understand and communicate in the past and the kinds of things that I could imagine using it for in the future. But one major influence that the writing community has had on me is in giving me back a sense of engagement with poetry as communication (in the broadest sense of the term) and in changing that sense, giving it the increased flexibility that comes of being read deeply and insightfully by poets who are very different from me in style and preoccupations, and with whom I'd been brought into contact by the fact that we belonged to the same community.
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?
A: In part, I think my answer to this is the same as my answer to the previous question. But there are also some specific elements of the landscape itself that have found their way into my poems. When I lived on Vancouver Island, I would think through poems while watching the tides and the waves, so that the sea became woven into the thoughts/emotions/impressions that constellated into a poem. Here, something similar has happened with the Ottawa River (or at least the bit of it that I walk along most days); watching the formation of river ice on a day-to-day basis – all those textures and colours – that's been a new experience, and the river has probably influenced not only the imagery of my poems, but some of the rhythms.
Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?
I've thought about what it is about the Ottawa writing community that could lead to the kind of generosity I've experienced here. I have theories, but I don't really have a lot to compare it against, so my theories should be taken with a pretty big grain of salt. I think maybe the Ottawa poetry community is exactly the right size. Literary communities always have to fight for survival, I guess, but maybe there are enough people in Ottawa who care about the literary community to foster the kind of welcoming, open, yet close-knit environment that is harder to sustain when the pool is too large or too small.
Q: What are you working on now?
My current project is a collection of poems loosely structured around the concept of "katharsis". But this isn't the release from or neutralization of negative feelings implied by the familiar use of the term “catharsis.” The poems engage with the sense of “self as defilement” that I think is a frequent inheritance of individual history, but that is also part of our inheritance as human beings at this moment of ecological crisis. The poems move between, and often blur together, the sense of that defilement in its narrowly personal and its species-wide sense. They chart my ambivalence concerning the notion of a “view from nowhere”, especially as expressed in the early Greek philosophers’ ideas about the emptying out or “katharsis” (cleansing, purification) of self -- many of them focus on unresolved tensions between the desire to hold onto narrowly private feelings and needs and a desire to overcome the lineaments and limits of individual needs and values.
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