In 2017 Invisible Publishing released his first novel, Death and the Intern, a mystery/black comedy set in the Ottawa Civic Hospital that was shortlisted for the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize in 2018.
He is now blogging about nuclear war and other end times–related topics on Medium at The Golden Age of Apocalypse.
You can find him on Twitter at @jrrrremy and email him at jhansonf at gmail dot com.
Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?
I moved to Ottawa in 2005 from Victoria to study Journalism at Carleton, but ended up changing to a double major in English and Communications after first year. I then moved to Toronto to work in publishing in 2010, but moved back to Ottawa in 2016 because I missed the easy access to the outdoors and the feel of the city, with all my friends being able to afford to live downtown within walking distance from each other, and because I was able to find an appealing job here outside of publishing.
Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?
I always enjoyed creative writing as a hobby from early childhood onward. My username on social media is “jrrrremy” because I wrote a “book” of short stories when I was around four years old called The Case of the Big Bam in which I spelled the word “were” as “wrrrr,” and after I showed my friend Luisa, she started calling me “Jrrrr.”
It wasn’t until I took a creative writing course in Grade 11 with local writer Terence Young (who is also the husband of another writer, Patricia Young) that I realized writing was something I wanted to take more seriously, and it was because of Terence’s class that I started reading modern poetry and literary fiction.
Before that I had mostly read science fiction or other genre fiction, which is still great, but Terence opened up a new world for me with his recommendations. I remember I did presentations on a book of poetry by David McFadden—I could never find it again, but I remember it had a poem about being on a plane and seeing the “terminator” line between day and night—and Bel Canto by Ann Patchett, and both of them absolutely blew me away.
Terence also had us read at a Victoria open mic and submit to The Claremont Review (the apparently now defunct Canadian literary magazine publishing young writers, not the very much funct right-wing American journal), which he had previously been heavily involved in, and that was where I had my first poems published in print.
Funnily enough, it turns out two writer friends who grew up in Ottawa, Ben Ladouceur and Catriona Wright, were also published as teens in some of the same issues as I was, along with friends from my high school class who went on to pursue creative writing as well: Andrew Battershill, his sister Claire, and film writer Dan Christensen.
I first got involved in the writing community in Ottawa through a poetry workshop with Armand Garnet Ruffo that I took in my second year at Carleton. Justin Million was in that class too, and he invited everyone to come to an In/Words open mic night at the Avant Garde Bar (In/Words being the creative writing community associated with Carleton’s English department), and that’s how I started meeting people and getting involved.
As well as attending the regular In/Words writer’s circles, I later became the host of one of them, and Jeff Blackman invited me to be one of the co-editors of The Moose & Pussy, the literary erotica magazine he and his now-wife Kate Maxfield conceptualized.
Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?
Taking Armand’s workshop, attending and running the In/Words writer’s circles, working on The Moose & Pussy, and taking another fiction writing workshop with Ivan Coyote in my fourth year of undergrad set me up with a deep understanding of the editorial process that I further increased after I moved to Toronto, where I worked as an editorial assistant, production editor, and then freelance editor of nonfiction books for Wiley Canada (including some true crime, which was basically like editing fiction), as well as running the literary magazine Dragnet with Andrew Battershill.
As a result, I became very open to making sensible changes to my own work, knowing I could always return to material I liked that ended up getting cut another time in another project. Given that I was thankfully working with editors who shared my vision, Leigh Nash and Stuart Ross, I was able to see the reason for and accept the vast majority of the edits on my novel.
Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?
To be honest, I haven’t been entirely in the loop in the last few years for a variety of reasons, but I am ready to be more involved again now. The one thing I would say is that in Ottawa there’s much less of a focus on attending all the events and being seen and making yourself memorable to the right people than in Toronto.
Of course, meeting people is still important in any field, but here the community is small and not as tied into the publishing cycle and I guess what we now call “the discourse,” so you can meet people in your own way and at your own pace and it feels a lot more human.
In fact, here it’s totally fine that I disappeared for several years and people still remember me and want to see what I’m up to and hear what I have to say (thanks again, rob!).
Although this may not be everyone’s experience, and obviously this situation had more than one contributing factor, as soon as I left Toronto in December 2015 and stopped showing up at all the events, it felt like I immediately lost all the social capital I had built up over six years, and that nobody aside from the genuine personal friends I had made there was at all interested when my book Death and the Intern was published by Invisible in spring 2017.
Most memorably, a friend of a friend who told me in person that my book sounded fantastic, offered to review it for the major national publication they wrote for, and said I should reach out as soon as galleys were available, blew me off in about five words when I did about a year and a half later. Which evidently I am still sore about.
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?
Although I wrote it when I lived in Toronto, my novel is set in Ottawa, mostly at the Civic Hospital. I have for the most part set anything fictional I’ve written in the previous place I lived: Victoria when I lived in Ottawa, Ottawa when I lived in Toronto, and Toronto now that I live in Ottawa again.
I guess it’s just easier to see things with some distance when you are physically distant—although it means you get things wrong sometimes. I wandered around the Civic taking pictures on a trip back to Ottawa until someone in the anaesthesiologuy department (where the novel primarily takes place) called security, so I was pretty bang-on for details there, but I also said the fire hydrants in Ottawa were the wrong colour, which several people pointed out to me.
Q: What are you working on now?
In what seems to have started as a way to work through my feelings about the state of the world, about six months ago I began a blog about nuclear war and other end-of-the-world topics called The Golden Age of Apocalypse (the name comes from a great 2011 jazz fusion album by Thundercat).
I wrote one post about the overtly Christian ethics training provided to officers working with nuclear missiles in the US Air Force, which has historically had not only a large number of evangelical members and an institutional focus on converting new recruits to evangelicalism. In the post, I touched briefly on how believers in some strains of evangelicalism are not only looking forward to but actually want to hasten the apocalyptic events depicted in the Book of Revelation.
Looking into this topic more turned into a seven-post series on evangelical conceptions of the end times, and I ended up devoting the most time to exploring Christian media representations of the events of Revelation, focusing on the Left Behind and A Thief in the Night film series.
The posts kept getting longer each time and the series now totals 32,000 words, not counting the final post, which I’m still working on. Given that I already have so much material to work with, after taking a break and writing about some non-religious topics on the blog, I actually now want to try to pitch a book about the A Thief in the Night film series to ECW Press for their Pop Classicscollection.
One issue is that the alleged 50–300 million people who have seen the films in a religious context do not translate into an audience for a Pop Classics take; the books in the series are critical essays, not just extra information for “fans”.
So of the films’ viewers, I imagine only those who have left that faith might want to read a novella-length critical essay about something presented in Church as effectively a modern addendum to the New Testament.
That said, an infinitesimally tiny percentage of 50 million people is an absolute slam dunk when it comes to the prospective audience for a book by a Canadian indie publisher, so 🤷.
I’m also in an online community of writers of all kinds that some friends I met at Carleton who now primarily write film scripts, Steph Coffey and Illya Klymkiw, started earlier this year. A bunch of us took part in National Poetry Writing Month this year, during which time I wrote a few poems I liked for the first time in ages, and Jeff Blackman and Bardia Sinaee are starting a regular poetry open mic night here, so that’s added incentive to write at least one poem a month.
Members of our writing group have also committed to submitting to Taco Bell Quarterly during this reading period, which is a really good new literary magazine where you just have to shoehorn Taco Bell into your poem or story somehow and they’ll consider it, and Taco Bell is even totally fine with them existing. What a world.
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