Six Questions interview #148 : John Geddes

John Geddes is the former Ottawa bureau chief at Maclean’s, where he won National Magazine Awards for political journalism. Last year, he picked up a Digital Publishing Award for a personal essay on the Nazi past of a Viennese painting in the National Gallery of Canada’s collection. He was co-winner of the Ottawa Book Award in 2006 for his novel The Sundog Season. Earlier this year, his story “Tetlock” was published in the Irish literary quarterly The Moth and his poem “Curfew” recently won Arc Poetry Magazine’s Diana Brebner Prize. He lives not far from the Ottawa River with his wife, the CBC journalist Joanne Chianello.

Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here? 

I moved here from Toronto in 1989 to work in the Parliament Hill bureau of the Financial Post, reporting on politics and economic policy. I was only a few years into a career as a journalist, so that was an exciting time for me. Way led on to way, and I covered national affairs for three decades, mostly at Maclean’s, where I also wrote quite often about art.

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

I started thinking of myself as a writer, who knows why, when I was kid. I was also fascinated by politics from pretty early on. So a life in newsrooms seemed a natural aspiration. But I also loved stories and poems, and always wanted to write them. As an undergrad at University of Toronto in the early ‘80s, I hung out with driven writers and impassioned readers. One of my best friends was an Auden nut, still is. I latched onto Derek Walcott, who was then coming into his own as a major poet. As for Ottawa’s writing community, I’m only just meeting writers of poetry and fiction, although quite a few of my old friends are accomplished writers of non-fiction.

Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?

I retired from covering the news only a couple of years ago. From what I can tell so far, the literary scene seems friendly. Still, my thinking about writing comes pretty much entirely from reading. I’ll read something that gets to me and wonder, Could I do something like that? Occasionally I read something thought-provoking that’s expressly about the writer’s life and work—George Saunders’s beautiful, insightful A Swim in a Pond in the Rain comes to mind. Generous friends recently gave me a Paris Review subscription, and I lap up the author interviews.

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

I’ve lived in Ottawa for so long that I don’t have enough experience elsewhere to know if there are distinctive happenings or unique resources in this city. But I am grateful that the Ottawa International Writers Festival has, over the years, invited me now and then to interview both fiction and non-fiction authors, novelists and journalists. As a writer with a foot in both worlds, it’s been fun to meet authors from either side of the divide on the festival stage. 

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? 

Way back in 2005, I published a short novel set in mining country in Northwestern Ontario, where I grew up. Ottawa didn’t enter into it. Yet I find the stories I’ve written recently want to take place here, so to speak. For instance, earlier this year an Irish quarterly published a pandemic story I wrote, in which the protagonist is a 90-year-old guy who turned out to hail from Lanark County. Does my poetry somehow respond to where I live? I don’t know. Bardia Sinaee, who judged the Diana Brebner Prize, says my poem “Curfew” is “placeless,” and I’m afraid he’s right.     

Q: What are you working on now? 

I’ve been toiling away, as best I can, on short stories for a couple of years. I work on poems whenever some snippet of language won’t leave me alone until I try. I would like to say I’ve also got a second novel on the go, but that would be stretching the truth.