Q: How long were you in Ottawa, and what first brought you here? What took you away?
A: I was born and raised in Ottawa. The first half of my childhood was spent in Hunt Club, then there was a brief stint in Manotick before moving to Riverside South and later splitting time with my parents in Crystal Beach and Nepean. I left Ottawa in my early twenties after completing my degree in International Development and Environmental Sustainability from the University of Ottawa. I went on to study Graphic Design and Illustration at the University of Brighton in the UK and then made my way to New York where I have been working in publishing for the last six years.
Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?
A: For the last year I have been the art director for the intersectional feminist journal Canthius, which is based out of Ottawa and has been my only link to the Ottawa literary community. I came late to writing. I’ve always enjoyed writing and reading, but growing up I was intimidated by the craft. I was co-founder of a student-led newspaper at my high school, but kept to designing it rather than submitting articles. During university, I volunteered at the Ottawa School of Art and was involved in many art projects with non-profits that eventually led me to pursue a career in book design and authorship.
Q: What did you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What did Ottawa provide, or allow?
A: For me, Ottawa has always encouraged a sort of ruminative inner focus. Those stretches of Greenbelt, water, farmland, and emptiness between suburbs; the placidness of long winters; the smudgy brown and grey brutalist architecture. It all became a frictionless, inaudible backdrop to my creative workings. I wanted to make color against it. Expression and voice were safe to enter, there was space.
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?
A: I write about my reverence for Ottawa’s network of bike paths in Cyclettes. It wasn’t until I began traveling and living elsewhere that I realized how impressive and rare that network was. Each time I return to the city I am amazed at how the bike infrastructure continues to improve, far outpacing other bikeable cities I’ve visited in North America. My book is about bicycles, but it more often uses cycling as a metaphor for how I move through the world and make sense of myself. A lot of my ability to process and generate new ideas and connections within my work arrives when cycling on uninterrupted pathways through nature, like those found in the Ottawa-Gatineau region.
Q: What are you working on now?
A:
I am working on two new manuscripts, both works of creative nonfiction that
like Cyclettes, use hybrid visual and textual forms to investigate
recurring themes in my life.
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