Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?
My father was in the Air Force and, in 1954, he was posted from
Europe to Ottawa. I was 4 years old at
the time and we lived on Rockcliffe Air Base in the northeast end of the city on
the Ottawa River. The base was very
self-contained with an elementary school, a library, churches, a small IGA,
wonderfully wooded areas, wetlands and fields, and facilities for every type of
sport imaginable. It was like living in a
small town with the added advantage of having everything the city had to offer
only minutes away. When my father
retired from the Air Force, we moved to Lindenlea, a small community neighbouring
New Edinburgh. As a result, I was able
to complete all my elementary and secondary education in Ottawa. I also attended Carleton University for a
couple of years as well. In the early
70s, I married and my wife and I moved to Halifax where she attended the art
college and I continued my studies in English literature at Dalhousie
University. Soon after we completed our
undergraduate degrees, we returned to Ottawa to begin our careers and to raise
our children. A few years ago, we moved
to the Town of Carleton Place but altogether Ottawa was home for close to 70
years. As a side note, I discovered this
past summer that the first of my Steadman ancestors to come to Canada arrived
from Ireland in 1817 and settled on farmland less than a half hour drive west
of where I live now, and less than an hour away from Ottawa. Seems I was meant to be here.
Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?
I had excellent English teachers during
high school and was encouraged to pursue my interest in literature and literary
criticism at the university level. I was
also encouraged to write creatively and my poetry (although as bad as juvenilia
often is) attracted some attention. I
did little creative writing during my university years and even less during my thirty-three
years with the federal government. But
as retirement approached, my interest in writing poetry resurfaced and, in the
early 2000s, I began participating in local poetry workshops, including one given
by a vocal, longhaired fellow named rob mclennan. Heard of him?
I also started around this time to co-direct the Tree Reading Series and
over the four years that I was there I got to meet local poets at the open-mic sessions
and to host established and emerging Ottawa poets as featured readers.
Q: How did being in such a community of
writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?
I was 57 years old when I started again to
write poetry and it was clear to me (and I'm sure to everyone in the workshops
and writing circles I attended) that I had a lot of work ahead of me if I
wanted to get my work anywhere near the calibre of poetry I was hearing at Tree
and elsewhere. Still, I wasn't
discouraged. My government career was
one learning curve after another requiring time and devotion and I expected
poetry to be much the same. I wasn't
wrong, and established poets in the community and fellow emerging writers were
encouraging and assured me that my writing would improve if I kept doing what I
was doing. I soon developed a daily
routine: listen, read, analyze, write allowing the poem to speak with its own
voice, and edit, edit, edit until that voice resonates. Expressions like "Show up for
work!" and "Get out of the way!" became mantras. It was a period of creative ups and downs,
and I felt at times I could paper my desk with rejection letters. But it was all good.
Q: What do you see happening here that you
don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?
Ottawa has a history of having a vibrant
arts community and it’s a community that has benefitted and continues to
benefit from support from all levels of government and from the generosity of a
very appreciative public. In the case of
the literary arts, local journals and societies, publishers, and a range of
reading venues and festivals have helped to win Ottawa a reputation as a city
of readers and writers. Added to all
this is an extremely enthusiastic volunteer base dedicated to ensuring the
Ottawa arts scene continues to thrive. I'm
not very knowledgeable of the arts communities in other Canadian cities and
can't really say how Ottawa fares in comparison. But I'm sure Ottawa is by far superior. Joking.
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?
During
my government years, I was an avid reader of novels and paid little attention
to poetry with the result that when I began writing again in my late 50s I
wasn't current with the trends and styles of contemporary poetry or, for that
matter, knowledgeable in a practical sense of the art of poetry. My attendance at Ottawa's various reading
series and literary festivals helped to remedy this situation, and my work soon
began to show the influences of the poets I was hearing and studying for form and
technique. As well, the feedback I received
at local poetry workshops and from the writing circles I participated in helped
me to identify my strengths and weaknesses and to deepen my understanding of the
different ways to craft a well-constructed poem. In short, my involvement in the Ottawa poetry
community did more than change the way I approached my work. It effectively became my approach to writing
poetry.
Q:
What are you working on now?
I've
been distracted from writing for several years now, but soon to be in the works
is a small collection of poems in celebration of the revered mystic, Saint
Gertrude the Great. Saint Gertrude was
born in 1256 and at the age of five she was placed in the care of the
Benedictine nuns at Helfta in Saxony, where she studied under Mechtilde of Hackeborn. She eventually became a nun herself and during
her lifetime experienced numerous visions.
These visions and her spiritual instructions are recorded in five books
that in recent years have attracted renewed theological study and
interpretation. Thanks for asking. Wish me luck.
[Photo
left to right: Dean, the Running Man, and James Joyce in Dublin. Courtesy of Françoise Steadman.]
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