Six Questions interview #156 : Sharon King-Campbell

Sharon King-Campbell is a theatre and literary artist based in Ktaqmkuk, colonially known as Newfoundland. She was the 2017 recipient of the Rhonda Payne Award, was long-listed for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2020, and is a three-time winner of the Arts & Letters Awards in fiction, dramatic script and poetry. Her collection of poetry, This Is How It Is, was published in 2021. Sharon holds a BFA Theatre and a MA English from Memorial University of Newfoundland, and is currently pursuing her PhD.

Q: How long were you in Ottawa, and what first brought you here? What took you away? 

I moved to Ottawa with my parents when I was not-quite-2, and I stayed until I was 19. I moved away for university, owing to the double-cohort that graduated from high school in 2003 and gummed up the first-year classes of every university in the province (and the country, to some extent).

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

I started writing pretty much as soon as I could. I think the first poem I ever published came out when I was about 7 in the kids’ section of the Alta Vista community newspaper. I kept it up as a fun pastime through childhood and attended the Literary Arts program at Canterbury High School, which I credit for so much in my life, including introducing me to the work of a lot of local and otherwise-Canadian writers. I didn’t stay in town after graduation, and that was before Facebook so I haven’t reconnected with all of my old friends, but several of my classmates have books out now, which I think is a testament to the program.

Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all? Have there been subsequent shifts due to where you have lived since? 

Writing, and learning about writing, for a couple of hours every day from ages 14 to 18 had a pretty big impact on my thinking, and so did my colleagues in that class. Without too much top-down guidance, my classmates taught me about working with different genres, about finding your ideal collaborators (and collaboration as a skillset!), and about taking notes with the generous spirit in which they’re offered. Those lessons have followed me through a 15-year career as a theatre artist, and, more recently, back to writing for the page.

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

I really don’t see programs like the one at Canterbury anywhere else. There are in-school and extracurricular music, dance, theatre, and visual arts programs available where I live now, but the Lit program at CHS seems to be a fabulous anomaly.

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? 

Growing up in Ottawa and living in Newfoundland now gives me a sense of being on the outside a lot of the time. I think that duality and liminality – belonging to two places at once and occupying the figurative space between them – is a theme you’ll find in a lot of my work.

Q: What are you working on now? 

I’ve just started work on a new book of poetry and creative non-fiction called two lines, and I’m about to go on tour with a couple of theatre engagements. I’m also up to my eyeballs in work on my PhD, which is looking into the impact of COVID-19 restrictions on the experience of live theatre.