Six Questions interview #157 : David Blaikie

David Blaikie won the 2021 Don Gutteridge Poetry Award for A Season in Lowertown (Wet Ink Books, 2022), the story of a young man living the raw life of Lowertown in the 1970’s, before developers transformed it into the Byward Market of today. He’s also published two chapbooks, Her Final Days (1990), the story of his mother’s death from AIDS during the tainted blood scandal of the 1980s, and Farewell to Coney Island (2011), which won the inaugural chapbook award of the Tree Reading Series in Ottawa. A previous full-length collection, In That Old City by the Sea, was published in 2017. He’s also written Boston: The Canadian Story (1984), a sports history book about the 11 Canadian athletes who have won the Boston Marathon, which dates back to 1897. Now retired, Blaikie was a reporter with the Truro Daily News in Nova Scotia, The Canadian Press, The Toronto Star and Reuters. He had a second career in the Canadian labour movement.

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

A: Since 1972, when The Canadian Press assigned me to Parliament Hill. My plan when I finished high school a few years earlier was to work in my father’s sawmill, but sometimes we are saved from our own worst decisions. The principal called me into his office before graduation and said he was sorry I was not going on to university. "I'd have encouraged you to go into something like teaching or writing.” Then he looked at me and said, “I know the publisher of the Truro News. Would you like me to see if they have any summer jobs?" I was dubious but said yes. He called the paper and it changed my life.

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

A: Pete Hamill, the great New York writer and columnist, said the best day of his life was the day he got a press pass. “To be a newspaperman is one of the best educations in the world,” he said. Journalism was my university. I spent three years in Truro, then had the good luck to get hired by CP in Halifax. Shortly afterward, I was sent to New Brunswick, where I spent four years, and from there to Toronto. The next year I came to Ottawa. It was all good. Wire service training is great for writers. The fundamentals are everything – clarity, economy, accuracy, and speed – and the deadline is always now. Much of my early wire service work was condensing local news for distribution to other CP papers. I also did a lot of reporting, especially covering politics and the legislature.

CP had a desk at the time inside the Telegraph-Journal newsroom in Saint John. I worked nights and, as luck would have it, the night editor at the paper was Alden Nowlan, who had just won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry. I devoured his poems and began to write some of my own, usually late at night in a room where I lived at the YMCA. Eventually, I showed a few of them to Alden, who by then had become writer in residence at the University of New Brunswick. He encouraged me, and some were published – in The Atlantic Advocate, Chatelaine, Alive and Canadian Forum. But I drifted away from poetry and did not return for decades, except for a chapbook about my mother, who died of AIDS after receiving tainted blood in the 1980s. My first association with a “community” of poets was the Tree Reading Series in Ottawa.

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

A: Poetry is music. It has a thousand voices. The challenge is to find your own. I love poetry readings but I’m often perplexed by what I hear. I write for the page and the silent ear. Readings are verbal and performative – all over the place – which is their charm. But a lot goes over my head. Workshops and poetry circles help. I’ve met many folks who have studied, taught and immersed themselves in poetry, literature and creative writing all their lives. They know much more than I ever will. But I know enough to be wary of too much technique and artifice. Poetry must ring true, above all, and that’s hard to nail at any time, let alone in the cloud of correctness we live in today. Leonard Cohen used to say the air is filled with slogans – something good to say about everything. That’s even more true today. We also live in the swamp of social media, and the din of everyone pouncing on everything that offends their orthodoxy. The static is immense – hard to tune out, and harder to get past. But that’s the challenge of poetry. Otherwise, we’re just Stepford Wives with a pen (or keyboard).

I belong to two poetry circles: Other Tongues, which has been around for a long while, and The Pentland Poets, a small and very informal group in which our discussions ramble all over the place. In both groups, we share poems in progress and critique each other’s work. I learn new things. But the greatest benefit is the warmth of community, which lingers after each gathering, like a log on the fire. It keeps me writing.

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

A: Ottawa is a great a place for a writer, but poetry abounds everywhere. The trick is to see and capture it. Henry David Thoreau travelled little outside the New England town where he was born and died. He walked local fields and forests for hours each day, and his writings (Walden, Civil Disobedience) have inspired legions, including Gandhi and Martin Luther King. “I have travelled a great deal in Concord,” he said. I love Ottawa for obvious reasons, the drama of daily political life, the sheer beauty of the city, the intensity of the seasons here – autumn in the Gatineau Hills, skies that fill with geese despite the scourge of developers. But the urge to write is universal. A motivated poet could be dropped on the dark side of the moon and would find a way to scratch poems in the dust.  

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? 

A: A Season in Lowertown paints a portrait of Lowertown as I knew it when I lived there in the 1970s, after my young marriage ended. It was just before the developers arrived and remade it into the Byward Market of today. The poems are highly personal but the themes are old and universal. I was young, naïve, and hungry for life. It was a lovely and excessive time, and Lowertown was raw and perfect.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I don’t try very hard to get published. I should probably concentrate on that. I have a lot of unpublished poems that touch on one phase of my life or another – marathon and ultramarathon running, alcoholism, a long association I had with a cult, and two careers, 25 years in journalism, plus two decades in the Canada’s labour movement. Any of these themes might make a collection. I’ve also kept a diary since 1978, and that’s a good resource to have. Poetry has its own compass. I’ll just keep writing.