Q: How long were you in Ottawa, and what first brought you here? What took you away?
I lived in Ottawa for four years, from 1996 through 2000. I moved there because my husband (then partner), Patrick Leroux, was running a theatre company there, Theatre la Catapulte. We'd met at Banff in 1994, done the long-distance thing for nearly a year with him in Ottawa and me in Vancouver, and then spent a year together in Quebec City while he worked on a family history project. Ottawa was the first city after my original home of Burnaby, BC, that began feel like home.
In 2000, I was hired into a tenure-track position teaching creative writing at Concordia in Montreal. I thought I'd return to Ottawa more often than circumstances ended up permitting. I made good friends there.
Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?
I'll spare you the "I've always written" story, though it's true, as it always is for anyone who tells it. I'd just finished my MFA in creative writing at UBC when I went to Banff, and I didn't even really look for a writing community in Quebec as I assumed there was no such anglo community there (I later met the poet Aurian Haller, who was living there then, and wished we'd connected). Ottawa was the first place where I deliberately sought to integrate myself into a community of writers. You won't be surprised to hear that knowing you was tremendously helpful. (To contextualize readers: because you and Patrick had gone to high school together, on the English and French sides of the same school, you were the first poet I met on my first visit to Ottawa in March 1995. Was it called the Bohemian Café, where we met? One of many long-gone market hangouts.) Especially during my first two years in Ottawa, I think I managed to get to most of the readings you'd organized, and you welcomed me enthusiastically, connecting me with many writers who, like you, became dear friends.
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?
I remember being grateful for the fact that Ottawa's comparatively small size made it easy to meet people. In Vancouver, my community had come readymade, though UBC's BFA and MFA programs, although even there, finding friends hadn't come easily due to me being a typical introvert. But by the time I'd moved to Ottawa, I'd travelled on my own, matured a bit, And I was lonely -- I really wanted to meet other writers.
Other than Diana Brebner, who became an important mentor and friend for me, I'm not sure that the writers I came to know affected the nature of my work, though the presence of the National Gallery was a major influence. I also spent a fair bit of time with the arts writer Douglas Ord, who made me take think about ekphrastic writing more seriously from a research perspective. I’d always felt like an imposter, not having studied Art History, but he gave me the confidence to go into the National Gallery archives and look at their files on Jean Paul Lemieux.
In Montreal, through my teaching at Concordia I’ve been able to play a small role in shaping a community, but due to the demands of the job, and the fact that I have two kids and a very busy husband, I feel like my presence in the community is more as a teacher/mentor than as a writer. That said, I’m heading into sabbatical as I write this, and over the next year I'm hoping to get out to readings more. Certainly I have many friends in Montreal who are writers -- nearly all of my friends are writers! Again, though, if my writing's been shaped by place, it's been through art collections; Long Exposure, my long poem slated for publication in fall 2025, began with a visit to Montreal's Musee d'art contemporain in 2009 (!) to see an exhibition of work by Robert Polidori -- with (the then-and-again-now Ottawa-based writer) Anita Lahey, in fact.
Q: What did you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What did Ottawa provide, or allow?
Warmth and openness. Things may have changed in the past twenty-plus years, but when I arrived in Ottawa, I felt as though writers of all ages, stages, temperaments, and aesthetics went to the same events and supported each other. I was always impressed that established writers like John Barton -- who after all had a museum day job and the time-draining responsibility of co-editing Arc with Rita Donovan -- was a regular at the TREE readings, and read his work at the open mic that always ended the night. There were no cliques. And visual artists were involved, too, like David Cation. Ottawa's grown since -- everywhere's grown since -- but there was an inclusiveness that felt generous and affirming. I got to know Toronto a bit during that time and although it was a more exciting place to be, I always felt that if I lived there, I'd have had to choose my circle.
Again, I can't overestimate how important the presence of the National Gallery in particular, and museums in general, was to my experience of living in Ottawa. During my first two years there, I went to the National Gallery once a week to wander, look, and write. During the latter two years, I worked there on contract, as an editorial assistant for the members' magazine Vernissage, where I had the pleasure of working with the poet Susan McMaster. Later, as I was leaving, John Barton and Anita Lahey came on board. It was a rewarding way to make a living and I'm eternally grateful to Susan for inviting me into that opportunity. I sometimes wonder whether, had the Concordia job not come along, I’d still be there.
I also appreciated the arts funding at the civic level. It was great to live in a city where all levels of government supported culture.
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?
Patrick's parents bought a cottage north of Ottawa midway through my time there, and some of the poems in Pavilion responded to that site, and to our little row house in Vanier. But -- sorry to be a broken record here -- it was the museums that were most central to the poetry. The idea of writing ekphrastically through visiting museums is one I took with me through my travels in Europe in the early 2000s. Patrick was studying in Paris, my job at Concordia was then relatively undemanding outside of the academic term, and I didn't have kids yet, so I was free to wander in the Louvre, the Mauritshuis, the Tate Britain, as I had at the National Gallery in Ottawa. The Met, the AGO . . . I knew cities through their art museums.
I always feel a special bond with the many Ottawa writers who come through Concordia's program, and I still keep in touch with my Ottawa friends, even if I rarely have the chance to visit. It was really the city in which I came of age as a writer: my first two books were published while I lived there, I was able to support myself through grants and school visits for a while, and I won the Governor General's Award while living there, the latter of which briefly enabled me to move in entirely different circles that I'd previously barely known existed. It was an exciting place to be at that time. I was invited to have lunch (in the company of many others, of course) with a Belgian prince at Rideau Hall! And then I went home to my little street in Vanier, near McArthur Lanes (where we never actually went bowling, despite having great intentions) and the Loblaws on Vanier Parkway. The city was small enough to permit a relatively easy, if sometimes unsettling, movement between levels of wealth/status -- things just felt possible.
Q: What are you working on now?
I've been working for over a decade on a project called Long Exposure, which as I mentioned began with photographs by Robert Polidori, taken in post-disaster sites like New Orleans and Chernobyl. It will be out with Palimpsest in 2025, so I'll be working on edits for that. I'm also about to begin a new project centred on the BC Sugar Refinery, which dates from 1890 and is the oldest surviving industrial building in Vancouver. I don't know how to write this book, or even research it, but that’s part of the process. And I want to do more work on writing for, and pulling together, a book of essays on various subjects, with coincidence as their common thread. With the prospect of a year away from teaching, I feel time opening up before me. As a teacher, I'm always actively engaged with the making of poetry; now I'm looking forward to making my own again.
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