Fabienne Shepherd Stone is a white settler poet and acupuncturist whose writing explores themes of queerness, bodies, and belonging. Their debut collection of poetry, Second Growth, was published by Creekstone Press in 2014, and their poems are included in the anthology Make It True: Poetry From Cascadia (Leaf Press, 2015) and Canadian journals such as Prairie Fire and Briarpatch. Past work was published under the name Fabienne Calvert Filteau. Fabienne resides on the traditional territory of the Kwanlin Dün First Nation and the Ta’an Kwä’chän Council in Whitehorse, Yukon. Home to them is an ever-evolving question.
Q: How long were you in Ottawa, and what first brought you here? What took you away?
I moved to Ottawa with my parents as an almost-six-year-old in 1990, and moved away in 2003 when I graduated from high school. My parents worked as Canadian diplomats, and we moved to Ottawa from Seattle for many reasons, in part so I could start elementary as a five-year-old, in part for my parents’ careers. I left Ottawa in 2003 to go to university in British Columbia where I spent most of my adult life before moving to the Yukon four years ago.
Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?
I grew up in a household where books of all kinds were revered and where reading was a favourite pastime shared by my parents and many members of our extended family. Word play, telling stories, and talking about books and writers and ideas were love languages in my family, and in this environment I found a love of writing and reading poetry and fiction as a very young kid. Writing became a way to have a curious, rich engagement with my inner world, and a way to discover the ongoing interplay between this inner world and the outer one.
I was fortunate to participate in festivals and workshops for young writers. I had a marvelous English teacher, Bernice McInnis, in elementary school who encouraged me to write and submit to various contests, and this further broadened my writing community as a youth. I went on to attend Canterbury High School, a public arts high school, where I was a student in the writing program. At Canterbury, I made lifelong friends, and was immersed daily in a world of writers and writing. Michael Fitzpatrick, head of the literary department at the time, championed us all to find our voices, challenge those voices and perspectives, experiment with a variety of forms and genres, and pump out more material than felt possible most of the time.
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?
Because I grew up immersed in writing community, I would say this shaped how I thought about writing more than shifting a pre-existing perspective. In some ways, writing life since the Ottawa days has been a sobering reality check. When I was fourteen, I won a national poetry contest and was awarded $500, more money than I’d seen in my life. Because successes like this happened early on for me, I thought that poetry was something I could do for money as an adult, and such successes would just keep rolling out. Ha! Newsflash. Not the case. Writing, which was central to my existence as a kid, has been sidelined at various points in my adult life as I negotiate with the necessities of capitalism and how to make a living in a way that allows room for writing be a part of my day-to-day life without requiring it to be something I rely on to pay the bills. For many years, I stepped away from writing to pursue another vocation. Since moving to the Yukon, I’ve been finding my way back into a writing practice and a writing community again.
Q: What did you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What did Ottawa provide, or allow?
As a young writer in Ottawa, there was extraordinary opportunity. Canterbury is one of the few publicly-funded schools of its kind in the country, and it allowed for an experience of high school that for me really fostered creativity, uniqueness, and artistic collaboration. We were allowed – and even encouraged – to be our gorgeous, awkward, introverted weirdo selves there. By the time I graduated, I had written stage plays, screenplays, poems, fiction, and non-fiction, and for five years was required to have a daily writing practice and produce a high volume of material. We had cheap passes to the NAC and GCTC and were required to review plays as part of the curriculum—what a dream! Life outside of high school was a challenging period for my family, and being able to anchor in creative practice and a community of like-minded kiddos really carried me through some rough times.
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?
Like I shared above, the community shaped – more than changed – the way I approach my work. It laid the groundwork for my writing life, in many ways, and taught me a level of discipline needed to write, one I don’t know I would’ve otherwise learned. It built my critical lens and exposed me to so many different ways to engage my love of writing.
Q: What are you working on now?
A second collection of poems! I recently received a generous award from the Yukon government to work on the first draft of a manuscript this year. What a dream! It’ll be the first time in a decade that I’ll have regular weekly time specifically allotted to writing, and a deadline, and people I’m accountable to who believe in my work. My aim is to explore writing a character-driven manuscript of narrative poetry, in which each poem is a self-contained unit nested within a book that can be read from beginning to end as a narrative in verse.
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