Q: How
long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?
I am originally from the Eastern Townships, but I have travelled quite a lot. After living in Germany, Spain, Montreal, and Quebec City, I first moved to Gatineau for work in September 2009. I had my eye set on Ottawa from the start, though, and eventually bought my first house here in 2018. I have been a happy Vanier dweller ever since!
Q: How
did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community
here?
I have been writing since as long as I can remember, but I guess I started getting truly involved while in CEGEP, when I became editor of our student literary journal Chimère. I then went on to write quite a lot of poetry while I was doing my BA and my MA, and some of my poems got published in book form in France in 2009.
When I first started to write poetry, I felt I could be creatively deviant and subversive: I could write everything in lower-case, decide to leave out punctuation marks and put words all over the page – or not. I first wrote in French, obviously, but also wrote a little in German, and quite a lot in Spanish at some point. A few of the poems included in my first poetry book, Des mots dans la neige (anagrammes, 2009) were actually first written in Spanish (while I lived in Spain), and then translated (or rather rewritten) into French.
Curiously, English was not a language in which I felt comfortable writing poems. For me, it had always been an academic language, in which I wrote article, essays, but not poetry. It just did not feel right. Then, one day, a publisher in Syracuse I was working with asked me to translate a selection of my own poems into English. English suddenly became a poetic language for me. I wrote a few texts in English over the past few years, some of which can be found online.
Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?
Until
now, I have published mainly translations, but have also taken part in quite a
few public readings here, including at VerseFest. My peers have consistently motivated
me to go on writing. It is thanks to them that I have not given it up poetry!
Q: What
do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa
provide, or allow?
I find
people here are particularly receptive to bilingual or multilingual poetry. I
enjoy how different languages and cultures are welcome to interact and grow
together, particularly in Ottawa.
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?
Living
in Ottawa has made me want to write more poetry in French, my first language.
It is important to me that French continues to thrive, here in Ontario. I am in
touch with quite a few Francophone poets here. I want to be part of that
community and strengthen its different networks, both through my translations
and my own writing.
Q: What
are you working on now?
I am currently working on a book project funded by the
Ontario Arts Council. Now that I have spent over a decade learning to write
“like” other people as a literary translator, I feel it is time to rediscover
my own voice and find out how it has evolved. I am going back to my roots, writing
in French. It is both exhilarating and daunting to write “as myself.” The book
is slowly coming together. I am curious to see what comes out of it!
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