David Currie is a writer in Ottawa. He is the author of five chapbooks and no book books. His chapbooks include Bird Facts (Apt 9 Press, 2014), Mystery Waffles (In/Words Press 2014), Poems for the Mishka (Shrieking Violet Press 2015), The Planets that Block our Light (In/Words 2015), and Memento Mishka (Apt. 9, 2023) in collaboration with Jennifer Baker. His poems have appeared in magazines across Canada most recently in Plants, Animals, and Humans (Apartment 613, 2023). He currently works as a political organizer – a job which brings him to exotic locations across Canada most recently the resplendent former municipality of Kanata.
Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?
I was first brought to Ottawa by way of a cesarian section. I have lived here for most of the ensuing years with the exceptions of periods of failing to live in another city or attempts to escape the purgatory that our city occasionally feels like.
Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?
I’ve always written – from the time I could first speak I was playing with language. However, as with most things in my life shame prevented me from pursuing writing at Canterbury (I instead chose vocal music – an artform that is beautiful, if generally a little too self-serious).
I did however write my first and second plays in quick succession. They were well attended by my high school peers and not attended by my later friend Cameron Anstee who was unable to get a ticket due to the popularity of “Pants!”
A month later, I borrowed the complementary monogrammed Writer’s Festival pass of Agnies Grudniewicz and attended most of that year’s festival including a workshop (that I did pay for) by Trillium Award Winning Poet Stuart Ross. That workshop changed the way I thought about writing. The idea of exacting silliness began transforming my work.
In university, I continued writing plays and started stand up and, occasionally, poetry. By 2008, I was screenwriting for film and television.
I re-entered university that year as well and had the next transformative writing experience of my life: In/Words.
Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?
In/Words is something that has been discussed at length on this blog, and I have a feeling as those who passed through it become more well-known, what Trilliam Award Winner Bardia Sinaee has dubbed “The In/Words Extended Universe” will garner even more data server usage (ink).
In/Words, at its best, fostered a community of writers constantly collaborating, editing, and encouraging new work by its writers. In/Words was at once a magazine, a press, a writers’ circle, and a reading series. It was a constellation of writers all orbiting around a single grounding space. That space was a broom closet with a printer, a computer in hospice, and a bearskin rug.
At its worst, In/Words was a community inspired by opposition in the tradition of First Statement, Contact, and the Cerberus collective. As the In/Words writers have joined the diaspora of Canadian Literature I know many of us have struggled to purge this oppositional impulse from our writing. I know I have.
My involvement with In/Words begat my participation in the small press fair, which begat Versefest. The broader community of writers in Ottawa are warm, welcoming, and feature many incredibly talented people.
Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?
I don’t know if I can say that anything that happens here doesn’t happen anywhere else. I will say that the incredible level of bureaucratic bumbling Ottawa has to offer creates a wonderful ironic backdrop to write in front of. Whether it be the O-Train with its constant decommissioning due to predictable issues, the wrong Jack Purcell monument, the pin people, the haunted dog park at the edge of Lowertown, or the wonderful dead bird sculpture which likely got somebody fired – if you’re looking for it, you can find wonderful writing fodder.
However, Ottawa is also exceedingly beautiful with its nature spaces and river pathways. Gatineau Hills aside, this city has the arboretum and the experimental farm, the greenbelt, and three downtown waterways, not to mention the myriad of botanical gardens. There are so many opportunities to surround yourself in natural beauty that it’s easy to forget how absolutely ridiculous having 4 levels of government who do not communicate with each other and fail to accomplish anything successfully is.
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?
I’m always trying to write about Ottawa or In/Words or lampoon my time working on Parliament Hill. However, usually I run out of steam before figuring out what I’m writing.
Right now, I am trying to write a tryptic exploring my traumatic bipolar disorder diagnosis, the community that I loved a decade ago and my efforts to reach out to it now, and then finally the current apocalypse we are currently living through and being inconvenienced by. The end question of the whole project is "who would you want to spend the end of the world with?" For me, it’s the people of In/Words.
It’s a tall order and could be impossible.
Q: What are you working on now?
Apart from the above project stuck on a raft, for the past four years my main focus has been finishing a novel. I always need two projects to flip between to avoid losing writing momentum but “Gary Hughes” is the big one.
Gary Hughes is a novel about groundhogs, specifically one groundhog named Gary Hughes. In the book, all groundhogs have a biological ability to time travel but humans have never noticed because they don’t do anything we would recognize as interesting. The novel explores their time travel exploits and the ripples across time they create and how those ripples are resolved. The Groundhogs are anthropomorphized as little as possible. I’m hoping to be finished by the end of 2023 and publish it sometime before the world ends.
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