Blaine Marchand's award-winning
poetry and prose has appeared in magazines across Canada, the US, New Zealand
and Pakistan. He has six books of poetry, a young adult novel and a work of
non-fiction published. He has an essay on his mother, A Long and Lucky Life, which will be published in a New Zealand
anthology, Love and Loss, in April 2020. He has just completed a
full-length manuscript of poems, Becoming
History. Active in the literary scene in Ottawa for over 50 years, he was also
the President of the League of Canadian Poets from 1992-94 and a monthly
columnist for Capital XTRA, the GLTBQ2
community paper, for nine years. He is currently working on a three different
series of poems – on his cancer, Finding My Voice; on aging, set in a forest
reserve, Old Growth; and on the Ornamental Gardens at the Central Experiment
Farm in Ottawa.
Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought
you here?
Oh, seventy years. My parents brought me into the world.
Born in the Grace Hospital, now Grace Manor, which is about eight blocks from
where I have lived for the past 38 years and several more from where I grew up
in Champlain Park area. What do they say – the apple never falls far….
Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and
subsequently, the writing community here?
I began writing in elementary school. I kept a notebook of
stories and drawings. My grade seven teacher, Mrs. Davis, was the first person
to say to me – you could be a writer. She loved poetry and would recite it to
us often. As a result, I became intrigued how poetry worked – the imagery and
the use of words to convey meaning. One of her favourite poems was Indian
Summer, which is by the Ottawa Confederation Poet, William Wilfred Campbell,
although I did not know that. In high school, I kept a notebook of poems. My
English teacher, F.J. McElligott – who wore natty suits from the 1940s – gave
me free reign to write my essays as poetry. He put me in touch with a poet
called Ruth E. Scharfe, who mentored me. She belonged to the local branch of
the CAA, which was an active group, many of whom were very talented poets, such
as herself and Lenore Pratt. So, I had a sense of community very early on.
In the early 70s, it was my time to give back and create
opportunities for Ottawa poets and writers as felt as everything in Ontario was
Toronto-based. More often than not, this came about due the sense of community
and commitment of a group of local authors. Claire Harrison, Clive Doucet and I
started Ottawa Independent Writers very much in that vein. And a group of poets
in the city at the time, Tim Dunn, Robert Craig, Kathryn Oakley, John (as he
was called at that time) O’Neill and I started the monthly poetry newsletter Sparks [editor’s note: see my 2015 interview with Blaine Marchand on Sparks here].
Later on, I got involved with Patrick White’s Ottawa Review, later changed to Anthos.
I also started a reading series that took place in Major’s Hill
Park, during the Tulip Festival, Poetic Intent, called that because the NCC
provided a military tent for the event. Then, during National Book Week, with
funding from the League of Canadian Poets, writers from across the region and
Ontario gave readings and took part in panel discussions. Eventually, working
with Francophone poet, Jacques Flamand of Editions Vermillon, and YAA Tony
German and others, the week morphed into the Ottawa Valley Book Festival/Festival
des livres d’Outouais, which became a bilingual annual event at Archives and
National Library Canada. It was at that time, I founded the Archibald Lampman
Award for Poetry, giving it that name as a result of suggestion by Ottawa poet
Robert Eady.
Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your
thinking about writing, if at all?
I think it exposed me to all sorts of different voices and
various takes on how poetry or prose can be written. We are writers because we
want to communicate. I think my travels in the developing world let me experience
so many things beyond my own culture that this impacted on what I write about.
But it was the openness of the literary community in Ottawa that, to a certain
extent, allowed me to embrace things that are different from my own view or
writing style. Even today, when I hear younger writers, I think wow - I wish I
could write that way. To a certain extent, everything I hear or read shapes how
I write. Not always changing my style but the way I approach and think about
poetry. I hope I am always this way.
Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see
anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?
It is hard for me to answer this question as I have always lived in Ottawa, except for two years in Islamabad, Pakistan, where, by the way, the writing communities were divided along linguistic lines and which, like Ottawa, feels that too much focus in on Lahore and Karachi. I attended poetry readings in both English and Urdu. Although I do not speak Urdu, I liked to let the musicality of the poetry flow over me. I did have a Pakistani friend who came with me and she would translate it spontaneously when I wished. Another friend, poet and artist Ilona Yusuf, and I put together a proposal for Vallum magazine to do an issue highlighting Pakistani poetry in English. It was accepted and came out two years after my return to Ottawa in issue 9:1 in the winter of 2012. It featured 26 poets.
One thing I have found about Ottawa over the decades is
that there is a strong and supportive community of writers. The community has
always been welcoming as new voices emerge. It’s my impression that in other
centres, particularly Toronto, the literary community is quite divisive and
there are in-groups and those on the outside. Kinda like in high school. I
never found that in Ottawa.
It is natural that groups do form along cultural or race
lines or around writing styles or age. But beyond that, I do think the Ottawa literary
community has been very welcoming and supportive. We all want each other to
succeed.
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 write very much out of my experiences and my environment.
Many of my poems are directly about Ottawa as that is what I know most
intimately. I worked for the Canadian International Development Agency and it
certainly impacted on my writing through my travels to the developing world.
But I always had the security of a home base to return to. I am very much
rooted in it. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I was a columnist for Capital Xtra, the local LGBTQ paper and
wrote a monthly column, which focused on the gay community here and told their
stories.
When I belonged to a poetry group in my 20s, the person
leading the group kept insisting that being too local was not a good idea as
readers from elsewhere could not possibly know the references. I kept thinking
but we read poetry about England, France, Ireland, Mexico and the US. Many of
the cities in those countries I have never been to. So why is it acceptable for
those poets to make local references but not me?
I think in the Ottawa of today there is greater diversity
and this brings it’s a greater wealth to culture in the city. All this, you
absorb and it finds a way into your writing. I cannot be other than whom I am
but the way it is expressed alters over time with age and experiences and being
exposed to other approaches.
I have just sent off to publishers my latest manuscript of
poems, Becoming History, which
explores the life of my mother, who was abandoned by her parents, raised by a
loving older couple in Ottawa East, my childhood with her in Ottawa West, as it
was then called, and her final years in the Grace Manor. She lived till almost
104 and her memory was so vivid. She told me so many stories about her life.
So, as a result, it is a book very much imbued with Ottawa.
Q: What are you working on now?
I have several things on the go. I had a chapbook of poems,
My Head, Filled with Pakistan,
published by catkin press. I continue to write poems about my two years living
there. I am also working on a series called, Finding my Voice, about my bout
with laryngeal cancer five years ago. And I have begun a series called Old
Growth, set in Shaw Woods, an old growth forest in Renfrew County. It theme is about
aging. And a series of poems on the Ornamental Gardens of the Central
Experimental Farm, where he volunteers.
