Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?
Fate, or as Heidegger would put it, my thrownness, where I happened to be thrown. My father’s family lived here for many generations, in the Westboro area, on the land now referred to as Tunney’s Pasture. And my mother too was born and raised in Ottawa, in the Sandy Hill area. Except for the odd season away when I was younger, here is where I have lived my life also.
Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?
For me writing had always been a secret activity; I suppose because it felt presumptuous to think anyone would want to read what I wrote. My brother, a decade older than me, had books which I would borrow (or steal) and in one of those books, an anthology of American writing, I read the poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot. At the time I read it without understanding its intent, but I knew immediately that here was the thing for me that would give meaning to life. It was like finding a new element in nature. I wish now that I could experience the exhilaration I felt when I first read that poem and others in my brother’s book. At this stage, I could likely speak of what Eliot was communicating and feel I’d tamed the beauty of his language into something like logic, but I cannot capture that feeling of – and here I struggle for the correct word – the bliss, or joy, or awe that I felt at twelve reading it for the first time. I’ve come to feel gratitude for that spontaneous impulse and that I was able at such a young age, to know what I wanted to study and what I needed to have in my life. Around the same age I had an experience of what I can only refer to as a waking vision, after which I was left in awe and not wanting to lose the emotions it evoked, it struck me that the only way I could hold on to it was to write it down. That was the first time that I wrote on my own initiative, without obligation.
I did not personally know another writer until it became necessary to stop my PhD program in English Literature (I was at the point of having to attend fulltime, which my situation then did not permit). I had begun working at the National Research Council as a teenager and for years had done my university studies at night and so I decided to use my evenings to change my focus from the study of literature to its creation. At the time Humber College in Toronto was starting a writing correspondence program, to which I was accepted. For the first two years I worked with Bonnie Burnard, and then Isabel Huggan for almost a decade. Today I tell Isabel that so much flowed from my working with her because she introduced me to Jean Van Loon, who recommended me to the Rubies poetry collective. Joining this group of talented women meant I met and became friends with some wonderful writers: Lise Rochefort (who hosted our gatherings), Frances Boyle, Laurie Koensgen (these three poets were the founding members of the group), Jacqueline Bourque, Pearl Pirie and Robin MacDonald. A little while later Jean joined the group along with Mary Lee Bragg, Claudia Radmore, Doris Fiszer, Sneha Madhaven-Reese, Jenny Haysom, Susan Atkinson among others over the years. Through Frances, I attended a short story writing group run by Mary Borsky, a writer I’d always admired, where again I met a group of talented writers, and I note especially Sonia Tilson who became another friend. These dear friends and remarkable writers helped me incredibly, not only in the creation of my work – their critique has been invaluable – in their support through all the trials of the writing life, but also in their knowledge of the Canadian publishing world. As an example of how my fellow writers have helped in the process of promoting my work, Laurie reached out to one of her contacts, someone she felt would be interested in my poetry collection, A Different Wolf, on the life and work of Alfred Hitchcock. This contact then gave her names of experts in the area of cinema from across Canada whom I was able to contact in the promotion of my book. And if it were not for the urging of Frances, the book itself might never have been published.
With Frances and Mary, I am also part of a short story group that meets monthly (now over zoom) when again I met another group of amazing writers – Rhonda Douglas, Barbara Sibbell, Debra Martens, Maria Saba, Kathlyn Bradshaw, Una McDonnell, Sara Mang, among others. It’s easy to appreciate how the cross pollination of local groups has created the vibrant writing scene we’re lucky enough to enjoy in Ottawa.
Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?
When I first started to write I realized that there was an element of pure joy to it, when I was able to transform into words a thought, or a moment, or an image. Of course in the harsh light of day I’d read what I’d produced in those moments and wonder what I was thinking, but putting that aside, this experience is the magic that not only allows creation, it also makes a writer crave the creative act. It is the thing you miss terribly when you’re unable to write as it is the moment that lifts you from the everyday into a place where you can define and order and bring sense to the chaos of experience. So if that’s the impetus, the next stage in the creative process is to bring this enlightenment (I use the term lightly) to an audience, to have it rinsed of superfluous details or intent, and it is then that a writing group can help immensely. They are the sounding board, grounded in the world, and if a writer is lucky enough to have such generous writing colleagues as I have, they are invested in seeing your work be the best it can be. They celebrate with you when things go well and give you emotional support when they don’t, when you meet those inevitable pitfalls and disappointments. Fundamentally, they understand the writing quest, that thing that drives you to create, they are afflicted, some would say, with the same involuntary need to express themselves, ‘the midnight disease’, as the neurologist Alice Flaherty refers to it in her book on the subject.
Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?
Having not lived elsewhere for any real length of time, it is difficult to compare. But, that said, I cannot imagine a more generous and supportive environment than the writing community I’ve found in Ottawa. Nor can I imagine a place where I could find more interesting and compelling stories as those I have gathered over my lifetime here. Of course, it can be argued that anywhere you find humans, you find human stories, and these stories – the language of our psychology – are universal enough that where you live is not that crucial an element to your creative process.
I love visiting New York City, or Montreal, or travelling to large European cities. I love the cosmopolitan sense that at any moment something exceptional can happen. It sparks the mind, but I am reminded of Flaubert’s famous dictum to writers: “Be regular and orderly in your life so that you can be violent and original in your work”. This is not to say that the exceptional is not found in Ottawa, for as I’ve said, the elements of life here, like life anywhere are full of mystery and hope and the universal.
When my stepson was young and would complain “I am bored,” I would reply, “Well, then you are boring”. You have a personal obligation to fight boredom, I’d argue, and you do that by engaging the imagination. Ottawa is the place where I was first able to read Eliot, and where I was able to study literature that linked me to generations of writers and thinkers, a place in short where my imagination was given free reign to create. I guess what I’ve come to appreciate about Ottawa is that, as my home where I can easily be regular and orderly, supported as I am by friends and family, it is unarguably the perfect place for my writing life.
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?
My first published book, The View from the Lane, which is a collection of linked stories is set mostly in Ottawa. I saw the east end neighbourhood of Overbrook where I grew up as the landscape for some of those stories. I’m not sure I had an option as this is the place I knew best, the place where all my young life happened, the place, in fact, that provided the mystery and puzzlement that often is the impetuous for a work of art. It’s difficult to know or even express the impact your home has on your imagination, but I believe place is a crucial element in the creation of literature, one that cannot be divorced from the stories themselves.
Where my novel Winter Willow takes place is never revealed, but I can tell you that the snow scenes, when Melanie is marooned in that large mansion called Winter Willow, were inspired by the Ottawa storms I have experienced through the years. When I wrote of the university, it was the University of Ottawa I saw, and the surrounding streets and bridges.
Likewise, in my poetry collection, even though I used the work of Alfred Hitchcock as the point of departure, the link between the movies and poetry brought me back to Ottawa, for it was in Ottawa that I experienced my first viewing of these movies. And it was here where I tried to initially untangle the mystery of Hitchcock’s cinematic vision. I was driven to align my experiences of life with the expectations implicit in his world view, especially in his depiction of women in the 1950s. Arguably, this to be the era when we find Hitchcock’s fullest creative expression and I’ve analysed why the work resonated so powerfully with me. I came to feel it is Hitchcock’s obsession with women and the societal pressures of the 1950s. His observations of these elements allowed him to create the artefacts whereby we can examine the cultural implications of the era and in fact how those assumptions continue to define classifications of ideal femininity. And I believe the confluence of these two facts – Hitchcock’s portrayal of his vision of women and my own personal reaction to such a vision – was the impetuous for writing A Different Wolf.
Q: What are you working on now?
Just as I tend to always be reading at least one book of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, I have three projects of my own which I am currently working on. The first and oldest is a collection of poetry which I’ve called ‘The Yard’, and which to varying degrees looks at how yards – those from the past and those currently in my life – have come to represent all that can pass through a life. As repositories of years of constant change, they display seasons, death, birth, they give comfort, are laid bare by storms, know winter cold, are awakened in spring, and bloom in summer. I did not set out to write a collection on yards, but noticed that this topic seemed to find me, as if a gravitational core around the idea took form to find its expression in the poems.
I’m also working on a book of short stories which I’ve tentatively called It Is What It Is, after a story in the collection. Of its fourteen stories, six have been or will be published. And my newest project is a longer work which has at its heart a trip I took to Dublin about eight years ago. It is in the nascent stage when I am not sure of its value or even what I am trying to capture, when I may decide it’s not worth the effort and let it go. Years ago, when I was working with Isabel, she gave the sage advice to dream my way into the story. And when I am falling asleep often it is this story that comes to mind, that I can see when I close my eyes. This seems to me to indicate that I will not have the option to let it go, although I will have the option to not share it.
