Six Questions interview #238 : Harold Hoefle

Harold Hoefle lives in Overbrook, where the Anishinabe Algonquin Nation lived for 8000 years. He’s been there a month. Before that, forty years in Montreal, half of them teaching English & Creative Writing at John Abbott College (with three semesters of teaching at UVic). Writing-wise: fiction first.  Ottawa’s Oberon Press published his collection of linked short fiction, The Mountain Clinic, in 2008. It was a finalist for the QWF’s Paragraphe-Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction. His short story, “Ride”, won the 2012 Quebec Writing Competition, sponsored by CBC/Radio-Canada. Poetry…inspired by the ghazals of John Thompson – meaning: blown away by – he started writing poems in 2009. His work has won the Bliss Carman and Great Blue Heron poetry prizes, and garnered a silver medal at the National Magazine Awards. In 2018, his debut collection, The Night Chorus, was published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. rob mclennan is putting out a chapbook of Harold’s poems, Leaning In, in August 2026. A full-length manuscript, Give and Go, is wandering the realm of small presses. Realm? Dark woods? Right now, two of his poems are in The Antigonish Review. David O’Meara has kindly solicited a poem for the upcoming Riverkeeper event (and corollary chapbook), where eight poets – four English-language, and four French – will read a piece related to the Ottawa River.

Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?

As noted above: a month.  But in 1980, I came here for my undergrad, at Carleton.  Four glorious years: skating on the canal, new friendships, and reading dozens of books unrelated to my courses.  Also: the National Capital Marathon (flat course = good time).  Now I’m here for many reasons: nostalgia; grandchildren in Gatineau; old friends; and the belief that, at a certain point, it’s good to shake up one’s life.  New province; new city.  I love Overbrook: the entire world lives here.

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?

Someone, probably a long time ago, said that readers become writers.  So: the Hardy Boys; Stephen King; then…Camus, Hesse; later, Elizabeth Smart, Munro, Norman Levine…I wanted to try.  But the real adrenalin-jangler was Kerouac’s On the Road.  So, after reading that, and finishing my undergrad, I spent four years Kerouac-ing around Canada, Mexico, Central America, and later Europe.  Notepads always on the go.  I tried to write stories; I did write stories; they sucked.  Then, in the summer of ’96, I began a year of teaching at St. Xavier’s High School, in Kathmandu.  In the evenings, I had time.  And I really felt: if I don’t start writing now, I’ll throw myself off a building.  No one wants to read about self-hate; I was feeling it.  So I started writing.  Stories.  First one, about my Austrian-immigrant mother; second, about my security-guard work at the asbestos mine in northern BC.  Third, the state coffee-farm in Nicaragua, seven years after the revolution…

The writing community here: I’ve met people at events.  Writers, here – no different from Montreal – will talk with you, about you, about themselves, about anything.  No wall of ego.  The opposite: kindness, crystallized by offerings: rob maclennan soliciting a chapbook; David O’Meara, a Riverkeeper poem: that kind of thing.  Writers, here, knowing that the new guy should be included.  Really – it’s heartwarming.

Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?

Too early to tell!

Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?

Again, it’s early (for me), but I can say I’m impressed by all the stuff that’s happening: readings and a group-walk at Fletcher Wildlife Garden; events at Perfect Books; the upcoming Riverkeeper event (on September 2^nd).  Also: the few people I know, are introducing me to people I do not.

“Harold, this is so-and-so, she’s on the board at VERSEfest; “Harold, let me introduce you to so-and-so, she worked at the Carleton Library for thirty years…”. And so on.  I feel welcomed, as if space has been made.  And I’m sure that’s the way it is with other writers who move here.  You are brought into the room – or, as at Fletcher, into the garden.

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?

Well, the Riverkeeper poem, for sure.  I mean, one day I got up early and walked to the path behind the Parliament buildings…en route, I spent ten minutes staring at a cormorant on a rock in the Rideau River, then I exchanged greetings with a guy nursing a vodka soda on a bench – and this was before I reached the Ottawa River.  But it’s all in the poem: bird, guy, drink.  All writers know: composition is composite.  You take; weave; pull out the threads that ruin the pattern.  At least, that’s what you think you’re doing.

Too early to say whether the city and community are changing – or will change – the way I work.  Hmm.  Maybe more café time.  I have some volunteer-work ideas, but I’m afraid to air them.

Q: What are you working on now?

Poems.  Brewing up a novel; it’s still in primary.  Nowhere near the siphoning into a carboy of actual pages.

Six Questions interview #237 : August Chun

August Chun is a queer, Han Chinese writer, organizer, and researcher based on unceded Ohlone land (Bay Area, California) and unceded Algonquin land (Eastern Ontario, Canada). Their writing has been supported by Periplus, Kearny Street Workshop, McCormack Writing Center, Sundress Academy for the Arts, and Abode. They have been published in Seventh Wave, Prism, and SOLRAD, and have work forthcoming in Crucial Comix and Xenolithic Edges. 

Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?

I grew up in Ottawa! I immigrated here with my family when I was very young. We lived all over-- South Keys, Billings Bridge, Barrhaven, Kanata. I moved away for undergrad and then lived in California for almost a decade before moving back to Ottawa in January of this year.

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?

I was really lucky to have grown up in Ottawa when there were so many writing opportunities for youth: I was a part of the Cappies program where I wrote some high school theater reviews, and even wrote a (terrible) play for the Youth Infringement Festival way back in the 2010s (terrible because of my writing, not because of the hardworking producers, stage managers, or actors). I took writing classes with the City of Ottawa. I even submitted a really terrible poem to Bywords as a teenager-- it was rightfully rejected, because it was so bad!

Even though I majored in English in my undergrad, I didn’t start seriously writing creative nonfiction or poetry until much later, after I finished my graduate degree in LA and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. There, I started doing more formal writing retreats like McCormack Writing Center (fka Tin House), and Kearny Street Workshop.

When I moved back to Ottawa earlier this year, I was pleasantly surprised to find a beautiful little writing community, with lots of small gathering spaces like the small press fair, the Ottawa Comic Arts Festival, Possible World’s Object // Project Art Book Fair, and Versefest. I got to have a wonderful little mentorship session with Cassidy McFadzean, who was Arc Poetry’s Writer in Residence. I’ve started getting to know so many amazing folks in the zine community, especially in the queer zine scene (shout out Trans History & Queer Zines and Ottawaisms) and those involved in the city (like Good Golly Zines).

Sadly I’m moving to Toronto later this year to start my PhD (not in writing) but I feel deeply rooted to this city and its people. I hope to continue building more relationships with the writing community. Moving back has showered me in constant, mostly pleasant surprises as I’ve realized how this city has changed, and how much I’ve changed: I’m finding many little writing pockets and communities that I either didn’t know about before, or simply did not exist. It’s a gift to find my hometown, with all of its frustrations and annoyances, continuing to grow.

Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?

I really reject the idea that writing is a solitary, individual activity: I write in community. That doesn’t necessarily mean physically writing beside another person at one table (though I love that too), rather that I like to respond and be in conversation to what others have written, what they’ve said, and think about how my work can contribute to movements. My poetry, comics, and my creative nonfiction are all rooted in liberation, organizing, and justice, and like Mariame Kaba says, “Everything worthwhile is done with other people”. It’s what Mahmoud Darwish implores us to do in his beautiful poem “Think of Others”.

Because the writing community is so intimate and small in Ottawa, folks truly have to take the initiative to start their own projects. The community here has taught me to be agile, nimble, and to just go ahead and do things! I was so inspired by the many critical and organizing conversations I’ve had since returning, and by Object // Project, I was inspired to be a part of “Critical ‘Ottawa’ Studies”, which is meant to be an ongoing research and organizing writing & art project thinking about this complicated city at large.

I also wasn’t out as a queer, nonbinary person when I last lived here, almost a decade ago. I was also just starting to critically examine what it meant to live here, occupy space as a racialized person. There is such a big, beautiful queer writing and zine community here, and to a smaller extent, a queer BIPOC writing community. It’s healing to return and find the folks and people I feel like a younger me really needed but didn’t know to ask for.

Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?

There’s a proximity and closeness with the Ottawa community that I feel here-- folks are close to each other. We’re not Toronto or Montreal, sure, but there are people here doing interesting, compelling work. Ottawa excels at putting on tons of community events: the small press fair, Object // Project Bookfair, Ottawa Comic Arts Festival, and on and on. There’s a feeling of intimacy that can feel suffocating, but there’s also a comfort in finding yourself in a smaller city like 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?

I’m obsessed with Ottawa. The city haunts all my writing, often explicitly, but sometimes silently. By trade, I’m an urban planner: it’s a lens that informs everything I write and think about. I’m constantly thinking about the city, the land on which it was built, its histories, movements, and struggle. When I lived in California (both LA and the SF Bay Area), I worked and organized with people committed and building toward better futures in the communities and excavating histories where they were raised-- it made me homesick, and reflect on my own relationship to Ottawa as well. It really undergrids my two intentions for writing: the first, seeking to illuminate, analyze and invite discussion and learning; and the other, excavating parts of my own experiences growing up.

There’s a wonderful interview in Bomb between Ryan Lee Wong and Kyle Lucia Wu that I think about often. Ryan wrote Which Side Are You On?, a thoughtful book that blurs the line between oral history and fiction and features an Asian American protagonist thinking through his relationship with his parents (both Asian American organizers and activists) and his hometown of Los Angeles in the wake of Akai Gurley’s murder by a Chinese American police officer. Ryan pointed to an epitaph by Walter Benjamin in Mike Davis’ City of Quartz: “A native’s book about his city will always be related to memoirs; the writer has not spent his childhood there in vain.”

When I first returned, I wrote endless poems about the locations I was returning to but also encountering for the first time: a Barrhaven Wal-Mart where I first experienced a jolt of gender dysphoria in middle school; downtown nightclubs; federal boardrooms with Ministry staffers; protests outside City Hall; the edge of the urban boundary in Kanata. Ottawa is a strange, weird, and often hostile place: returning has made me reflect on the ways in which it’s changed, but also the hidden histories I wasn’t taught growing up. It’s a big theme in what I write about, but also, as all writing does, takes inspiration from my time growing up.

Q: What are you working on now?

I’ve got a few different projects on the go!

-       A chapbook (or some longer project) on the thinking through Ottawa suburbs and colonization;

-       A comic on immigration court observing in the SF Bay Area for Crucial Comix;

-       A piece on surveillance technologies for Contrapuntal;

-       Continuing to build out Critical “Ottawa” Studies (please check out the Instagram to see the call for submissions!); and

-       A poem coming out in Xenolithic Edges!

Six Questions interview #236 : Sara Graefe

Sara Graefe (she/they) is a playwright, screenwriter and essayist who lives and works on the traditional, ancestral, unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations in Vancouver. She is a three-time winner of the National Arts Centre (NAC) Young Playwrights Search and her early play Sadly As I Tie My Shoes premiered to critical acclaim at the NAC Atelier in Ottawa. Other plays include Scribbles, Dreamspyre (Honourable Mention, Jane Chambers Playwriting Award) and Yellow on Thursdays. Her current work-in-progress, Courage, developed in collaboration with Vancouver dramaturg Joanna Garfinkel and at Banff Playwrights Lab with Montreal dramaturg Emma Tibaldo, is an anti-war play exploring intergenerational impacts of migration and flight.

Sara was a screenwriter-in-residence at the Canadian Film Centre and has worked for many years in the BC film industry, including five seasons in the writing room of Edgemont, CBC-TV’s Gemini and Leo award-winning teen series. She also writes creative nonfiction and is the editor of Swelling with Pride: Queer Conception and Adoption Stories (Dagger Editions/Caitlin Press), selected for the American Library Association’s 2020 Over the Rainbow Nonfiction Longlist. She graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing and Theatre from UBC, where she now teaches in the School of Creative Writing.

Q: How long were you in Ottawa, and what first brought you here? What took you away?

I was born and raised in Ottawa. I grew up in Blackburn Hamlet in the east end. In the 1970s and 80s, Blackburn was still a shiny new suburb, surrounded by NCC greenbelt and crawling with kids. I graduated from Gloucester High School in 1988 and moved to Kingston to study Drama at Queen’s. I came back to Ottawa after each year of university to work at various summer jobs, e.g. at Ottawa Public Library, NCC Infotent on Parliament Hill, Gloucester Summer Theatre Camp, and National Science Library (then known as CISTI). I left Ottawa for good at twenty-three, when I moved to the west coast to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing and Theatre at UBC. Other than a short stint in Toronto as a screenwriting resident at the Canadian Film Centre, I’ve made my home in Vancouver ever since.

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?

Like many writers, I discovered my passion young, making picture books as a kid and writing long, complicated stories for creative writing assignments. When I was at Emily Carr Middle School, late Ottawa author Jan Andrews came to my class as a visiting writer for two consecutive years. What an incredible gift this was. She got a classroom full of awkward, hormonal tweens working on novels. This was my first introduction to long-form writing and I was all in. I finished a book-length fiction manuscript each year Jan was with us. The content is cringe-worthy when I look back now, but most importantly, Jan taught me that I could create a long-form narrative and follow it through from start to finish.

By high school, I’d fallen in love with plays. My friend’s older sister was studying Theatre at University of Ottawa and invited us to watch countless student productions at Academic Hall and in the studio of the now-defunct white Theatre Department house on Waller Street. To my young eye, the student work seemed edgy, provocative and exciting. I was taking Drama myself at Gloucester and performing and working as crew on school shows. Around this same time, the National Arts Centre English Theatre, under Maureen Labonté and later Gil Osborne, started offering a myriad of outreach and development programs for local playwrights in the now long-gone Atelier, an intimate, 100-seat black box theatre on King Edward Avenue. One of these initiatives was an annual Young Playwrights Search, where four winning teen playwrights would spend a week with professional actors, dramaturgs and directors workshopping their scripts at the Atelier, cumulating in a public staged reading.

When I heard about the inaugural contest in 1985, I was inspired to merge my passion for writing with my love for theatre and script my first-ever stage play. With the confidence I’d gained writing long-form prose with Jan Andrews, I wrote a full-length, lighthearted family drama called Hunky Dory and won the contest. The week I spent at the Atelier working with Ottawa theatre professionals was immersive, exhilarating, and life-changing. I now knew without a doubt that this is what I wanted to do when I grew up – not just write, but write plays and collaborate with other artists to make theatre.

I kept writing plays and won the Young Playwrights Search again in 1986 with Gimme Some Truth and in 1988 with Sadly As I Tie My Shoes. The NAC went on to produce the Canadian premiere of Sadly As I Tie My Shoes as part of the 1988-89 English Theatre Off-Centre season at the Atelier. The show was directed by Stephen Malloy, dramaturged by Janet Irwin, and starred Birgitte Solem, Michael-Valiant Saunders, Joan Gardner, Noel Counsil and the late, great Heather Esdon. It received critical acclaim and was voted best new play of the year by Ottawa Citizen theatre critic Barbara Crook.

Through the local playwriting community, I also discovered Tree Theatre and, by extension, Tree Poetry, and had the pleasure of attending numerous readings and events there while still in town.

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?

Emerging as a writer in Ottawa at a time when the two major theatre companies in town, NAC and Great Canadian Theatre Company (GCTC), were actively nurturing local playwrights and new play development, set me on a career path writing for theatre that might not have otherwise happened. For this, I am forever grateful.

When I arrived in Vancouver in the early to mid-90s, there were far fewer opportunities for text-based playwrights. Instead, the doors that initially opened for me as a dramatic writer on the west coast were in film and television. I’ve done a lot of screenwriting and story editing here, and spent five seasons in the writing room of Edgemont, CBC-TV’s Gemini and Leo award-winning teen series, created by fellow Canadian playwright and TV showrunner Ian Weir.

Further, part of my MFA coursework took place in the multi-genre Creative Writing program at UBC, where I now teach today. As graduate students, we were expected to branch out and work in at least two other genres in addition to our speciality. This key learning experience has emboldened me to move more freely between dramatic and literary genres than I might have, had I completed my MFA solely in a Theatre department. For example, I am now also known in the literary community as a published writer and editor of creative nonfiction.

Q: What did you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What did Ottawa provide, or allow?

Something unique and exciting about Ottawa theatre is the rich cross-pollination that occurs between English and French practices. During my time there, I saw some amazing francophone shows produced by NAC’s French Theatre, as well as French Canadian plays in translation at GCTC. My sensibility as an emerging playwright was as much informed by the work of Michel Marc Bouchard, Michel Tremblay, Jovette Marchessault and early Robert Lepage as it was by the likes of Judith Thompson, Sharon Pollock, George F. Walker, Timberlake Wertenbaker and Caryl Churchill.

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?

The plays I created as a teenager were all set in Ottawa. I was writing about the world I knew. My adolescent characters in those early plays get around the city on OC Transpo, hang out on Rideau and Elgin Streets, and cross the river to Hull to buy alcohol underage at the Dépanneur.

My plays tend to be very theatrical. I like to play with time and space on stage, and to incorporate stylized, movement-based elements. I think this is a direct result of the highly evocative, inherently theatrical French Canadian work I experienced in Ottawa as a young playwright.

Q: What are you working on now?

I have two big projects on the go right now, that are in conversation with one another.

I’m writing a play for the first time in a long while. It’s called Courage and is an anti-war play that explores intergenerational impacts of migration and flight. It interweaves three main narratives: my grandmother’s 1948 escape through the snowy East German Harz Mountains with five month-old twins in a baby carriage; playwright Bertolt Brecht’s return to communist East Germany that same year, after a long exile abroad, to stage his famous play Mother Courage in East Berlin; and my present-day return with my queer family to hike the Harz Border Trail, retracing my grandmother’s footsteps and making peace with the past. While this may all sound pretty serious, there are also healthy doses of humour and magic realism sprinkled in. Time and space fold in on themselves, present intersects with past, and magic happens. I’ve been developing this script over the past couple of years in collaboration with Vancouver dramaturg Joanna Garfinkel, and this past May at the 2026 Banff Playwrights Lab with Montreal dramaturg Emma Tibaldo.

I’m also working on a book-length collection of creative nonfiction, a memoir in essays, about growing up as a Canadian Kriegsenkel (a German word coined in the early 2000s, meaning “war grandchild”). The book, like the play, examines intergenerational war trauma and, more specifically, my experiences growing up in Ottawa with immigrant parents (a British mom and a German dad) who’d spent their early childhoods on opposing sides of World War II. The collection explores my struggle to reconcile various facets of my identity, namely my British heritage and Canadian nationality, with their heroic World War II narratives, with the guilt and shame associated with my German heritage and blood ties to the nation that perpetrated the war and the Holocaust. Add to the mix my queerness, deemed “un-German” by the Nazis, making me simultaneously an embodiment of hero, perpetrator, and victim/survivor. While this book aims to provide an unflinching look at the trauma and tragedy of war and its lasting impact on subsequent generations on all sides of a conflict, it also expresses themes of healing, post-traumatic growth, resilience and social responsibility. As with the play, there are various lighter, more playful pieces to offset the more serious parts. For example, there’s an essay about why I love bike riding, and another about my life-long Davie Bowie fandom. A couple of early pieces from the book have been published in Canadian literary magazines: “My Summer Behind the Iron Curtain” appeared in Geist and “My Other Tongue” in Prairie Fire.

 

Six Questions interview #235 : Alice G. Waldert

Alice G. Waldert is an emerging poet and short story writer. Her poetry has most recently appeared in Poetry Pause, Nixes Mate, and The Marbled Sigh. Alice holds an M.A. in Canadian Studies from Carleton University and an MFA in poetry writing from Manhattanville University. Retired from international humanitarian aid work, she spends time participating in story and poetry writing groups, taking classes at the Ottawa School of Art, and volunteering for the Board of Community Legal Services of Ottawa.

Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?

I moved to Ottawa in 1980 to attend Carleton University. In the mid-80s, I attended poetry readings at Quaker House in the Glebe. I left Ottawa in 1992 to work in humanitarian aid for various United Nations (UN) agencies and retired in 2015 in New York, where I enrolled in an MFA program at Manhattanville University in 2019 to focus on nonfiction and poetry writing. When the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, I returned to Ottawa and completed my MFA via Zoom. I graduated in 2021 and have worked since then to further improve my poems and get more of my poems published.

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?

I have been fascinated with writing short stories and poems since I was a teenager, when teachers encouraged me to keep writing. At one point, however, while at Carleton U, an English professor, Michael Thompson, read some of my poems and told me I needed to work on them more if I ever hoped to get any published. I felt frustrated and stopped trying to write. Years later, in 2017, while in a Barnes & Noble bookstore, I picked out a book on the art of poetry writing and discovered that someone had already written on the book flap, “Keep writing,” dated it to my birthday, and signed it with the name Michael. I took it as a sign to keep writing.

Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?

Most of my poetry has been published in the U.S., but living in Ottawa, I regularly submit to Canadian poetry magazines. Arc published one of my poems in 2022, and Canthius magazine published two of my poems in 2024. I have stayed aware of poetry activities in Ottawa. Last year, I joined the League of Canadian Poets and hope to become more involved.

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 approach your work?

None of my projects has responded directly to Ottawa.

Q: What are you working on now?

Currently, I am a member of a poetry manuscript writing group that zooms from New York and is run by my former poetry professor at Manhattanville U, Jennifer Franklin who is a successful New York poet. I have just completed a poetry manuscript and want to have it published in Canada. However, it seems I need to add more poems to my manuscript. In the U.S. publishers expect a poetry manuscript to be 46-54 pages, here in Canada the manuscript is expected to be longer, 60-120 pages.

I am also working on a new collection of poems about people who have passed through my life, sometimes under strange synchronistic circumstances, and left a long-lasting impression.

Six Questions interview #234 : Cora Siré

Cora Siré is the author of two books of poetry, a chapbook, two novels, and a collection of short stories. Her poems, fiction, and essays have appeared in anthologies and magazines in Canada, the US, Mexico, and Europe. Her website can be found at www.quena.ca.

Q: How long were you in Ottawa, and what first brought you here? What took you away?

I was seventeen years old when I arrived to study at the University of Ottawa. It’s no exaggeration to claim that Ottawa lured me into writing poetry. The poets I encountered made a deep and lasting impression.

After my BA, I stayed in Ottawa for a bit, working at a deli and then in government. I was reluctant to leave, but I eventually returned to my home city of Montréal. Ever since, Ottawa continues to lure me back. I have family in the city and of course there’s a vibrant community of poets and writers with so many fine readings and events. I’ve been lucky to participate in a number of them.

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?

I experienced a pivotal moment in Ottawa that was so formative, it found its way into my hybrid memoir/story collection, Fear the Mirror (Véhicule Press, 2021.)

In “The Mark” I write about a student who spends an inordinate amount of time playing backgammon in Pigeon Bleu, the bar that was on Colonel By Drive near Pretoria Bridge. One night she attends her first poetry reading. In a packed, darkened room on campus, she witnesses a visiting poet deliver powerful verses. The experience changes her forever.

It is true that when Dorothy Livesay stood under a single spotlight and read “The Unquiet Bed,” the last stanza ripped through my heart: The woman I am / is not what you see / move over love / make room for me.

After the reading, I went back to residence and wrote a poem. Livesay’s words and courage had ignited my voice. I played less backgammon and started attending readings whenever I learned of them. I paid attention to local poets and the magazines that were publishing them. It took more than a few years, but eventually I was grateful to have my work published in local venues such as Bywords and Arc.

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?

The Dorothy Livesay reading prompted me to take a contemporary Canadian poetry course in my last year at the University of Ottawa. It was insightful, although the canon taught consisted of largely male poets, with little diversity. But one of the assignments was to write a review of a chapbook and I was assigned The Chemistry of Instruments by Jane Jordan. From the opening poem, “Ottawa,” to the last one, “Brass Notes,” the stanzas spoke to me in truths I’d rarely encountered. Like Dorothy Livesay’s words, but even more intense. As in: gestures are the poem / you write / to tell me / the world is fragile (from “Brass Notes.”)

I felt Jane Jordan was addressing me in very precise terms. The poems I was drafting in my notebooks exposed my own fragility as a hyper-sensitive twenty-year-old trying to find her place in the world. I later learned from rob mclennan’s writings that Jane Jordan had been a legend in the Ottawa poetry community.

From the monumental shift I experienced in Ottawa (finding my voice and the courage to express my deepest feelings), I then shifted many times over. In Montréal I discovered poets such as Robyn Sarah and Carmine Starnino who led me into thinking more deeply about the language and architecture of poetry, the exciting possibilities around metaphor and compression.

After meeting my partner, who grew up in Argentina, and spending time there with him, I went on a Latin American reading spree and shifted again, influenced by Borges, Bolaño, and Parra among others. I started writing a novel set in the region that featured Delmira Agustini, the Uruguayan poet who was murdered by her ex when she was twenty-seven. Her work inspired me to compose a sequence of glosas that made their way into my first collection of poetry, Signs of Subversive Innocents (Signature Editions, 2014) and also, my second collection, Not in Vain You’ve Sent Me Light (Guernica Editions, 2021.)

All along, I took a number of workshops with poets such as Mary di Michele, a fine Montréal poet, or Jan Zwicky whose work reflects her deep connection to music. These poets prompted me to reconsider and refine my poetry. I think I’m like most writers in that we’re constantly developing as we read and learn from the works of others.

Q: What did you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What did Ottawa provide, or allow?

Thinking back to my years in Ottawa, I feel there was an interesting collision of influences that fostered creative life. The population includes many students who are largely transient (like I was) so there’s a youthful influence which expresses a certain subversion or resistance to the status quo and accepts the outsider status that so many of us share. That’s important for artists, I think.

Ottawa seemed less alienating than other urban settings and offered me a relatively safe space in which my origins as the daughter of war refugees from Estonia and our family history of displacement were generally accepted, if not always fully understood. Then there’s the international representation through the embassies and government work. I met students from Africa at the University of Ottawa who exposed me to diverse cultures and poetic traditions. In Ottawa, I was also exposed to progressive ideas around social justice that resonated with me.

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?

There’s a great spirit in the Ottawa writing community. I’ve been invited to attend events and readings over the years, and have always been made to feel welcome here. For example, I launched my first collection of poetry alongside Steven Artelle, an Ottawa poet, to a packed audience at Pressed Café thanks to the curators of the Rail Road Reading Series. Later, Frances Boyle invited me to read with her at The Lieutenant’s Pub for the launch of her novella, Tower. As part of the Sawdust Reading Series, I appeared alongside several Ottawa poets, including James K. Moran, rob mclennan, and AJ Dolman, at Bar Robo.

All these poets shared their remarkable, often innovative works in ways that seeped into my own poetics. The generosity of spirit I feel in Ottawa is extremely bolstering for poets, and the momentary emergence from obscurity gives one courage to continue exploring and creating.

I’m also aware that almost every place can have an unforgiving quality. Back when I was living in Ottawa, my mother gave me Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. I think my mother wanted to warn me off falling in love with poets. Instead, the book’s fierce passion moved and inspired me.

Later I was shocked to learn that after 2,000 copies of By Grand Central Station… were first published in London in 1945, Smart’s mother had all six copies on the shelf of an Ottawa bookstore removed and burned just so her Rockcliffe friends wouldn’t be scandalized. Then she made Prime Minister Mackenzie King ban further imports to the book to Canada. This stuck with me, and wound up as a central theme in my recent chapbook, Moonlight Recipe for Disaster (Turret House Press, 2025.)

Q: What are you working on now?

I’ve just completed a novel exploring art, democracy, and how they are connected. Portraits of the Essential will be published in a year and a half or so. In the meantime, I’m polishing some poems that seem to be very political, given the state of the world. These are especially tricky to write, but I’ve always felt that outrage is a powerful creative fuel and hard to supress.

Six Questions interview #233 : Ann Cavlovic

Ann Cavlovic’s debut novel is Count on Me (Guernica Editions, 2025). Her fiction and creative non-fiction have appeared in CBC First Person, Event, the Fiddlehead, the Globe and Mail, Grain, Little Bird Stories, PRISM international, Room, SubTerrain, the Anthology This Place a Stranger (Caitlin Press), and elsewhere. Her work has been recognized in contests, including winning the 2017 Little Bird Writing Contest judged by Esi Edugyan. She wrote Emissions: A Climate Comedy, which won “Best in Fest” at the 2013 Ottawa Fringe Festival. Find her at: anncavlovic.com.

Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?

I arrived in 2000 on what I thought would be a short stint with the feds. I stayed in Ottawa until 2015, when I moved just a bit north to the Quebec side near Gatineau Park.

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?

I first got into writing while I was in grad school for economics (therein lies a tale). Months later, I moved to Ottawa for a very square day job.

I owe this city a debt of gratitude, as it gave me the vast majority of my early training as a writer. I started with various courses run out of community centres or the back of bookstores like Collected Works and Mother Tongue (sniff sniff). I came to a few Tree Reading Series too. One of those courses led to the formation of a short story critique circle, led by Mary Borsky and including Frances Boyle and Deborah-Anne Tunney, which lasted for years.

Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?

Literary community is crucial. Without that short story critique circle, I don’t think I would have been able to develop as a writer. 

I tend to think of writing as a conversation, not only between the author and the reader/audience, but with other authors of the past, present, and future. I’m always puzzled when I meet aspiring writers who don’t read much – they remind me of people who’d rather talk than listen, and those are not my favourite conversationalists.

Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?

I miss the Ottawa scene. As much as I’m still just a short hop across the river, several things in recent years have distanced me from it, such as being a parent, health issues, and working on a novel instead of shorter pieces. I am involved with the Quebec Writers’ Federation, which offers fantastic workshops and opportunities, but most are based in Montreal. I deeply miss the cross-pollination that comes from hanging out with other generous artsy types, whether within literary or other forms such as dance and theatre. (The recent launch at Café Avant Garde was a reminder of the joys of artistic community!) But fortunately, I have more space in my life again for outings. So, dear Ottawans, invite me to your parties, pretty please!

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 straddle between fiction and personal essays, so some of the latter is implicitly “set” in Ottawa during the period I lived there. I’m probably inclined to set fiction elsewhere to help keep the two separate. So that’s no reflection on the city itself.

Nonetheless, the Crazy Kitchen at the Science Museum makes an important cameo in Count on Me. The novel is set in Kingston, because that lined up with my protagonist’s day job: I made her an auditor of environmental charities targeted by the government because they opposed oil and gas pipelines (drawing upon the actual history of this). She hates that job, poor dear.

I had considered setting the novel in my newly adopted Belle Provence but, as it turned out, the Quebec legal system is better at preventing financial elder abuse.

Q: What are you working on now?

I’m working on a play that’s a comedy about mortality. I know that makes it sound like I have a morbid fascination with aging and death. But facing these things head-on, I contend, makes you more fun at parties, not less. So, my plea for party invites above stands. I promise not to ugly cry in your kitchen.  

I’m co-writing the play with my “breastie” Crysta Balis, who until very recently lived in Old Ottawa East. She is brilliant. I never intend to write plays but have accidentally written two, and I’m excited to see where this one goes. 

 

Six Questions interview #232 : Ian Li

 

Ian Li (he/him) is a Chinese-Canadian economist, developer, writer, and poet, who started writing in late 2023 after a lifetime of believing he could never be creative. He also enjoys spreadsheets, statistical curiosities, and brain teasers. Find his work published in Nightmare Magazine, Small Wonders, and Strange Horizons, among other venues. Learn more at https://ian-li.com or find him on Bluesky @ianli.bsky.social.

Q: How long were you in Ottawa, and what first brought you here? What took you away?

I lived in Ottawa for about five years in elementary school. My dad’s career originally brought me to Ottawa, and it also took me away to California. We eventually moved back to Canada, but settled down in Toronto.

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?

I’ve always been an avid reader, especially of sci-fi and fantasy, but never thought I was capable of writing until I gave it a try two years ago.

My writing community has mainly been in Toronto and online, but I’ve also been lucky enough to have my poetry featured in the lovely Ottawa-based publications Bywords and The Sprawl Mag.

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?

Since I haven’t been too involved in the Ottawa writing community specifically, I just generally wanted to express that the writing communities I’ve interacted with in Toronto, online, and elsewhere have all been incredibly welcoming and supportive. As a new writer, everything felt quite new and daunting, but folks have been kind, inspirational, and generous with their time and knowledge. I feel particularly lucky to be part of the Canadian writing community because we support and uplift each other, and we’re also fortunate to have government-funded programs that keep many of our beloved publications and programs going.

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?

I didn’t become a writer until decades after I left Ottawa. But I will say that I had fond memories of my childhood in Ottawa, some of which inspired and continues to inspire my poetry, including my poem that was published in Bywords and received an honourable mention in the John Newlove Award. There’s something about a child’s perspective that makes all manners of experiences feel larger than life, and sometimes I like to capture that kind of childlike wonder in my writing, so I often draw from my elementary school days in Ottawa in those instances.

Q: What are you working on now?

A couple of short stories and a lot of poems, including a short story and a poem forthcoming in Canadian publications, Augur Magazine and On Spec, respectively. And I’ve outlined a novella that I hope to get to soon. I’m early enough in my writing journey that I’m still trying a lot of things to discover my voice and what I’m good at, which is very exciting!

Six Questions interview #231 : Laura Hebert

Laura Hebert began writing poetry to get the inside out and process the world around her. Her writing, poetic and otherwise, has appeared in Bywords, flo., Women's Anthology: Carrying Fire (TL;DR Press), and CBC First Person. She received an honourable mention for the 2025 John Newlove Poetry Award and has been twice short-listed for the People's Choice Award in CV2's Two-Day Poem Contest. Originally from Manitoba, she now lives on a small farm near Ottawa with her partner, their dog, two cats, and a spoiled flock of chickens

Q: How long have you been in the Ottawa area, and what first brought you here?
Perhaps a cliché reason: I moved to Ottawa for a job with the federal public service in 2017. In 2021, I moved outside the city to a little farm near Vankleek Hill with my partner Noel. I still spend a fair bit of time in Ottawa for work and for fun – like poetry events!

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?
I've inconsistently written or wanted to write my whole life – unfinished short stories, scraps of fantastical world-building, and all sorts of attempts at poetry. After I moved to Ottawa, I submitted a few poems to Bywords, and eventually one got accepted. At the same time, through a friend I contributed to an anthology of poetry. These little successes encouraged me to keep writing and to keep putting my poetry out there, a little bit at a time.

I also volunteered at VerseFest and attended the Writers’ Festival. Events like these exposed me to the writing community here in Ottawa.

Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?
I am, at heart, a self-conscious observer and a tentative introvert. Writing has been a personal undertaking for the most part. Writing as a community activity for me started with an occasional writing group made up of me and three of my close friends, encouraging each other, responding to prompts, and just trying things out. 

Here in Ottawa, writing as community happened through festivals and attending readings, and reading myself a few times. The first time I read my work aloud to people was through a flo. launch. That, I think, signalled a shift for me, to thinking about writing not just as the act of creating and expressing, but taking the further step into sharing (in person!) and being truly vulnerable. That is in part what my poetry is for: I am sharing bits of myself and hoping it resonates with someone in some way. I’ve also joined a creative writing group in my town to continue building community into my writing practice.

I’m somewhat on the periphery, popping in here and there, but even so, the community here is very open and welcoming. For me, Ottawa is the community in which I am becoming a writer, a poet, and I’m very grateful for that.

Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?
Like my hometown Winnipeg, Ottawa is a small big city. That’s part of why I feel at home here. And I think what that means for writers and other creators is that it feels warm and accessible. It isn’t as daunting or perhaps disconnected as I imagine it might be in our country’s bigger cities. But at the same time, Ottawa is big enough that there is variety, and there is always more to discover and contribute to.

Q: Have any of your projects responded directly to your engagements here? How have the city and its community, its environment, if at all, changed the way you approached your work?
Yes, in the sense that my environment inspires and feeds into my writing. When I lived in the city, I walked everywhere I could, and during those times I was also thinking and observing, feeling and avoiding my emotions. So, the canal and trees and squirrels and cracks in the sidewalk certainly made it into some of my poems. This is often how I start a poem: what am I seeing and immersed in, what is around me – particularly nature – and how does that relate to the story and the emotions I want to communicate.

Q: What are you working on now?
Quite honestly, just finding the time and energy and persistence to write. But I always have a few ideas vaguely formed and percolating. Right now, poems around existential guilt and hope and, always, birds.

Six Questions interview #230 : Bohdana Sereda

Bohdana Sereda is a writer residing in Ottawa. Born and raised in Ukraine, she started her creative journey in middle school. Bohdana aims to share stories inspired by her life experiences and topics of personal growth. Currently, she is working on two poetry collections, one of which is dedicated to Ukraine. 

Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?

I have lived in Ottawa since October 2020, when I moved to Canada for my master’s degree. The decision to permanently cross the ocean was taken in September 2019 after three months spent in Ottawa on a research internship. Before the internship, I had barely heard about Ottawa, but now I can call it my Canadian home!

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?

My earliest memory of writing is a snapshot of a four-line poem I dedicated to my first year of school. I have enjoyed reading and writing for as long as I can remember, even though one of my third-grade teachers told me that I’m better at math than writing. Luckily, it didn’t stop me from exploring poetry, short fiction, and fanfiction in my teenage years – as it turns out, I was much better able to deal with emotions by writing them down and finding intricate words to describe them, rather than through solving equations!

Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?

Throughout my time in Ottawa, I had several updates in my thinking regarding what writing can achieve. But it is also worth noting that I haven’t been writing consistently for almost six years before restarting my writing journey in 2023, here, in Ottawa. And this new beginning is partially thanks to the all-welcoming and diverse local community. My interest in sharing my work with literary journals was sparked by a flo. lit mag, a copy of which I saw at the Art House Café.

Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?

Due to Ottawa’s governmental influence, many authors are deeply involved in their communities and draw inspiration for their writing and art from social issues. I don’t know if there are any statistics to support or contradict my observation, and I haven’t lived in any other Canadian city. Still, I find it incredible when people care about their social and political lives and actively express those concerns through art! 

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’ve recently started a bi-annual zine about everything, STEPPE, and many ideas for topics come to me when I walk through the streets of Ottawa. This also helps me include Ottawa in the zine. I would love for Ottawa to become even more artsy, and I would love for myself to be a drop in the ocean of its art scene! 

Q: What are you working on now?

Too many things at once, to be honest! Most of my current draft writing focuses on Ukraine as I aim to share Ukrainian culture and experiences with my readers. Then, there is STEPPE. Then, there are little projects, like starting a Ukrainian book club. I’ve also just finished a series of writing workshops with Westboro Books. I think I need more hours in the day…

Six Questions interview #229 : Carter Vance

Carter Vance is a writer and poet originally from Cobourg, Ontario, currently resident in Gatineau, Quebec. His work has appeared in such publications as The Smart Set, Contemporary Verse 2 and A Midwestern Review, amongst others.  His debut novel, Smaller Animals, will be released in November 2025.

Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?

I first moved to Ottawa in 2010, to attend school at the University of Ottawa. Since then, I’ve moved back and forth out of Ottawa and the area several times for education and employment. I most recently moved back to the area at the beginning of 2021 and moved to where I currently live (in the Aylmer area of Gatineau) in 2022.

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?

I was originally from Cobourg, Ontario, a small but growing city on the shores of Lake Ontario, about an hour outside of Toronto. I was an avid reader from an early age, and first started showcasing my writing at readings at my high school and at local coffee shops, with the encouragement of a teacher. My earliest recognition came in the form of an award from a writing contest at the Cobourg Public Library.

When I first moved to Ottawa, I actually was not actively involved in writing for several years, as I was more focused on my studies and on other adventures such as debating and campus politics.  But I’ve actually gotten more involved since moving back the area, especially through some friends of mine who are also writers.

Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?

The initial manuscript for this novel given more shape by comments from a number of local readers, including my good friend  Chuqiao Yang  (who recently had a poetry book of her own published, which is nominated for an Ottawa Book Award!). One of the largest challenges in writing the novel  that getting that feedback and input on helped with was getting the balance of character development and plot action right. The novel is on the shorter side and I struggled with making sure it was long enough to convey what I wanted to convey but short enough to be quick read and not overlong with subplots. There were some sections that I removed in the name of not being extraneous or adding incident for its own sake. The process of being in a community has helped me refine more as a writer, but also as a reader, in terms of knowing myself, my tastes and blindspots more, and being more comfortable writing from a direct place.

This is somewhat different than previous short stories that I have published tended more towards a dryer, understated style that I have written in since my initial high school exposure to Raymond Carver. Smaller Animals is my attempt to be more directly emotional vein and be more generous to my characters. Whether I succeeded in that is largely up to the reader to determine, but I don’t know I would have written in this way without community support.

Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?

Politics is often written about in terms of the top players, the Prime Ministers and Presidents, even though so much of the actual work takes place at the level of largely invisible and often-maligned staffers. This novel is an attempt to shed light on and humanize them, particularly those early in their careers who are the least likely to be known in and of themselves. It’s those sorts of experiences I could only have had in Ottawa that make the novel what it is. The ability to connect the literary with the political, as well as the unique blend of cultures, languages and experiences make Ottawa a special place I’ve continued coming back to.

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?

Smaller Animals is my first full-length novel, following a series of short story publications and poetry chapbooks. I have previously worked as a policy analyst and legislative assistant on Parliament Hill, within provincial and federal governments, as well as on a number of projects internationally. The novel is primarily informed by my experiences on the Hill, as well as being active in the political life of Ottawa as a city.

The first draft of the novel was written in 2019, during a time I was working on a development project overseas. The separation from my previous life in Ottawa gave me the chance to reflect on what the city and its people had meant to me and develop the themes and characters in the novel. I felt that I wanted to capture and preserve some of what had happened to me and my peers in a form that could speak to others.

Q: What are you working on now?

In turning my mind to future projects, I have an idea for a historical novel set around the construction and fall of the Berlin Wall that I’ve been considering writing for a long time. Perhaps having this initial novel published will be the spur that finally causes me to put pen to paper on it, but I feel like I should do more research on the topic first.  I’m also continuing to write poetry and the occasional piece of creative non-fiction.