Six Questions interview #243 : Jenna Timmons-Oikawa

Jenna Timmons-Oikawa lives on the traditional, unceded territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation in Ottawa, Ontario. She is the winner of the 2026 CBC Nonfiction Prize. Her work also appears or is forthcoming in The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, PRISM International, yolk, and was selected 1^st runner up in The Temz Review’s inaugural “London” Literary Prizes. She is so grateful to anyone who reads and engages with her work!

Jenna lives with her loving husband Grant, and their mischievous dog, Morty, and strives for a calm and gentle life.

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

As a former child of the Canadian military, my family was posted here for the second time when I was about to start grade eight. I stayed in Ottawa until I finished high school then moved away to study creative writing in Montreal. After completing my BA, I continued moving for some time before I returned to Ottawa while finishing my diploma in child and youth counselling. I had reached a point in my life where it was important for me to be near my family, and that is what originally brought me back to the city.

I have been here about eleven years now and have my own small family with my amazing husband Grant, and our little dog Morty.  

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

I have been writing my whole life. I entered my first short story contest when I was in grade two, writing a Halloween story about three little ghosts. I beat out some of the grade fours and after that, I was hooked!

I was so fortunate to, many years ago, attend Canterbury High School in their literary arts program, and I credit Mr. Fitz (Michael FitzPatrick), a beloved teacher for many, for giving me the gift of the foundations of my writing practice. Upon graduating high school, I went on to complete a BA in creative writing at Concordia University and was able to study under the incomparable Stephanie Bolster.

After finishing university, I didn’t really know what to do. I didn’t know how to be a writer, not in the professional sense, and felt lost. I floated around for a while, not really writing, and decided I needed a new direction in my life. I went back to school to get a diploma in child and youth counselling. At that point I had almost stopped writing entirely. Then I did stop. For around a decade I barely wrote anything, and dedicated myself to working with youth in the mental health field.

After a life changing injury, a lot of therapy, and support of my husband, I returned to writing last year and it has opened life back up to me.

I’m very fortunate that my husband is an artist. He is the partner at PLOTNONPLOT Architecture, and he inspires me with the beauty that he creates. He was my first and only reader of many of my pieces before I began to attend a small writing group, which we loving call our “writers support group”. They are some of the kindest people you could ever meet.

I don’t feel that I am part of the Ottawa writing community yet, though I would like to be. Due to my struggles with PTSD, there are a lot of locations that I am limited in going to, and often events in Ottawa take place in these areas. I would love to see Ottawa have more virtual/hybrid events, as that would be more accessible for someone like me and I’m sure, others with disabilities as well.  

I am hoping that I will be able to be more involved in the community in the future as Ottawa has such a vibrant writing scene!

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

My writing group has opened me up to reading genres I don’t usually read; speculative fiction in particular.

I don’t think that my thinking about writing has shifted, but being in the group has given me a bimonthly deadline, and this has helped keep me motivated to keep writing, even on those days/weeks where I feel like I can’t put a single word on the page. 

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

            I’m not too sure to be honest!

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 feel that having been a child of the Canadian military, that I can morph into and shed cities very easily, and that my work is more affected by memories, intimate relationships, and experiences that have occurred over multiple places. I feel my work speaks more broadly, rather than being rooted in specific city. 

            That being said, Ottawa has changed the way I approach my work because I began to write creative nonfiction to make sense of my injury that occurred here, and the

subsequent health care I received. Creative nonfiction was a genre I had never written in, and I used the form as a means of processing. The first piece of creative nonfiction I ever attempted has just been published in issue 308 of The Fiddlehead, Disability: The Revolution and is entitled “Ketamine Therapy”.

I often think of the Anne Carson’s quote that “art is not therapy”, and though I understand the sentiment, I would have to be on the side that disagrees. Writing has been a catharsis, and beautiful therapy for me. I’m just so honoured that people are reading and responding to my stories.  

Q: What are you working on now?

I’m working on my first hybrid collection of poetry, focusing on themes of identity, and reclamation, based off my creative nonfiction piece “Wawa Indian” which just recently won the 2026 CBC Nonfiction Prize! It is what I plan to be working on while in residency in Banff! 

Six Questions interview #242 : Barâa Arar

Barâa Arar is a writer and editor, based in Toronto. Her creative and critical writing has appeared in The Markaz Review, This Magazine, Canthius, Room, Rowayat, Ex-Puritan, and Muslim American Writers at Home. She was selected as a mentee by Zilla Jones for the Writer’s Union BIPOC Writers Connect 2025 and is currently working on her debut novel thanks to grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Toronto Arts Council. You can find her at baraaarar.com

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

I arrived in Ottawa in 1998 from Montréal, at 10 months old, with my parents. If my mother is to be believed, I was a big baby. We settled in Bayshore, a community in Ottawa’s west-end, where many other Muslim immigrants lived.

Other than one year in Kamloops, British Columbia, I lived in Ottawa until I moved to Toronto in August 2019. At first, graduate school brought me to Toronto, and though I must admit the city was not my first choice, I’ve grown to love its chaos and characters. Here, life happens all at once.

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

I started writing in high school and was introduced to spoken word poetry shortly after. I felt a deep sense of fulfillment when I first recited my poetry to an audience and I saw people nodding. I loved that sense of connection and mutual recognition and kept reaching for it. 

I started competing at the Urban Legends Poetry Collective, hosted at Carleton University, and in 2014, I made the national team. We competed at the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word in Victoria, British Columbia. In university, I started experimenting with personal essays and creative non-fiction to make sense of my experiences as a Muslim woman and a daughter of immigrants.

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?

Everything.

I loved reading but before my exposure to spoken word poetry in Ottawa, I never thought of writing as a craft or an art, and certainly not as one that I can engage with seriously. The spoken word community empowered me. I felt that what I had to say was worth saying.

I owe much of my confidence to Ottawa poets and friends JustJamaal ThePoet, Apollo the Child, and King Kimbit, just to name a few. Their generosity, kindness, and mentorship taught me about building a literary community and dedicating yourself to art.

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

I used to think that Ottawa’s (relative) smallness was entirely a bad thing. I struggled with the lack of anonymity in the city.

What I didn’t appreciate until I moved away was how Ottawa fostered my artistic practice. I benefited from access to established writers, word-of-mouth promotion, and community support. I struggled, at first, to find that when I moved to Toronto, especially during the pandemic lockdowns.

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?

My short story, “The Beach at 27,” is set at Westboro Beach. The characters were my way to think through what Ottawa meant to me as my hometown, how the ‘smallness’ can be suffocating and how it can be supportive. The story is not autobiographical but it came to me once I had more insight into that personal question.

On a craft level, even as a fiction writer, I still write like a poet. I want the sentence to be beautiful. Plot is a second thought for me.

Q: What are you working on now?

My latest short story came out last week. It’s about a Muslim man who returns to his hometown and must negotiate his relationship with faith, community, and a woman from his past. You can read it here: “The Dentist’s Son.”

I am currently revising my debut novel. By winter, I hope it will be with early readers. Next, I hope to start a new project, a short story cycle set in Ottawa, exploring the effects of 9/11 on the personal lives of Muslim women and girls.

Six Questions interview #241 : Rebecca Hirsch Garcia

Rebecca Hirsch Garcia lives in Ottawa, Ontario. 

An O. Henry award winning author, her work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, PRISM international, swamp pink, The Dark and elsewhere.

Her debut collection, The Girl Who Cried Diamonds & Other Stories (ECW, 2023) was nominated for an Ottawa Book Award and was the runner up for the Danuta Gleed Literary award.

Her debut novel, Other Evolutions (ECW, 2025), was nominated for an Ottawa Book Award and won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Fiction.

She can be found on instagram and blusky @rhirschgarcia

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

On my mom’s side I’m a second generation Ottawan. So I’ve always been here. And I’m pretty sedentary so I’m not going anywhere either.

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

I’m one of those annoying writers who knew they were destined to write since childhood. Since before I was literate actually: I used to beg the kindergarten aides to write down the stories I told them (they very kindly obliged).

True to writerly form I tend to be a solitary creature but after my first book The Girl Who Cried Diamonds was nominated for an Ottawa Book Award writers in the community reached out to support me. It was very, very kind.

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

I don’t know if they shifted my feelings about the actual business of writing but I did think that the positive example of Ottawa writers made me aware of what I owe to my community.

I’ve tried harder to show up in the way people have showed up for me. I’m still fairly solitary but I go to more book events, I read more books by Ottawa authors, I congratulate other writers when they are nominated or win awards, and I’ve been on more juries.

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

I think that we’re so consumed by being the country’s capital that it doesn’t leave a ton of room for Ottawa to define itself in any other way. However being underestimated like that is quite delicious. I can be out here doing really weird work with absolutely zero pressure. It’s very freeing.

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 am always writing about Ottawa. It’s my home after all. And I find that it’s very neutrality and the fact that it has a reputation for being boring lends it the perfect backdrop to some of the eeriness I embrace in my work. My characters in some ways live very cushy lives so when that comfort is threatened the change feels more violent.

Q: What are you working on now?

I don’t like to talk about work in progress but let’s say I’m working on a novel. In between I’m working on short stories which I love and will never stop writing. The last one I wrote is a rat story that is so bizarre I fear it might be unpublishable. I made the mistake of telling people about it and now it’s all people ask me about. Where is the rat story? Why haven’t you published it yet? You got another rejection for the rat story? I thought you loved rats (I don’t) etc. I regret mentioning the rat story at all.

Six Questions interview #240 : Nadia Bozak

Nadia Bozak lives in Ottawa and teaches at Carleton University. Her latest novel, Fret, has recently been published by ECW.

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

I moved here for a job opportunity, around 11-12 years ago.

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

I started writing in a more professional sense in Toronto, where I lived for many years before moving to Ottawa. I met writers in Ottawa through my publisher at the time, as they kindly introduced me to Ottawa writers who published with their publishing house. I was also introduced to Ottawa-based writers through my job at Carleton, thanks to writers teaching in the English department. I am also lucky to be able to invite writers to speak to students in our department, so this is how I met many wonderful Ottawa writers, including a certain rob mclennan. I continue to find connection with writing communities in Ottawa via my students at Carleton. They are always up to interesting things, so I’m grateful to have a sense of what younger writers are doing to and learn from them.

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

When I moved here and knew only a few people, and not many of them writers, I immediately realized that I had taken everything for granted that I had before, friends, connection, sense of home.  I realized how important artistic communities are, to have a sense that you are not alone in your pursuits, to exchange ideas with other writers, and share resources. Writers spend a lot of time alone, but a balance between practice and connection is essential.

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

Ottawa writers are great at supporting each other and celebrating each other’s writing and achievements. We’re sandwiched between Toronto and Montreal, so that’s hard sometimes, but Ottawa is a unique place that produces writing with a distinct perspective. That’s something to continue explore and to celebrate.

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 new novel, Fret, fictionalizes Ottawa in a very loose sense. It is about a musician who loses touch with her musical community and, therefore, with her art form and her sense of self. This musician does, however, reestablish a bit of a community, thus finding her footing again. But there is at the heart of the novel a sense of isolation and examination of how not everyone wants to be part of a community or feels they deserve to be part of one. This experience is part of what is explored in Fret.

Q: What are you working on now?

It’s a novel, but I don’t want to give much away as I may change my mind about it. I will say that there are elements of speculative fiction involved, and that’s a fun departure for me.

 

Six Questions interview #239 : Sybil Lamb

Sybil Lamb is the author of I’ve Got A Time Bomb, The Girl Who Was Convinced Beyond All Reason That She Could Fly, and The Lost Little Girl Show. She has been profiled in VICE, The New York Times, and The New Orleans Gambit. Having made her home in Ottawa, Montreal, New Orleans, San Francisco, Toronto, the backwoods of Tennessee, and a cross-country ice cream van, she now lives in Windsor, Ontario.

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

21 tears!!! And then I had to leave cuz the cops in this town are crazy and will arrest you over every tiny stupid little thing. You know what my problem is? I'm too honest, too trusting! Naw, just kidding, I was hung up on a girl and chased her to Montreal. I knew we were long through by then but I was using the power of the 21 year old heart, the kind of passion that will make you chase someone across the country from New Orleans to New York to Skull Mountain Ohio just cuz you felt an intoxicating connection and you want it all the time  and your just chaos, you haven't had the time to have your heart properly broken yet you autosadiatic fool! Also I bought a house and retired at age 45  in SANDWICHTOWN SOUTH ONTARIO. I live between a battery factory and some whirlpool rapids ! I was about to say YOU CAN'T GET THAT IN OTTAWA but then i remembered there's plenty rapids in the river. Did you ever profile that guy who makes art on LUMPY DOOMEE ISLAND? That's  my 2030 dystopia plan, GET BOATS, its Pirate time!  The Ottawa canal rule; if Ottawa would quit wasting time and money on all  those transitway terminals and replace them with canals instead I'd move back in a heartbeat.

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

FULL DISCLOSURE: I never intended to be a writer. I WANTED TO DO COMIX!  except creating comics takes easily 100 times as long as writing. Tehn during the brief apex of society in the late 90s Livejournal got really popular and I'd blog my art shuffled up with crazy punk rock adventures and I'd sometimes write little stories to go with the pictures. Then in 2014 I was touring 36 cities around north amerika with Casey Plett for TopSidePress and in every town I kept correcting people anytime they called me a writer, "No I'm just an illustrator who wrote a 350 page fsn-fic of myself and Casey and Tom Leger took me aside and had a talk with me, breaking it to me that I had and ISBN now and was on a book tour so it was ok to call myself a writer at that point.      I think there is an interview with me on YOUTUBE somewhere where I admit that THE GIRL WHO WAS CONVINCED BEYOND ALL REASON THAT SHE COULD FLY {ArsenalPulp Press} had some unsettling pacing and a narrative made of vignets cuz I was actually just making up a store about all these flying girl drawings i was doing. That book is actually my most lucrative endeavor ever: Writing YA books gets you that Canadian library PublicLendingRight $$$. Remember CAFE WIM? that place trained me to be a brooding goth in the back corner of the cafe swilling coffee and futzing in a sketchbook. Too bad its a wine bar now? My mom used to go to happenings with beatniks there in the 1960s

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?

back in the 80s my 8th grade english teacher shut down my creative writing about a kind of decayed retro future world and he would watch tv without moving for days and crap himself,  I'd gone 4 times the length of the assignment in to this crazy world building elaborate back stories for every minor thing grand odyssey, like this thing was really a 13 year olds retelling of THE 5th ELEMENT but on even more psychedelic and Ms J___ shut down my reading at the crap part. I flew into a rage at the greatest betrayal so far in my life and destroyed the whole thing and stormed off scream cry in a fire exit. I am just now realising she was just tryna teach me to distro my own stuff, and make backup copies, and accept criticism so THANKS FOR MAKING ME A WRITER MS J! Windsor has a great BOOK community, I think half my friends are writers and the other half are enjoyable D-gens.

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

ZAPHOD BEEBLEBROX  nevermind Berlin or New Orleans , Ottawa Goths are the real fraky deeky!! And ARTGUISE / underworld lounge / HOUSE OF TARG we are forever bound and marked by one another <3  Ottawa 35 years ago was, like, half its size and  it had that whole punk and a raver and a skater and goth and prep and a nerd and a jock all just hanging out in the market together cuz there was only 4-5 or every subculture so we just all wound up uniting in to this dynamic scene. Ottawas always been big enuff to be very self contained and also a couple hundred km away from the "real world"  so it was like a tim hortons sub-cultural think tank/

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 did an ONTARIO ARTS GRANT series of paintings, TRANSONTARIO  I did 4x6 foot oil paintings of of all my spicey lady friends across ontario but 500 feet tall and destroying their home towns and Kim demolished the upper rideau center bus stop. (ATTACH ART). One of the biggest foundational influences on all my work is THE OTTAWA ONTARIO SCIENCE CENTER Do you remember the SOUP COMPUTER?  it was a room size animatronic puppet show about how a computer works. Crooked kitchen? THE TRAINS; I spent a zillion hours sitting at the (inoperable) controls of the two retired Northwest territories super long haul locomotives pretending I was driving a train! I went there for the first time in decades a couple years ago and I caught nasty cooties from all the little children they have running all over the place touching all the science with their filthy children fingies.

Q: What are you working on now?

CRIME CUBE // MOLLY & PYXXY DO CRIMES ! It's about what if BONNIE & CLYDE WAS TWO TRANS GIRLS IN THE YEAR 2027? AND GET THIS it takes the trope of  WHAT IF A DARK STORMY GOTH AND A QUIRKY PERKY RAVER WERE PARTNERS IN CRIME and turns that up to 11. Its about being told you're a bad person and deciding to lean into it.   It's about WANTING TO BE A Monster because if you're the monster you have nothing to be afraid of.  It's about what if you did every stupid idea that popped into your head and got away with it. Its about a dozen 'friends'  exploring butch femme top bottom master slave gender dynamic, loyalty betrayal ,lust and love, and Its peppered with all kinds of dirty fighting and improvised explosives and cop hacks misremembered from the Anarchist Cookbook and the CIA MAnual For Trickery and Deception. I'm also very inspired by the MAGAS campaign to define trans as terrorists and I'm like Oh yeah? Go say that in a mirror three times cuz I am gonna demonically invoke that and hurl it down upon all of you, ok? Just Kidding, this isn't a call to arms, its a guidebook on how to survive an impoverished violin rogue police and how two people with totally different PTSD can Love so hard its Anitauthoritarian! I've been writing this book for 5+ years,  Technically I took 2024 to go get MECHATRONIX Certified at UWIN (industrial electro mechanics competence) and then instead of getting a job in factory automation I used the machine logic, karnaugh mapping and  linear matrix algebra I learned to apply that to things like WHAT ARE THE MECHANICAL OPERATIONS AND SUCCESSFUL FEEDBACK OF BEING 26 years old and head over heels in love, whats stages and actions will that relationship perform to arrive at a define condition? A big inspo for me was taking the very GEN-X FUCK THE WORLD ME AND YOU AGAINST EVERYONE kind of problematicly self centered mid 1990s Natural born Killers, True Romance, Wild at Heart Fantasy and FORCE it to take place in 2027 when everything has a camera on it and a super computer is watching it and the MAN is exponentially worse but the  Ruling Class are crumbling appart.  I don't have time to do this interview right now: Cat Fitpatric from Little Puss has me re writing the LAST 66 pages of it over and over so it grips and hits harder. I'm sure your readers know all about LITTLEPUSS who published the meoirs od a 1967 outback australian Tgirl hooker and That girl who enlisted her evil doppelganger to walk to hell with her to HELL and Argentinian Cecilia's memoir about the time she had sex w jesus but then found out everyone had. What WE are trying to do (I could talk about the super genius collaborative editing process and multilayer character motivativational matric we just drafted.  The Most important thing I think WE're trying to do is I aM STONING FOR ALL THE MEAN BULLIES ON GOODREADS calling I've Got A Time Bomb emotionally devastating and GIRL FLY sweetly sad. I don't wanna alienate people who like that stuff (most of my fans) but In my head I think I'm like a fun dieselpunk Scifi geek? After a decade of the trope of the SAD INTROSPECTIVE TRANS GIRL  NOVEL that I am partially responsybil for , and In line with the LittlePuss Mission of Pussin' excellence in literature, this is a book where {SPOILERS} the two girls messy neurodivergent felony crime filled love is what saves them in the end! even your enemies are your friends, no matter how  they are torn apart they come back together, their love survives every trial by ice and fire, every dumb messed up thing you did will one day be redeemed and over and over again COMMITTING TO LOVE saves your life and takes you higher, and the sex is great every time and we are more in love every day and all our friends shall rule over this entire planet and as for us, WHAT IF WE STOLE XMAS TOGETHER ?

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!