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!

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.

 

National Poetry Month : Maleea Acker,

 

Carpaccio

 

I’m under the blue tarp. My feet hidden
in polyester onesie pajamas, Max’s wolf suit
but without the trap door. Climbing out
for goodnight under a low stage and a flywheel
of stars. It wasn’t you who dissected the fish
with the still beating heart, not you, who couldn’t
club anything without a Yiddish epithet or a sigh.
I didn’t say a thing at your funeral. Family
plus two. So I climb back in, dragging
a Coleman, tequila, crackers, a 5 gallon of water.
My neighbour yelling at her cats like that
will do a thing. Step into memory: the Polish graveyard
where maybe we’re from, crack a summer globe
of tomatoes like a note wrote to myself each decade
before the possibility there might be less
than one left. You feel to me like a lake towel
left in an overgrown lot. An unnameable key.
I eat the uncolour of the Hebrew letters. Watch
the minutes tick like rain’s café chatter, wash water,
your label maker labeled Tupperware: Lines.
Scrapers. Fishin’. The tide changes again.
If I had the god damn organ still
I’d eat it or flick it into the massacre forest
let it listen for the ticks of two clocks run
by anxious scorekeepers, their bicker. Corner kick
for Saka. I could have made a chowder, carpaccio,
or buried it here and visited. Brought beer.

 

 

 

Maleea Acker is the author of three books of poems: The Reflecting Pool and Air-Proof Green (Pedlar Press, 2009, 2012); Hesitating Once to Feel Glory (Nightwood 2022) which was a finalist for the Victoria Book Prize, and; Gardens Aflame: Garry Oak Meadows of BC’s South Coast (New Star, 2021). She is faculty in the English Department at Thompson Rivers University and an instructor at the University of Victoria. Maleea is currently Program Lead for the post-doctoral ECCC-funded project Engage with Nature-based Solutions (engagewithnbs.ca), which is producing science storytelling, educational curriculum and funding climate artists nationally to create a climate and NBS toolkit.