Six Questions interview #43 : Pearl Pirie

Pearl Pirie’s 4th poetry collection is footlights (October 2020, Radiant Press). She has run phafours press for over a decade and put out nearly 4 dozen titles with it. Her author site is at www.pearlpirie.com.  You may find her on twitter @pesbo and help her reach 2000 followers and find out about wildflowers, mushrooms and leftist randomalia.

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

I came to Ottawa for university in August, 1991. I have lived. volunteered and/or worked in Ottawa since.

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

I was writing before I arrived but at a disconnect from the contemporary scene. Within the first months of arriving I encountered the Bywords schedule and tentatively wall-flowered at Sasquatch and Tree, picked up Poem broadsides, and later saw rob mclennan writing in a bookstore window. After a workshop that grew out of Christopher Levenson poetry course fell into splinters, I hung with the Omnigothic Neo-Futurists for a bit. When I joined rob mclennan’s workshop about 20 years ago I started talking with more poets and attending more events are his gentle coaxing.

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

Being steeped in the 1800s, I was introduced to poetry of this century, or rather, the 1900s. I realized people could write playfully and in language without meaning, and of their own lives without a poet voice authority. It was my first glimpse of the Avant Garde, which I liked much more than lyrical.

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

There’s sound poetry here. That’s a boon.

When I arrived it was a boom time of book publishers most of which has since busted. Small presses are still at a higher than usual density, probably owing to all the universities feeding new poets into the community. The agency of owning the means of production gives energy and power to people compared to small rural and urban areas where people petition to gatekeepers. Models of people you know electing to be gatekeepers gives a sense of personal power.

Some cities I’ve toured seem cold and cynical. Ottawa seems friendlier but maybe that’s because I have friends here. Ottawa is at the cross-roads of Montreal and Toronto with the benefits of a larger city for art-presence of a capital. It seems a gentle stopping place without the harsh feuds and divides between sub-communities of literature that mark some cities where you can feel the tension and cliques in a reading room. Was it like this here before VERSeFest?

Do you suppose all our green areas and rivers and the canal mellow the spirits? Slower bus service gives more interstitial time? We are close to politics but perhaps no less than Toronto protests that would raise consciousness of poets. Pub-keepers on bus routes who encouraged events make a huge difference. Cheap accessible venues allow people to cross-pollinate. Poetry is easily shouldered out by venues who charge. Back when the International Writers Fest had a whack of poetry people could congregate easily in informal writers suites. I don’t know how much that happens in other cities.

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? 

Working with Michèle Provost a couple times as a group we responded ekphrastically to her art out of which came chapbooks and a short story. The projects challenged with timeline for content and performance of work. I’ve done a gratitude project in poetry of people, mostly local poets.

The community formed me so yes, it changes me. I’ve been in 5 workshop groups here. All the writing community I’ve been exposed to and interacted with and the friends I’ve made—I’m a composite of everyone.

Q: What are you working on now?

I’m working on an urban fantasy novel. Defying Gravity is set in Jayde’s supernatural Montreal. Jayde Friessen’s Vancouver mother is fae, her father a Werewolf, but Jayde was born mundane. She is a queer stone mason in her best, quiet life, planning Al and Dom’s wedding, until someone starts shooting her and her friend Penny with skewers which disappear. And her girlfriend disappears. Then Penny does. When community comes together against street harassment in overdrive the protagonist learns she has powers she didn’t know she had.

Six Questions interview #42 : Chris Jennings

Chris Jennings (he/him) is the author of Occupations (Nightwood 2012) and the chapbook Vacancies (believeyourown press). At one time or another over the last 30 years, he has been a board member, editor, or regular contributor to a number of Canadian journals and magazines including ARC, Books in Canada, the University of Toronto Quarterly, filling Station and the Malahat Review.

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

A: I moved to Ottawa in 2003. I’d only been here once, for a few days for a conference, before I came out to look for a place to live having decided to move here for work. I lived in Toronto at the time.  On that first visit, the taxi ride downtown from the airport was almost bizarre with the long stretch of tree-lined parkway and almost no sign of a city for what felt like forever. I hadn’t realized how much I missed green space and easy egress from the crush of urban life. The move came shortly thereafter.

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

A: I started writing poetry in university as part of trying to understand it. It was a pivotal moment in my undergraduate career. A year of labour jobs in factories and on construction sites cured my motivational malaise, and I had dedicated myself to trying to get an honours degree in English. Poetry was killing me; I didn’t have a vocabulary to talk about it. I was lucky to have the right professor at the time. She gave me the vocabulary and the dictionary to go with it, but it was only when I started trying to try it on in my own (generally lousy) poems that I started to get the feel for it – that sense of maintaining both precision and possibility so you can pass both to someone else.

After I started writing, I was almost immediately involved with running a writing workshop for the undergraduate society.  That led to being involved with the founding of filling Station magazine for the first few years before (and slightly after) I moved to Toronto.  That kind of involvement in voluntary work in the community was really how I connected with writers here (well…my version of connecting…) – that, and writer friends who preceded me here. I knew about Plan 99 and Tree from writer friends in Toronto who had toured through behind books. I read and sometimes sent pieces that would show up in my first book to ARC back in the days of John Barton as editor. A string of coincidences led to joining the board of ARC. Rod Pederson invited me to read at Tree…twice. I had no idea what that would presage back then.

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

A: I watch, mostly.  I’ve spent a fair bit of time in three different cities with different writing communities, and in some cases with competing or just distinct communities that don’t intermingle.  I have a running record of how writing communities work in my head, and marginalia on how that in turn seems to play out for good or for ill in the writing of community members. Back in Calgary (where this started), so many friends were immersed in writing from theory with all of the dismissiveness you can muster in your early 20s when you’ve proven more or less nothing as a writer. Very few of them still write. Maybe as a result of how I reacted then, I don’t think my way of interacting with communities shifts my writing directly, but it makes me think about writing. I watch patterns and interactions, currents and connections, and unpack them in my head to see what I can learn. When it’s something useful, I steal it.

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

A: I’m inclined not to answer that first question.

This is probably the least “plugged in” that I’ve been for about 30 years. I used to have a much greater sense of literary communities in Canada and what might have distinguished here from there. Now, for a variety of reasons – one called work and another life – I’ve lost touch with most everything outside of the events where I am Jennifer’s dashing +1. Any comparisons would be gossip at best.

If the task is to compare here and now to what I’ve seen before, similarities reign over differences. The question of how to diversify audiences and bring together communities with fundamentally different aesthetics is a universal constant, a poetry community Esperanto. It pairs with the struggle to maintain continuity without becoming stale or stratified, and the concurrent challenge of turning the leadership over to new people without each hand-over involving the kind of reinvention that becomes a hard break between new and old administrations. (Those breaks can be valedictory for someone’s vision but they’re hell on the audiences you, in theory, serve.) And going back to that story of people who decried writers who didn’t begin with theory: how to deal, as a community, with the politics of aesthetics.

The current climate is a force multiplier for elements that every writing community deals with in its own way. Aside from the possibility of real changes to advance equity and justice – who ever thought a Universal Basic Income would be on the agenda? – right now, writing and publishing are staring down their own Napster threat – or, rather, Apple Music threat – to their economic model with the launch of e-book subscriptions. How writing gets shared, how ideas get shared, is mingling with questions as old as Plato about truth in fiction, or maybe just as old as McLuhan.  All writing is following journalism down this hole, just a decade or so later. The open circulation of ideas and creativity within a community couldn’t be more important in a moment like this.

So one of the things Ottawa has that I find characteristic if not unique is a well-established appreciation for alternatives to trade publishing and traditional forms of distribution. Self-published artefacts, chapbooks, micropresses, ‘zines and other forms of language production that once had the whiff of subculture are mainstream in the writing community here. I think that serves the city’s culture well, but it needs to be paired with the social dimension that causes those things to circulate, and even before COVID-19, the event calendar was in decline. (Perhaps I’m just sufficiently anti-social to have missed things…).  Nothing has replaced Sawdust, and other series seemed similarly quiet even before the pandemic. The exception is the festivals, which are wonderful in their way but privilege access to the shiny (expensive) outsider over the gathering of community. The other thing I don’t see as much as I used to see – perhaps because of the pressure from whatever is outside a particular community – is productive debate within tight communities. I can’t help but wonder if our writing communities are as prone to confirmation bias, echo chambers and preaching to the choir as politically-aligned news outlets (though with much smaller consequences for democracy).

The second question rescues me here…I’m going to interpret it to mean geography and not community. I love about Ottawa what I loved in Calgary and in Toronto.  In Calgary, oil money meant a disproportionately vibrant arts infrastructure for a city of that size. In Toronto, the economic centres of cultural production concentrated a large and diverse population of writers and supported national scale cultural institutions. Ottawa has the benefits of being the National Capital and all of the cultural institutions that go with that, combined with an elevated proportion of the population with university degrees, two universities, and official bilingualism. There’s cultural infrastructure in this city that we shouldn’t ever take for granted. The city is also an imperfect remedy for my nostalgias for my past cities. Growing up in Calgary, I could be surrounded by suits or deer in 10 minutes from my door depending on which direction I rode my bike. Here, I can be in Gatineau or anywhere on NCC lands in the greenbelt and have a similar feeling of getting away, or I can be in the Market or on Elgin on a weekend. That urban/sylvan, social/solo set of options is vital to me as a writer.

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?

A: I love “psychogeography.” People who use the term professionally would probably dispute my use of it, but meh. I don’t care. Several of the poems in Occupations are psychogeographically Ottawa poems. I could take you to the places they are if it’s the right time of day. This isn’t a change in approach so much as a change in geography’s influence on my writing psyche. I could, more or less, drive you down 14^th street in Calgary and, going about 80km/h, tell you precisely where I almost hit a sparrow and started composing one of the earliest poems I chose to publish. I could take you to the building in Toronto I used to walk by on my way to and from St. Clair West station with its once-vacant first floor apartment. About 10 years ago, I performed at a charity event where (I think) one of the Stampeders (or the 5 Man Electrical Band?) was a judge. His comment on a line about an outdoor rink / where highschool kids hide out and drink was “I think I know that park in Vanier.”

Q: What are you working on now?

A: A book manuscript. I was calling it Misanthropy, or Animal Cruelty but I had more to say on misanthropy than I originally thought, so it may very well be two books.  I also started playing guitar about 10 years ago, and it took almost exactly a decade for me to write something new that is actually written on guitar and not just a poet trying to navigate with limited musical skills and find music to complement poems written without any thought of instrumentation.

 

Six Questions interview #41 : IAN MARTIN

IAN MARTIN is a suspicious, barely visible figure in the middle distance. IAN's writing has appeared recently in Cypress, The Wild Literary Magazine, SURFACES.cx, release any words stuck inside you II, small poems 🍓, and the DUSIE blog. IAN has published five chapbooks, most recently I DON'T TRUST SKINNY PEOPLE (Ghost City Press, 2020). When not writing, IAN makes small video games and complains online.

[ www.ian-martin.net ]

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

I’ve lived in Ottawa since I was about 1 or 2. My family moved here from Pittsburgh for work. I have considered moving away once or twice, but specifically resisted.

I've been encouraged by multiple writers to move to bigger cities, cities more known for queer poetry, millennial poets, tech-influenced writing. While I get the impetus, I don't see that fixing my sense of alienation, nor has being here stopped me from pursuing opportunities with writers in those cities.

I think it's tempting to believe that I can go somewhere and suddenly belong, suddenly get opportunities, suddenly reach the exact right people. I've met some really great writers on Twitter or through friends, and my writing has gotten to readers far afield when I publish online. To uproot my life every few months because I "don't belong" is unsustainable.

Also: going somewhere because it's "queer" or the writers are "doing what I'm doing" is a shallow idea. I've read queer millennial writers from all over; some I like, some I hate. Labels are overly simplistic and don't guarantee anything. Anyone can write about computers and dicks. Those are just props.

This sort of stopped being about Ottawa, but I like living here, I like the people and the spaces, the vibe, the size. I don't think my writing "belongs" anywhere in particular, and if I'm here, then there must be others. And if there aren't, well, more room for me. 😈

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

I took an elective poetry workshop at Carleton with Sandra Ridley, who encouraged me to make my first magazine submission to Bywords. I also began attending the In/Words writing circles and reading series (also based at Carleton). I made friends there who introduced me to more writers from other pockets of the city. Since then I've just been hanging out, showing up to things.

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

Ottawa to me is an eclectic scene -- at most reading series I hear a variety of different styles and voices. The open mics have a very supportive atmosphere no matter what kind of poem you bring, and the people and groups are warm to newcomers. These good vibes supported me as I grew as a writer, and gave me an appreciation for a lot of different kinds of poetry. When I get stuck in my own writing, or am unsure where to go next, looking out at the Ottawa community gives me different places to start and new things to try (traditional, modern, visual poetry, sound poetry…)

I like Ottawa’s variety and “small town” vibe. I’ve only a little experience with scenes in other cities but I find them to be a little more spread out and separated. I like to get my paws everywhere and I feel like it’d be a lot more effort to get everything a bigger city has to offer. Though I’m always game to visit for a while.

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

Again, I’m not well-acquainted with other cities, but I think Ottawa is a good place to get started in writing, or to do some exploring. It’s a supportive and open environment with an interesting mix of people and projects. There’s a good amount of reading series without being overwhelming, and there are some lovely local presses and mags to read and submit to. Festivals like the Writer's Fest and Versefest pull some interesting and international writers. There maybe isn't as much going on as in bigger cities, but there's a lot of good quality stuff, and opportunities to hear poems and read poems and meet poets.

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?

Back when I attended the In/Words writer’s circle, I was new to the scene and got a lot of feedback that helped me pinpoint what I was trying to say, and how I wanted other people to react to my poems. It was good to be somewhere where I wasn’t always hearing what I wanted to hear, but wasn’t getting shot down for doing something different.

I don’t get out and collaborate as much as I’d like, but I do the occasional workshop or publication with my friends and peers still. Nothing particularly Ottawa-centric, but I have really met some fabulous poets here and I’m glad to be here.

 Q: What are you working on now?

Oh, who knows. I’ve got a potentially killer manuscript for something about misanthropy and video games, though I keep starting over from scratch. I want to do something digital and visual with it, but it’s also tempting to court a publisher and get a book under my belt. I’m also stretched a bit thin with the business of living right now, but I try to find time for writing where I can.

Oh! And, I’m also about to put out a little zine with some friends & foes. It’s a silly thing about line breaks in poetry. The release date is whatever day I finish it and tweet about it. Watch this space.