Six Questions interview #48 : David Groulx

David Groulx was born in Northern Ontario. Now calls Vanier home. His poetry has appeared in over 200 publications. His latest book, From Turtle Island to Gaza was nominated for the Archibald Lampman award in 2019.

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

On and off I've been living in or around Ottawa far longer than either I or the city expected me to. I initially moved here for work. Northern Ontario has been being emptied of people for the last thirty years because of it, or the lack of it. When I moved here, the Gilmour was still going. My first time in Ottawa was the first time I saw someone getting mugged.

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

I didn't really 'get involved' I was so struggling to find what I wanted to say, the way I wanted to say it. that mostly I stayed away from other writers. Although I do recall attending a reading at Tree of which you I think were just taking the reins, I think Pearl Pirie was there too, memory becomes a Trickster.

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

I think some writers have a media induced image of ourselves as either living in communities of bohemian bliss or wretchedly alone in the mountains caves of Greece neither of these scenarios are vaguely true. Writers know talking to other writers is pretty boring.

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

What is happening for me, here in Ottawa is that some old ideas I've had about self-publishing have been reignited. The freedom of letting go of expectation. Publishing or what I call the business side of poetry is becoming less and less appealing to me. I find it less distracting and the art probably has a better chance of breathing.

Q: Have any of your projects responded directly to your engagements here? How have the city and its community, if at all, changed the way you approached your work?

I've done some work here in the city such as grant and award juries and the like. Mostly my work is in some form of modest isolation when it comes to  an actual community. I don't come out of my cave too often, especially these days.

Q: What are you working on now?

These days I'm editing a poetry manuscript, but mostly I'm working on a shorter piece called, Under the Black Sun, it's about disturbing issue of male suicide, its prevalence and more disturbing fact that we as a society mostly ignore. It is a challenge to write about. I have also found a character that disappeared 25 years ago, she's back and wants to do a monologue from a sidewalk in Montreal, so there's that.

 

Six Questions interview #47 : Tim Mook Sang

Tim Mook Sang has studied and worked across Canada. He currently lives in Ottawa, where he works in education. His writings have been published in a variety of magazines and journals, mostly in Canada. When not working, he enjoys spending time with his family and doing crafts.

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

I was born in Ottawa in 1984. I moved to Prince George and Montreal for a couple of spells, but I always found my way back here. I have really settled in this time and do not see myself leaving anytime soon.

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

I always wanted to get into writing – to be a writer – but never knew what that meant. It was in my fourth year of undergrad at UNBC that I took a couple of writing courses with Rob Budde, and from then on I started to take it more seriously and made efforts to become involved in a writing community and to seek publication. When I moved back to Ottawa, I sought out groups and publications here and tried to reach out whenever I could.

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

It is important to not write in a bubble. You need people to share and workshop your writings with or else you might as well just keep a diary, so being in a community seems like a necessity. I remember when I was writing on my own – with nobody looking at what I was producing before it was submitted – I would not realize a poem was terrible until the feeling of regret or embarrassment I would have immediately after dropping the submission into the mailbox. Knowing I could not reach in and get the envelope back, I would just have to wait several months until the person on the other end opened it, cringed and sent back the rejection letter.

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

Ottawa has both a vibrant and accessible writing community. When I lived in Montreal, I had a group of people who I worked with, but they were mostly musicians or other types of artists and, while we were working together, they were not necessarily involved in the production of my writing. Being able to be part of publications like ottawater and Bywords and their associated events is not something that I had going on before moving back to Ottawa. The scene here encouraged me to find more partners to be active in my writing process. Even completing these interview questions makes me realize I have not written much outside of work-related emails and policy documents.

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?

One project that responded directly to my engagements here was the opportunity I had from bird, buried press to publish a chapbook, A Functional History, in 2017. I know they are not based in Ottawa, but I think that if I was not here I would not have connected with them, and I also attending some events they held in Ottawa afterwards.

Q: What are you working on now?

I regret to say that I am working on nothing. In May 2020 my wife and I were blessed with our second child, but that means we had two under two, and combined with taking on being the principal of a high school during a pandemic, I have not been able to find the time and energy. Things come in waves, though, and the tide is turning. Lately, I have started jotting down notes and sketching out new poems.

Six Questions interview #46 : Jennifer Baker

Jennifer Baker lives and works in Ottawa. Her first chapbook, Abject Lessons, was published in 2014 by above/ground press and her creative writing and reviews have appeared in various literary publications including Dusie, Ottawater, The Bull Calf, and The Journal of Canadian Poetry and Canadian Literature. Her article, ““Resituating Kroetsch: Accident and the Provisional Georgic in Robert Kroetsch’s ‘The Ledger,’” was recently published in Kroetsch:Novelist-Essayist-Poet (2020). 

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

I’ve lived in Ottawa for exactly a decade, now, which feels hard to believe! I came here to do my PhD at the University of Ottawa and stayed because it wasn’t Exeter.

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

It feels like I’ve always been writing. I started with long, rambling stories about Dusty and Dirty, my childhood cat and her stray best friend, who held seances in our garage to call up William “Tiger” Dunlop’s ghost dog to have adventures. (Dunlop was one of the founding settler-colonizers of Goderich, Ontario with the Canada Company, and an ambiguously shaded recurring character). Like any angsty kid who went through a goth phase, I graduated from writing rhyming poems that pleased adults into writing lyric poems about my many feelings. I wrote both prose and poetry well into my 20s, but my writing was mostly influenced by fiction writers like Alice Munro. I was searching for ways to express the latent observations I had about rural southwestern Ontario once I’d left it for the big city of London (Ontario). Poetry felt too lofty—it was the craft of people who grew up near art galleries and went to fancy wine-tasting parties and went home to houses built with studies. It wasn’t until the latter half of my undergraduate degree that I started thinking seriously about poetics as a tradition I wanted to be involved in.

It’s a little embarrassing to admit now that we know each other, but I read Phil Hall for the first time in the fourth year of my Undergraduate degree at Western, and it was the first time I had heard a voice from rural Ontario in poetics that I connected with. I included Why I Haven’t Written in my Master’s thesis at Concordia, but at that time I was far too shy to join Concordia’s writing community to further develop my own craft (for better or worse). I happened to come to the University of Ottawa, where he happened to be writer-in-residence, and I wrote some poems for the first time in years, and remembered for the first time the feeling of taking my foot off the break and letting myself say something. Phil’s kindness brought me to the Ottawa writing community, though I think my involvement is best described as brief and periodic. I have always had a hard time deciding where I want to belong, or maybe I just have a hard time belonging. I’ve been thinking of all the ways in which I feel community is both a vital and necessary thing and of all the ways in which for me it has always felt like a fraught set of impossible restrictions, responsibilities, embarrassments, and personal failures rather than a supportive refuge. I haven’t worked all of that out for myself yet, but I do feel lots of affection for many people involved in the Ottawa literary scene.

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

Ottawa’s writing community is the first community in which I felt welcomed and the one that demystified the world of small press publishing which, until rob published Abject Lessons and I met more people, had seemed a secret society to me. I learned a lot from my short time with Arc as their Reviews Editor, and all the people who tirelessly work to keep small presses, magazines, and events afloat here. My academic ideas of tradition and influence have shifted more intimately to affinities and affections.

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

Ottawa feels smaller, but relative to its size, it feels less dominated by academic departments than writing communities in, I guess, what you might call the coterie cities like Toronto and Montreal. I think that’s a good thing. You can also know “the community” here and still discover lots of other places where poetics and lively literary and literary-adjacent events happen. Despite my decade here, I feel like before the pandemic I was only starting to discover the depth and breadth of creative and collaborative activity in this city.

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 haven’t written anything that’s engaged directly with the writing community here, but the city itself has started creeping into my poems. Most recently, Jeff Blackman published a short poem in his pandemic ‘zine These Days about my and David Currie’s lofty observations of the guy who lives full-time on on Cummings Island, a tiny island in the Rideau river across from our balcony.

Q: What are you working on now?

I’m reading toward some side-projects that have partially materialized: I have been lucky enough to have been trusted with some important family artefacts, like my great-great grandmother’s diaries from the 1920s and 30s, and the Ontario School readers passed through the community to my grandfather when he attended a one-room elementary school, with marginalia written and doodled by bored relatives as schoolchildren. So I’ve been working on some found poems that centre those histories and pieces, but I have a feeling once I put them beside some of my other poems, they will all pull me toward the same place. It takes me a long time to digest anything. I’m someone you might describe has “having bit off more than she could chew.”

Very slowly, though, I think I’m turning to a manuscript project. I’ve noticed a thread developing in the poems I’ve written about the mechanics of abuse (of ourselves, others, nonhuman life), responsibility, and compassionate accountability. I’m slowly following that thread from the abuse I endured as a teenager through to exploring the dynamics of abuse in settler-Canadian histories and stories and ontologies, and the mysteries of my family’s settler history and the responsibilities that come from that history. I don’t know. I feel like I’m on the cusp of being able to express it all, but I also wrote a 400ish page dissertation roughly around this topic and feel like I haven’t figured it out how to express it. What can you do but keep trying?

Six Questions interview #45 : Nicola Vulpe

Nicola Vulpe was born in Montreal. He completed a doctorate in philosophy at the Sorbonne, and taught English literature in Spain before returning to Canada.  He has published three collections of poetry: When the Mongols Return, Blue Tile, and Insult to the Brain, with a fourth, Through the Waspmouth, scheduled for 2021, as well as a novella, The Extraordinary Event of Pia H., who turned to admire a chicken on the Plaza Mayor, and essays and articles on subjects as diverse as the twelfth tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the afterlife of Norman Bethune.

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

A: I’ve been in Ottawa since September 1996, a lifetime. I first came to Ottawa in 1979, two lifetimes ago. After a particularly grueling project I’d quit my job as a computer programmer in Toronto and gone off, destination undetermined.

After about a year and a half my employer asked me if I’d come back to work on a project in Montreal. I’d wearied of undetermined and liked the idea of going back to Montreal, so I got on a plane, and found myself on a project, not in Montreal, but Ottawa. I was never very good with the fine print. I left Ottawa again, for about a decade, first to complete my studies in France, and again to work in Spain, but Ottawa is now as home as anywhere could be.

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

A: Other than adolescent angst, I’d say late adolescent angst, in my twenties and, quite suitably for the theme, I was very isolated. Stuck at a computer terminal programming until dawn, I had fantasies of hanging about in some café—somewhere—and the attendant brilliant literary conversations. I did once walk into what seemed a likely place in Toronto, and promptly did an about face.

I suppose the closest I’d been to such an experience was in a bar in Amsterdam—of course—where a rumpled gentlemen came over to chat, commented nicely on a friend’s paintings, then danced out of the place shouting “I need a miracle every day!” The barman came by afterwards to inform us that we’d been chatting with one of the Netherlands’ greatest poets. I have no idea who he was—perhaps Remco Cambert, whose work I now very much admire? He would have been about the right age.

About a year after that brush with a literary great, I was with my computer in the second sub-basement of the University of Ottawa’s Morrisset Library—you didn’t know there was such a sub-basement, did you?—when Seymour Mayne called to let me know that he would admit me to his creative writing course.

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

A: Seymour’s course provided me for the first time with a context. Seymour himself and his students offered truly constructive criticism to help me write the poems I was trying to write. I succeeded on occasion, and I have a few rather decent poems from that period; when I failed, the failures were also very much mine, as it should be.

When I returned to Ottawa in 1996 I called on Seymour and Mark Frutkin, asking them if they would like to meet a few times a year to exchange poems and conversation, and to please extend the invitation as appropriate. The group—in fact groups—have been fluid, but some of us continue to meet, irregularly.

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

A: Before the plague, I had been making an effort to get out to readings, such as the Tree Series, to hear others read, though rarely to jump in for an open mic. I don’t think I’ve changed that much since I walked out of that café in Toronto 40 years ago.

Context is everything, I think. Well, context and trust. For my part, I’ve been fortunate to find in Ottawa a very small number of very talented poets with whom I can share poems, whose judgement I trust, and who trust mine. We will discuss a poem or a stanza or a line or a line break or a comma for half an evening—any poet will tell you that “of course you do”, then leave it to the authors to decide for themselves what happens next to the poems.

Though I have moved about a fair bit I’m not sure I can say much about what Ottawa has to offer that elswheres don’t offer. The City of Ottawa has been quite generous and has helped finance several of my projects over the years; I’ve tried to give back, reading cases of books for book awards and the like, but other than that, I couldn’t say what is particular to the poetry community in Ottawa. I don’t think that it is especially influenced by any sort of government town mentality. It is very Canadian, though, in that it is awfully, sometimes awkwardly, polite.

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 once witnessed a very experienced and widely published writer tear down a less experienced—though in my opinion, brilliant—poet, telling her that he didn’t consider what she was sharing worthy of poetry, only to share something similar a few minutes later.

In my experience, in this town, this country, that is the exception, though. I find that open mics—those I’ve gotten to anyway—tend to be just a little too nice, too complacent. Everybody gets applause, not a just a bit, but a lot. Just like every performance at the NAC gets a standing ovation.

It’s a tough, miserable, soul-gnawing business, poetry. And, yes, we should encourage all poets, especially novice poets. But maybe we should also encourage each other to take a step back and try to see our own work with a cold, critical eye. Not a sneer, no, but honest, constructive criticism.

Though I only attended a few times, I regret the closing of the Umi Café on Somerset Street. There were some excellent drop-in poetry workshops. Everyone welcome and welcomed, and a focus on the poem rather than the poet as we honed our “craft or sullen art”.

It’s a difficult balance, but an essentail one, not just in poetry but in life, I think. We need both empathy and honesty,and maybe just a little education. It will make us better poets and, most importantly, better humans.

Q: What are you working on now? 

I can’t say. I don’t.

Six Questions interview #44 : Terry Ann Carter

Poet and paper artist, Terry Ann Carter is the author of six collections of long form poetry, two haiku guidebooks, and five haiku chapbooks; she has edited four haiku anthologies. As past president of Haiku Canada, founder of and facilitator for KaDo Ottawa (2001-2012) and Haiku Arbutus Victoria Study Group (2014-present), she has given hundreds of haiku and book arts workshops around the world. A Crazy Man Thinks He's Ernest in Paris (Black Moss Press, 2010) was shortlisted for the Archibald Lampman Award, day moon rising (Black Moss Press, 2012) was shortlisted for the Acorn- Plantos People's Poetry Award) and Tokaido (Red Moon Press, 2017) won a Touchstone Distinguished Book Award. In 2019, she was a judge for the first International Haiku Contest for the city of Morioka, Japan. Haiku in Canada: History, Poetry, Memoir (Ekstasis Editions) and Moonflowers: Pioneering Women Haiku Poets in Canada (catkin press) were both published in 2020.

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

I lived in Ottawa for 43 years, arriving in 1969 from the States, and leaving in 2012 for Victoria, BC. My family left the States at the time of the war in Vietnam. I had three brothers, and my father did not believe in the war. There were also economic reasons. I left for my husband's health. The west coast provided a better climate for him to be out of doors year round. Looking back, I think Victoria added five years to his life; he died in 2017.

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

As a high school English teacher I was always around poetry. I knew at some point I wanted to write myself, but I was always too intimidated to try (until I took a writing course with Hayden Carruth at the Humber School of Writing in the late eighties. This was a turning point. I joined a writing group in Ottawa that included Blaine Marchand, Ronnie Brown, Sue McMaster, and Colin Morton. They were supportive and encouraging. Later, a group of poets met (after hours) at the (now closed) Mother Tongue Book Store on Bank Street. That group included Peter Richardson, Claudia Radmore, Paul Tyler, Frances Boyle and others. Through some editing work with Susan McMaster, I met Marty Gervais at Black Moss Press. In time I published two books of poetry with that press (and later an erotic haiku anthology); I was/am grateful for the connections I made in Ottawa.

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?

Feedback from other poets has always been valuable; the "shift" in thinking came with validation. I continue to seek out poetry critiquing groups. I also belong to a study group where the work of particular poets is given closer examination.

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

In Ottawa I enjoyed facilitating a group (KaDo Ottawa) that was primarily interested in Japanese literary forms of writing poetry and prose. Through this group, I was connected to VerseFest, the large poetry festival in the city. I enjoyed these ties; it brought me closer to other writing communities in the city.

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?

Ottawa provided a tremendous start to my writing. There were many groups, individuals, reading venues, and magazines. I became involved by attending readings and launches and small press events. It was/is a varied city of  poetry personalities. Ottawa changed the way I felt about my own poetry. I learned so much there; I grew as a poet.

Q: What are you working on now?

At present I am working on my seventh collection of poetry, based on a chapbook that I put together two years ago for a book arts show at the Gage Gallery, here in Victoria. My interest in "paper arts" blossomed here on the west coast, and in autumn of 2018 I was invited to have a "show" at an art gallery. I prepared a small chapbook to accompany that exhibition titled "First I Fold the Mountain" . I have been adding poems to it since that time and I hope to submit it to a publisher in early 2021. For more about my life as a poet and a paper artist, i invite you to www.terryanncarter.com.