Justin Million is a print and digital media poet, performance artist, founder of the
Show and Tell Poetry Series, and co-founder and poetry editor at
bird, buried press. Million was named the inaugural City of Peterborough Downtown Artist-in-Residence in 2020, and has been an artist-in-residence at Evans Contemporary, and the Precarious Festival. Million has been published in countless literary journals such as
Bywords,
In/Words Magazine and Press,
Poetry Is Dead, and
word and colour, and has published 18 chapbooks with various Canadian small press imprints. His first trade book
EJECTA: The Uncollected KEYBOARDS! Poems was published by Ottawa’s Apt. 9 Press earlier this year. Million lives and writes in his hometown of Peterborough, Ontario.
Q: How long were you in Ottawa, and what first brought you here? What took you away? I was in Ottawa for about a decade, from 2002 to 2012. I came to Ottawa for school, at Carleton University. My undergrad took way too long because I couldn't figure out what I wanted to do with myself, back when I thought there was an answer for that question. I was taken away by a disastrous move to Vancouver, where my life fell apart, which brought me back to Ottawa where I couldn't find any work, which brought me back home, here, the place where I grew up, where I am typing this now, in Peterborough, Ontario.
Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here? The first poem I ever wrote was a not-so-subtle reworking of the lyrics to Bette Midler's 'Wind Beneath My Wings'. I wrote it for the person I was pursuing in Grade 6. It didn't work. I had flowers and everything, even wrapped the poem in a little ribbon, you know, for flare. She was into my friend... you know what, I can't remember which friend she was into. It doesn't really matter. I'm glad she was into somebody else, or else I may have never written a second poem.
I got involved in the writing community in Ottawa through my involvement with In/Words Magazine and Press, which was then just called In/Words, and was the only real literary product coming out of Carleton at that time. If you are reading this as someone who is familiar with the Ottawa poetry scene, you have likely heard of In/Words, and have more than likely since heard of some of the talented young folks that cut their writing teeth at In/Words as editors and contributors, during the 2000's: Cameron Anstee, Ben Ladouceur, Leah Mol, Jeff Blackman, etc. The group I ended up joining to form the In/Words editorial team in 2003, or 2004 (I think? Cameron remembers all this stuff better than I do...), took the magazine from (I think) 200 copies quarterly to 2000, got an office, a computer, a printer, (almost) proper funding, and 15-20 chapbooks per year by local authors. We were pushing each other and getting better by leaps and bounds as a group, in part because of the healthy competition we participated in, but also because we controlled production, so we could print whatever we wanted whenever we wanted. And we did. We were young and pissed off (or at least I was), so we kind of descended upon the rest of the Ottawa writing community more than we got "involved". It's amazing how much ground one can cover, in terms of making purposeful strides to become a working writer, when one has the keys to the printing room at a university. I was publishing maybe four or five or six poetry books a year, getting appropriately good or bad feedback constantly from friends and readers, and trying to learn from those 'mistakes', which really just meant I was never satisfied, few of us were, so the work got better, for all of us. I still like what most people I met from that time are writing, because it's good, not because of loyalty to a time. It was an almost ideal training, ideal but for the horrible debt I was incurring to learn whether or not I had strong feelings toward semicolons or not (I did, but don't so much anymore... unless I'm writing ghazals).
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? I learned so much about poetry in Ottawa, as it was my main purpose for being during my time there. I put in a lot of work, and I think that was the lesson that shifted my thinking. If Toronto is the kind of city where you have to network to get your poetry trade book published, which I think it is, then Ottawa is the kind of city where you have to work your ass off to get a chapbook published. There aren't many publishers in the capital putting spines on their books, or at least there wasn't when I was there; Ottawa was a chapbook and reading series city. A tight-knit community too, as the publishing scene was connected through folks attending the same readings; it wasn't out of the ordinary to pick up a chapbook by someone I knew and to know almost all the poems inside, having heard them worked through in the regular open-mikes or as featured readers with longer sets. Again, it may be different now, but Ottawa worked really hard in poetry, establishing a working group of reading series that would form the beginnings of what is now VERSe Ottawa, who oversee Ottawa's annual international poetry festival (I was hosting the In/Words Reading Series at The Clocktower Pub on Bank Street at the time), and working with the city to establish a bilingual Poet Laureate program, and the city's poets did these things within the last 10 years. There are a lot of poets in particular in Ottawa who have been there and been active for their entire lives, or at least for the most part, and I think that helps when a city's artistic groups are lobbying for support or to push a good literary initiative through. In Peterborough we are on the cusp of announcing our Poet Laureate pilot program, and that has only been a possibility due to the contributions of spoken word, slam, and page poets alike, as well as the support of the arts scene at-large, and that scene is happy to support its local writers because we're a hardworking city, a little down and out, and being adversely affected by our proximity to Toronto, and the local scene knows that the more arts positions we erect with City money the more traction we will have with negotiations over funding with the City in the future. So, I guess Ottawa also opened me up to the realities of bureaucracy in the arts, which is help I didn't really need at the time, being young and ridiculous, but that I need now in municipal, Ontario Arts Council, and Canada Council grant funding applications, for instance, or operational funding requests for the reading series I run here. Yeah, maybe not the most inspiring or romantic "shift" in thinking to detail in an interview, but if you, reader, are still quite young, and insist on writing poems when the student loans run out, then I suggest you work on your work first but work on your ability to procure funding second. It is near impossible to be a "working poet", and those who are don't just write, they publish, edit, teach, consult, and perform just to make it work. I think it's important for young poets to know that. Of course, what I am getting at in my answer here all hinges on how much time and space one actually wants to dedicate to one's poetry. I find that many poets devote what secondary time they can to their work, which is fine, of course, I have a day job too, I'm not judging, it just makes me wonder what the poets could do, what further details we could accord the world, if we were paid properly for our hard work, and could live a modest living observing so the rest of the world doesn't have to, as it seems that is one of many human traits that is currently extincting.
Q: What did you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What did Ottawa provide, or allow? What you only see happening in Ottawa is, as I touched on briefly elsewhere, its rabid and rather vast smallpress community, and the outside community it hosts at events such as the semi-annual small press book fair hosted by rob mclennan. The community is vast, a container with space for zines, chapbooks, ephemera, and everything in between, ranging wildly in quality of content and production quality, as any good scene should. It makes for a rich and immersive scene that can quickly become an insider experience, just because there's so much to offer that one doesn't need to look up to see what's in the bowl of poetry readers from Toronto or Montreal, for instance. Again, Ottawa benefits from having a less transient arts base than Toronto, the big city, where people from small cities tend to flock to test their young meddle, or to go to school and stick around just long enough to run out of money and have to move back to Whitby or wherever. There are plenty of folks who have been active in literary production for thirty or forty years (or more!) in Ottawa, who continue to be active, and who influence the regenerating crop of students from Ottawa University and Carleton as they attempt to form what will inevitably be short lived small press ventures, or who carry the torch for a year or more at the university's established literary institutions, should those projects not be canceled due to the commitment or lack thereof of the crop of facilitators who came before. When we were coming up, Ottawa provided me and my fellow writers a place to publish that at least seemed to be listening, and because the scene is smaller than Toronto's, it was easier to get published, but unlike Toronto, as I said earlier, the work one is publishing in Ottawa is destined for chapbooks and literary journals or live performances, whereas in Toronto, recognition from one's involvement in the writing community can lead to a trade book with a major Canadian publisher. I'm talking about how it works for younger, less established writers... there are of course some amazing poets who have regular trade books, one of my favorites being David O'Meara, who's one of the best in the country. It's not about one scene being better than the other, it's just the reality of each city's publishing presence. Folks in Ottawa, then, can publish their work faster, and get more work out, if it's all a matter of printing pages and stapling or stitching the work together. But this is all how it was when I was there. Maybe things have changed, and the last year or two has certainly changed everything... Maybe I get irresponsibly sour about Toronto too easily. I love a lot of writers in Toronto, actually love them. Pete Gibbon, Bardia Sinaee... It's just that if you've ever filled out an OAC Recommender Grant application, and checked that "Regional" box, knowing half or more of the funding attributed to the entire province will go to the Big Smoke, that understanding stokes some healthy cynicism of how higher-order systems in publishing work. Fuck all of that, though. Just write. Right? Yes. Write, but show other people your work, and don't worry so much about publishing, and you'll be better off, regardless of where you live.
I do better with interviews in person.
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? When I started my reading series here in Peterborough, my Show and Tell Poetry Series, I was trying to establish a reading series that would allow a live audience more inroads into who the featured poet is by setting up what I called 'interactive stations' in the hosting venue. I had five stations, including:
-Writing desk: The featured reader would recreate (to the best of their ability) their writing desk (or environment) that they write in at home. Given that I was going for something hyper-local here, I thought it would be easy to basically move the featured poet's workspace into the venue, so that especially young writers could see what kind of environment an established poet writes inside of, I just underestimated how many poets I could pull into the series when I started, as it had been a half-decade since Peterborough had a regularly occurring reading series in 'Cooked and Eaten', Esther Vincent's longrunning and storied series. This station was the least successful, though it prompted a lot of creativity in terms of how the featured readers who could participate presented their work to the attending audience.
-Notes and rough drafts: I would challenge the featured reader to bring in notebooks or rough drafts of poems that the poet would read in their finished versions, so that the audience might see how a poem can grow and change or how a poem can die on the page, never to be revisited. The latter outcome for a poem, I think, is pedagogical, especially for young poets, in showing how some poems do not 'succeed', or are written in order to fertilize future ideas; I guess "kill your darlings" is the term for this which most writers would know. The poems you write to get to the poems you really like are just as important as those likeable poems, I think. I also think that my visiting writers enjoyed curating this 'station', as it required revisiting and showcasing old notebooks, thereby proving to their audience the amount of work it takes to write a good poem or two. That was my intention for this exercise, for the feature and the audience. Many traditional reading series present a poet who is polished, and who disseminates their poems as such, to the point where I remember being a young poet at readings and feeling like I could never accomplish such 'success' in poetry. I think that demystifying the professional development process for poets is important to fostering confident and able young poets, which is why I would also invite young poets, mostly from Trent University, to open for a more established poet at Show and Tell readings.
-Visual element: I would ask the featured reader to bring in one image that has or is currently inspiring their work. Usually, locals would bring in visual art done by another local artist. That's just how Peterborough works. We rabidly support each other, and are inspired by each other. We're a small arts community, so we aim to prop each other up so we can create more opportunities for more artists. That's how small communities have to do it, and we punch way above our weight class here because of that mutual support.
-Food and drink: I would ask the featured reader if they tend to eat or drink certain things when they're writing. This was really just an excuse to bring alcohol to the event.
-Short interview after reading: This is fairly standard practice, to allow the audience a chance to interrogate the reader(s) based on what the reader(s) had read, and what questions their poems prompted from audience members. However, because the audience had access to these other interactive stations, the questions were not limited to the material they had heard, as the audience could ask them about the evolution of a poem after seeing the nitty-gritty of it laid out in the reader's notebook, or about the visual stimuli the reader brought with them, or about their writing desk/environment.
I would change the series significantly over time to reflect the needs and interests of my 'regional' audience. It proved to be too much of an imposition on the artist and the venue to house my 'stations', so Show and Tell inevitably fell back into the traditional reading series model, hosting two or three poets a night who simply read their work and who might engage in informal conversation afterwards. I still believe that such an ambitious reading series model would work well in well-funded centres, especially in the universities. When I was coming up I could have used a lot of demystification, in terms of how poetry is wrought, funded, and disseminated. There was a lot of talk in university of 'muses' or 'lightning striking' in regards to how a poet would begin putting pen to paper, but any writer worth their salt knows that's bullshit. Also, I cringe when I hear writers talk about their agents, but would I if I had had more exposure to the business side of writing? There's no way of knowing now...
I think that moving to Peterborough, and having the space and freedom to explore what I thought a poetry reading series should be like, for instance, changed my approach to my work because it allowed me more freedom to do my own kind of research into how a poet might disseminate their work, how one might publish that work in a very small community, and how exactly to go about turning on that very small community to supporting and participating in more poetic activity. All of those examples made me a 'better' writer in the process, because I have since gained a more holistic understanding of my community, which, I think, can only lead to a more holistic understanding of one's place in that community, which just plainly prompts 'better' work. Feeling supported and understood is important for any artist. I qualified the word 'better' earlier because that is obviously a subjective term, but I feel I can say so confidently. Being here has made me a better writer just like Ottawa made me a better writer, just like whatever the next stage of my life brings will make me a better writer because I openly and excitedly chase that outcome, regardless of where I am. I feel exceptional to be part of the current arts renaissance in Peterborough, and I hope that I can, in my small way, contribute to its indefinite rise.
We currently have a fairly progressive city council, though I shudder to think of what may come with so many elections looming. God forbid the next time I answer these questions I have to outline my inevitable disapproval of local conservative hopeful (and monster) Michelle Ferreri.
Q: What are you working on now? By the time this interview goes out STPS will have posted five copies of three poems written by local poets in various locations in the downtown core as part of Show and Tell Poster Series. We did a round of five posters by five local poets in April as well, as part of our ongoing National Poetry Month programming. You can follow along with what STPS is doing here:
https://showandtellpoetry.wordpress.com/ Because of the unique circumstances of this year, STPS is trying to use its small but much appreciated budget (thank you City of Peterborough, and New Stages Theatre Company) to offer unique programming throughout such an unpredictable and inaccessible year. We also wanted to bring poetry to our community in a more direct way. On top of posting poems around town, STPS has purchased and disseminated six typewriters to local poets as part of the "Show and Tell Typewriter Initiative", and has produced our first "Show and Tell Poetry Zine", which is available for purchase at Watson & Lou, in Peterborough, or
here.
STPS is still figuring out what to do with our remaining funding for the year, as the landscape is so unpredictable these days, but we will continue to post poems around town as a reminder of the value of poetry and the arts in this time of disunity and crisis.
We will also continue our Show and Tell Typewriter Initiative efforts to pair local writers with neglected or otherwise available typewriters, as I firmly believe a writer writes differently (in myriad ways) on a typewriter than in a notebook or on a computer. My thoughts and my good friend and publisher Cameron Anstee's thoughts about typewriters and a live-writing typewriter poetry project I completed in Peterborough can be found in a book you can find
here. You should also seek out Cameron's Apt. 9 Press' impressive, nay, inimitable back catalog.
I just guest edited a zine by my good friend and occasional writing partner Jeff Blackman, from your fair city. By the time you read this the issue I guest-edited should be available
here.
Like I said about Cameron, feel free to peruse the issues Jeff has put together since the pandemic started. It's truly a unique publication, ranging in content from a Dungeons & Dragons themed issue, to this current one edited by yours truly that is an eclectic assortment of pieces done by Peterborough folks.
One of the pieces in the aforementioned zine will be about Precarious Festival, a relatively new but extremely important arts festival here in Peterborough that, as its primary goal, seeks to interrogate the precarity in which artists tend to find themselves while also contributing so much to the places in which they are struggling to survive and create. Find out more about that
here.
I'm also in the middle of guest-editing a local publication put together by Deryck Robertson and his Paddler Press. The issue likely won't be available by the time this interview goes out,
so please visit here for more info.
In terms of my own writing, I am working on a few different things, but all these things are keeping me happy and busy, so I'm not in too much of a rush to get a book out there, but I'll let you all know when that happens.
Finally, starting in late-September a group of local artists and I will be putting together a multidisciplinary show at Sadleir House here in Peterborough to celebrate the immense cultural value and significance of the work of local painter and renaissance man John Climenhage. The show has many facets, including a vast exhibition of John's work, a QR code walkabout through the city, a digital archive of John's work, a livestream event, music, essays, publications, etc. The contributing artists are myself, John Climenhage of course, Annie Jaeger, Bruce Whiteman, and Laura Thompson. Follow along with what we're doing on Instagram (for now)
@theclimenhageprojectOr it will all get locked down again in September... get vaccinated, jerks!
