Christy Ann Conlin is the author of Watermark,
winner of the Miramichi Reader Best Short Fiction award and finalist for both
the 2019 Danuta Gleed Literary Award and the Evergreen Award. She is also the
author of the novels, Heave, and The Memento. Heave was a
national bestseller, a finalist for the Amazon First Novel Award, Thomas H.
Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award, Dartmouth Book Award and a Globe and Mail
Top 100 Book. The Memento was a Booknet Top 10 bestselling ghost stories
for 2016. Her work has been published in Best Canadian Stories, Guernica,
Brick, Room, Geist, CBC Books Online and The Globe and
Mail. Her short fiction has been longlisted for the Commonwealth Short
Story Prize and the American Short Fiction Prize. Christy Ann’s radio broadcast
work includes co-creating and hosting CBC Fear Itself, a national summer
radio series about all aspects of fear, along with documentaries and web essays
for CBC Doc Project. Christy Ann was born and raised by the Bay of Fundy in
Nova Scotia, where she still resides along with her big sprawling sandwich
generation family. The Speed of Mercy is her latest novel.
Q: How long
were you in Ottawa, and what first brought you here? What took you away?
Ten years,
give or take. I came and went a bit, with my tumbleweed way of being in the
world at that time. I went to The University of Ottawa. As it was the first
place I lived long term as an adult, I became attached to Ottawa. When I went
off to work or travel elsewhere, I came back as it felt like my base.
When I first
moved to Ottawa as a crazy and unstable very young woman, I had a lot of trials
and tribulations. It was a time where I was caught up in the net of self-loathing
patriarchy loves to choke and trap young women with.
I left Ottawa,
finally, to live in Germany with my German high tech boyfriend. After a few
years, I tired of that, and came back to Ottawa, briefly. But as the saying
goes, you can never go home. I was there for a few more years, coming and
going, and then I left for good, because I needed to find a job. Back then, I
dealt with existential despair by moving and travelling for work.
At this point,
I wasn’t a writer yet, but I wasn’t a student, and I felt very adrift, lost in
a weird liminal space of mind and soul. Rents were increasing, and people I
knew had moved on, or had become civil servants.
Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and
subsequently, the writing community here?
Well, my first involvement was in bars and at parties,
where writers often were. My group was mostly with theatre people, but there
was a lot of crossover with the arts, so the alternative music scene and
college radio. In that window where I lived in German, I started writing, very compulsively,
but I would never have called myself a writer.
What I was drawing on was my time at Ottawa U, where I
studied theatre. It was through Theatre History, and stage managing plays, that
I began to understand that plays on a stage started with the stage play, the
words on the page, the vision in the playwrights mind, all the story and voice
and action, often even the stage design, specific stage directions. Before
this, I was focused on performance, and was one of those types who thought even
if I just ran across the stage, that the play really was about my walk on/walk
off character, ha ha ha ha.
But reading and working with scripts illuminated the
writing for me. It was like sitting outside at suppertime and watching the sky
slowly darken, and the stars come out, and then suddenly, the whole sky is
glittering and spectacular.
And so I started writing monologues, and then scenes,
and then plays. I am an accidental novelist and short story writer. Writing in
those forms was gifted to me by discovering writing through theatre. For me,
reading an incredible book is very much like watching a play. It’s a very
private experience and yet it’s communal. Thank you, Ottawa, for making me a
writer.
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?
My first experience was listening to people, almost
exclusively men, who called themselves writers, talk about writing. Lots of
talk about Hemingway and Kerouac. Not that it’s wrong to talk about male
writers, but it was almost exclusively talk of male writers and writing. And
the big overlook of the sexism in these “tomes” and “classics”. These bar guys
talked about writing ALL THE TIME. And they drank a lot. And smoked a lot. And
I wondered WHEN they actually wrote, and
why they didn’t publish.
My impression was writers were all talk and no work,
and basically, losers, ha ha ha ha. And honestly, I thought most people who
were professional writers who made a living (except for the dudes in those
bars), were male. I was such a product of patriarchy and capitalism, and was
enculturated from a gender and class perspective to think that being a writer
was not something a person like me could ever do.
The 1980s and 1990s were dominated, as before, by the
traditional literary world of white cis gendered guys and what they found
interesting, and the work they saw themselves reflected back in. There wasn’t
room for anyone outside of this except for Margaret Atwood and maybe Elizabeth
Smart and Virginia Woolf.
I did know a few playwrights, and they weren’t very
visible, because they were always writing, or in the theatre workshopping. Or
on the hustle for work to pay the bills. I was in awe of playwrights.
The nineties was strange commodification time of the
arts. Alternative music went from music that was an alternative to mainstream,
to a genre of corporate music. The same with writing, there the term “genre”
really took hold.
Q: What did you see happening here that you don’t see
anywhere else? What did Ottawa provide, or allow?
1985-1995 was a fascination decade in Ottawa. I was
very young, and while it was/is a government city, it was wonderful to be a
student there. Remarkable scene to begin
the process of coming of age. A big international population and a strong
Francophone presence, a train ride from Montreal or Toronto. And yet it also
felt small and intimate. But on the other hand, it could also feel big and bureaucratic,
and it was easy to feel you had on an invisibility cloak, whether you wanted to
wear it or not.
Back then there were very distinct neighbourhoods and
rent was reasonable. In Mechanicsville, rent was cheap. The Glebe was the most
expensive place to live if you were a student or in the arts.
I worked as a waitress at a little bistro called The
Blue Moon, across from the Royal Oak on Bank Street and a few doors away from
Barrymore’s.
And I lived on Bay Street, in a three story brick
house with a variety of fascinating roommates. And then on Cooper Street at The
Shefford.
Honestly, if I knew I was going to be a writer, if
could go back in time I would have stayed put at The Shefford. This would be
with the understanding that the true writing life is not romantic or glamourous,
but very solitary, requiring massive focus and commitment, especially if you
have a family and a day job. Any extra time must be devoted to writing and
reading on a very consistent basis or you can’t do the work, and you can’t continue
to develop as a writer. You can only do that by starting and finishing pieces,
and reading, reading, reading.
Just answering these questions floods me with
wonderous memories of living at The Shefford, and the sense of community in the
building. It was my best experience of urban living in my entire life, that’s
for sure.
And I hear Jane Siberry singing in my mind, It Can’t
Rain All the Time. A song for that era in my life.
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?
No, not yet.
Ottawa, as I said earlier, is where I started coming of age creatively. Where I
was steeped in art, music, writing, dance, galleries, and artistic and bohemian
communities. I was in a slow cooker there, for a long time, and after I left, I
was still in that cooker. But my exposure to such a vibrant arts community was galvanizing.
It just took me a long time to come into my own and be confident in that. But I
trace it back to my Ottawa days, where I felt invisible and unheard, where I
listened carefully, observed and metabolized.
I sobered up
in Ottawa when I was twenty two, and it was a great city to find sobriety in,
with a very supportive sober community of people of all ages, cultures and
professions. It was in Ottawa where I first had a tiny but profound epiphany –
I didn’t have to conform to the narrative I’d been force fed as a child, about
how my life would unfold. It took years to really change course, but it started
in Ottawa. I’ll forever have a fondness and sparkling nostalgia for the city.
Q: What are
you working on now?
A memoir, The
Accidental Selfie, and a novel, Tell It Slant. Ottawa makes a tiny
cameo in the memoir, but not in the novel.
