Six Questions interview #126 : Rob Manery

Rob Manery lives on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, where he is the editor of Some, a print-only poetry magazine, and the author of It’s Not As If It Hasn’t Been Said Before (Tsunami Editions), Richter-Rauzer Variations (above/ground press), Many, Not Any (Some Books) and ELEGIES (above/ground press).

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

I was born in Ottawa and although I briefly lived in Moncton and Edmonton as a young child, I lived in Ottawa from 1972 until 1996. I moved to Vancouver in search of a job. Prospects in Ottawa were dim. The Mulroney government had launched an assault on government workers, laying off thousands and the Chretien government did not bring significant change to employment possibilities. I knew people living in Vancouver and the Kootenay School of Writing was also a significant draw. 

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

I started a writing club in my first year at Carleton University and then became involved with the Carleton Literary Review. In 1986, Louis Cabri formed the experimental writing group (ewg) and he and I began to produce poetry talks and readings. In 1990, we started hole magazine and then hole books. Bob Hogg was a huge influence on me and the direction my writing and reading took. We were, however, largely influenced by writing communities located elsewhere, such as the Kootenay School of Writing in Vancouver; Steve McCaffery, bp nichol and their Toronto Research Group project; and the language writing communities centred in New York and San Francisco.

I did not feel very connected to the more visible writing communities in Ottawa when I lived there. In some ways, we were more connected to the visual arts community than the writing community in Ottawa. Gallery 101 was certainly a supportive organization that hosted many of our events. SAW Gallery also hosted several events. We also were very fortunate to be asked to organize a series of readings and talks at Art Court.

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? 

Bob and Louis certainly were the biggest influences. I took courses with Bob at Carleton and in addition to introducing me to Black Mountain poets, the TISH poets, and John Ashbery, suggested that I read the language poets. The Carleton library had quite a few books by language poets, including Silliman’s anthology In the American Tree and Perelman’s Writing/Talks. I read these works with bewilderment. When I met Louis, he was reading the same poets and so we began to get together to talk about this work, trying to understand it. There did not seem to be many others in Ottawa (or elsewhere) who were interested in this work, so it felt like Louis and I were initially a community of two, although we also met regularly with Bob. The Transparency Machine series was our attempt to initiate discussion about the work of the poets we were reading. These events asked writers to situate their work in the context of other work. At the events, the poems were projected onto a wall and the presenting writer and audience would discuss it. The series attracted a small but engaged audience, and I think this formed an important community for us.

My thinking about poetry was certainly shaped by these events, but the greatest influence was the work I was reading at that time, people like Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, Alan Davies, and Jackson Mac Low. Mac Low’s chance procedures and Silliman’s procedural writing had a profound influence on my own writing practice.

I have lived in Vancouver since 1996 and have certainly been privileged to be involved in the community of writers associated with KSW. I am certain my writing has been influenced by the community here, but the influences are not as formative as the work of the language poets and of Bob Hogg or the ewg talks and readings. The changes that have occurred are largely a result of being older, being exposed to a greater diversity of writing, and thinking about poetry in a more complex manner than the somewhat simplistic understandings I had in my twenties.

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

When I lived in Ottawa, Arc magazine and the Arc reading series were the main venues for poetry. There was also the Tree reading series, but not much else. You and Warren Fulton began hosting events in the mid-nineties, I believe? I felt very much outside of the Arc and Tree series. Nonetheless, there were many individuals in Ottawa who were writing in interesting ways or who were doing interesting things with language. Dennis Tourbin, Marwan Hassan, Jorge Etcheverry, and Colin Morton were people whose work I was reading and learning from. The universities also brought me into contact with important teachers. I have already mentioned Bob Hogg, but I took several courses with Christopher Levenson, who was the prime force behind Arc at that time. While our poetic sensibilities are obviously very different, I learned a great deal from Dr. Levenson, particularly around metrics. I am forever grateful for his course on the Metaphysical poets and for his poetry workshop. As a graduate student, I took a course at the University of Ottawa with Seymour Mayne on the history of little magazines in Canada. Louis and I were editing hole at that time, and the course helped to contextualize what we were doing (at least, in my mind) and to illuminate a number of considerations for the magazine. Dr. Mayne, of course, was part of the Montreal scene of Layton and Cohen, and he had a particular view on the role of the literary magazine which was instructive for me. The ewg events also brought us into contact with other interesting people, like Mark Robertson (aka Max Middle) and Christian Bök, who I met at Carleton.

Q: What are you working on now? 

I am working on a series of what I am calling embedded poems. These poems are composed so that another poem, or part of a poem, are embedded within the poem although in a manner that is unrecognizable. The embedded poems are all, so far, by people I know and whose work has been important to me.  

Six Questions interview #125 : Jennifer Cox

Jennifer Cox (she/her) is a poet, lawyer, and mother. Her poetry primarily revolves about motherhood, birth, and the impending climate crisis. She enjoys reading, spending time outdoors, and playing with her children. Her work has previously appeared in the League of Canadian Poets' Poetry Pause, Bywords, and Rejected Lit Magazine. She resides in Ottawa with her children and husband.

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

I’ve been in Ottawa for six years. I came here to be close to family and to start my legal career.

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

I’ve always been a writer. Even as a small kid I would write and gift my family short stories. My grade two teacher would actually “bind” and “publish” my work. I still have many of those “published” stories.

For the past fifteen years, most of my writing has been in the academic and legal realms. My legal career has been writing heavy, and over the past few years I have primarily written contracts. Writing contracts lends itself surprisingly well to writing poetry, as both disciplines consider the impact of every word and comma. You have to decide whether you want your particular phrase or word choice to bring greater clarity or strategic ambiguity. Often strategic ambiguity is the more interesting (and easier to negotiate) choice.

I only started publishing my poetry within the last year. Despite my status as a newbie, I’ve found the community in Ottawa to be encouraging. Bywords.ca was one of the first places my poems were published.

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

I learned how to write for an audience during my legal training and first few years as a lawyer. It felt like learning how to turn words into paint, and then that paint into a compelling painting. I learned from lawyers who were excellent writers and, for better or worse, thought ad nauseum about word and sentence choice. These influences have forever shaped how I approach writing. I’ve spent an embarrassing number of hours opining on the nuanced differences between “states,” “represents,” and “certifies.”  

It took me longer than it should have to realize my legal writing skills were translatable to writing poetry. Since joining this writing community, the biggest change in my poetry is simply the idea that I could learn how to turn my poems into something other people want to read. It was a new way of turning paint into paintings. It has been an enjoyable journey.

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

Ottawa, generally speaking, values the arts more than other cities. It was part of why I wanted to move to Ottawa in the first place. There is an abundance of talented writers in Ottawa, despite being a relatively small city. Ottawa also provides quick access to politics and nature, which are great writing inspirations.

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?

Most of my writing is set in Ottawa, either implicitly or explicitly. Most recently, the occupation in downtown Ottawa, and the local and national conversations around that occupation, brought me inspiration.

Q: What are you working on now?

I am working towards my first chapbook. And, as always, I’m trying to learn how to write better poems.

I am also searching for other poets writing about early parenthood. Becoming a parent has been one of the most transformative times in my life and the inspiration for much of my writing. It’s a weird, wild, and wonderful life transition. I am hungry for reading more poetry on this transition, and in connecting with other poets who are also writing about it.

 

Six Questions interview #124 : Jesse Keith Butler

Originally from the Yukon, Jesse Keith Butler now lives with his wife and two children in Ottawa, Ontario. He recently returned to writing poetry after a decade of silence, and discovered he was full of words. His poetry explores the boundaries of poetic form, looking for new ways to interconnect narratives with the sounds and textures of language. His eclectic education includes a PhD in Education, an MA in English, and a BA in Liberal Arts. He currently works in the federal public service.

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

I’ve lived in Ottawa about 15 years, off and on. I basically ended up here by accident, and subsequently kept trying to escape. But I didn’t escape, and at some point along the way it became home.

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

I’ve been writing poetry most of my life, but I largely kept it to myself. I then drifted away from poetry for about a decade, while I got married, had kids, did a PhD, bought a house, etc. It was the pandemic that got me back into it, as I think it did for a lot of people. It was also then that I started engaging more actively with the writing community, but since everything was digital I mostly connected with poets outside of Ottawa who were doing similar work.

I have never been very looped in to the Ottawa writing community. I tend to use formal elements (rhyme and/or metre) and my poetry also often dwells on religious themes—both of which I think have contributed to a bit of an outsider mentality. I’ve tended to engage and collaborate with artists in other media—musicians, painters, theatre people. I have a network of creative people here in Ottawa, but most of them aren’t writers. All that being said, now that I’m more actively working on writing a publishing I’m definitely hoping to engage more with the Ottawa writing community.

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

Although I haven’t had consistent involvement with the Ottawa writing community, there have been key moments of engagement that have been very important to my development as a writer. I’d like to particularly acknowledge the contribution of the late Steven Heighton, whom I met when he was writer in residence at the University of Ottawa. I was going through a strange phase of writing exclusively in sonnets (and extremely structured ones). I gave him a big stack of these weird, anachronistic sonnets and asked for feedback. Most people would have (rightfully) written me off, but being the man he was, he read them carefully and thoughtfully, and saw past the weirdness and the stiffness to what was good in them. He gently nudged me out of the formal rut I was in, but also pointed out various elements that had potential. One of the poems had the phrase “the living law” in it. I remember he reacted really strongly to that phrase, telling me THAT was the piece I needed to develop. More than a decade later, I’m pulling together my first manuscript and that is the title.

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

I’ll be honest—I’ve always found Ottawa a challenging place to live as a writer. I’ve found other cities, like Vancouver or Montreal, to be much easier places to find a niche as an artist. When I moved here in my 20s, it drove me crazy how the downtown core emptied out at 5. Now I’m one of the people vacating it. But I do think there’s something to a smaller, less obvious arts scene. The people out there creating are really committed, and I’ve come to appreciate that. We have to work it a bit harder, and I think that can pay off in quality.

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 have one poem in particular that responds to my experience of Ottawa. It’s about the slow anguish of my early years in Ottawa, living here but wishing I was elsewhere. It’s one of the poems in which I develop the idea of “the living law,” as prompted by Steven Heighton. It was also inspired in part by Seymour Mayne (another Ottawa poet), who taught me in a course about the Rabbinic tradition that enumerated 613 distinct laws in the Torah. It always seemed so fitting to me that this is the Ottawa area code. You can read the poem here: https://darklybrightpress.com/613-2/

Q: What are you working on now? 

As mentioned above, I’m finishing up my first manuscript. It’s about half new work I’ve written since the start of the pandemic, and half a selection of poems from my earlier life. I’m also working on publishing more broadly. I have a poem in in the most recent issue of Cloud Lake Literary, which is a great little Ontario journal I’m really excited about. That poem is pretty experimental in its formal structure, inspired by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, and Alice Oswald. It’s a good indication of the direction of my current writing. Going forward, I’m looking for opportunities to keep experimenting a collaborating, both with other writers and with artists in other media.

Six Questions interview #123 : Dave Gregory

Dave Gregory is a senior editor for Five South, an associate editor for Exposition Review, and a member of the Internet Writing Workshop. He is a retired sailor who currently lives in Kitchener, Ontario. His short fiction has appeared in more than seventy literary journals including Existere, FreeFall, White Wall Review, Pulp Literature, & The Temz Review.

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

I lived in Ottawa from 1987 to 1997, though I first visited in 1985 for a youth conference. At the time, I wanted a career in politics and immediately fell in love with Ottawa. I returned for another conference in 1986, then enrolled at Carleton University, where I fully immersed myself in the political scene and enjoyed five exciting years before my interest in politics waned. After graduation, I took a well-paying job at the university library, lived in a tiny bachelor apartment downtown, at Bank & Gloucester, and thoroughly enjoyed the writer’s life for the latter half of my time in Ottawa. In the mid-nineties, the university (like so many institutions) went through financial upheaval. Myself and many other contract workers were let go. An urge to travel is what ultimately took me away from Ottawa. I moved my stuff into storage, drained my life savings, and went back-packing in Europe. A six-month trip gradually morphed into a twenty-year career in the travel and tourism industry.

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

I’d always been interested in writing (I won a creative writing award in grade school) but it was at university that I began taking the calling more seriously. For eight months of every year, the heavy workload of reading endless dry textbooks and dusty source materials, made me crave fiction and reading for pleasure whenever May 1^st rolled around. Throughout my second year at university, I lived off campus, not far from Prospero – The Book Company, on Bank Street. I remember staring longingly at the book displays all through the fall, winter, and spring – books like Solomon Gursky Was Here, Cat’s Eye, and A Prayer for Own Meany – and counting the days until I’d finally have leisure time to read them. That seemed a more interesting world to me and I wanted to be part of it. Just as reading textbooks led to drafting essays, reading fiction also made me want to write and I scribbled about eighty pages of a novel that same summer.

While working at the library after graduation, the idea of finding a writing community gained appeal. Ottawa (X)Press had recently started publishing weekly and their events listings told me everything going on around town: literary readings abounded, especially at the universities and the National Archives on Wellington; John Metcalfe organized a reading series at various bookstores. I also found a local writer, Richard Taylor, offering a workshop on campus. He posted a notice in the public library on Metcalfe, I called the number and that became my first writers’ group.

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 loved being in a city with so many writers but the sad truth is that my Ottawa writers’ group nearly cured me of my desire to write. I was younger and probably thinner-skinned then. The members gave other writers wonderful feedback, compliments like “what an exquisite metaphor,” and “such delicious prose.” But when it came to my work, what I swear I heard coming from their mouths was, “Mmmm – maybe you should try a career in banking.”

It wasn’t until I started travelling and sharing tales with other wanderers that I gained confidence in the stories I had to tell. Of course, I had to get the travel bug out of my system before I could earnestly sit down and write again, so it was 2018 before I found another writing community, and this time it was online. Currently, I don’t know ANY local writers in Kitchener-Waterloo but my online writers’ group consistently provides useful and constructive feedback (most members are American but there are others from Europe, India, Nigeria, and New Zealand). The “Literary Twitter” community also lets me network with like-minded creatives who support and look out for each other.

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

Way back in the 90s, what I saw in Ottawa, that I haven’t seen since, was writers on the streets slogging their own work, seeking an audience. A poet used to stand by the Terry Fox statue, near the Rideau Centre, offering his scrolled poems for sale. I remember poems by rob mclennan posted on telephone polls in Centretown. The coolest part was going into a magazine shop on Elgin Street, near Lisgar, and seeing a full rack of locally made literary journals. Some were attractively printed and bound but just as many were photocopied, stapled, and folded sheets of paper. All of them were made by fellow writers, living a life very similar to mine – people like Warren Layberry who, in 1996, was the first to take a chance on me and publish one of my stories in his journal Graffitifish.

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? 

So much of what I wrote in Ottawa was set in that wonderfully diverse city. Most Canadians think of Ottawa as a cold, dreaded place where soulless politicians live but I was interested in representing a far more vibrant and compelling side of the nation’s capital. For example, I wrote and self-published an entire novel about musicians, magicians, and artists busking in the ByWard Market. The only thing I wrote that even touched on Ottawa’s political scene was a short story about a simple-minded night cleaner on Parliament Hill who fails to comprehend a small political scandal unfolding around him. [Read Fool on the Hill here.]

The latter half of my time in Ottawa defined my writing mode. Even though there is a two-decade gap between my Ottawa writing career and my current one, all those habits came back to me: writing in solitude, usually at night, and endless redrafts as I read my work aloud, listening for areas that need polishing. It was also important to balance these efforts with exercise and natural beauty, so I made a point of taking long waterside walks (back then, along the river below Parliament Hill, and now, around the swimming ducks, geese, and swans in Kitchener’s Victoria Park – not quite as dramatic but still serene and lovely).

Q: What are you working on now?  

Although I have about a dozen short stories awaiting revision and final edits, my writing is currently taking a back seat to my newest gig as senior editor for a Los Angeles-based literary journal called Five South. It is rewarding but time consuming. I’m reading endless submissions while meeting new and exciting writers as I help ready their work for publication.

 

Six Questions interview #122 : df parizeau

df parizeau is a writer, fibre artist, and chronic pain sufferer, of scottish/french ancestry, who still ties their shoes "bunny-ears" style. Their work has been featured online and in print by publications in Canada, Finland, the UK, and the US. They have a firm belief in the 3-0 curveball and that cherry is the best pie. Their debut chapbook dissections was released in 2022 with above/ground press.

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

I was born at the Civic Hospital and lived in the city for my whole childhood, with the exception of a few years across the river in Gatineau. My family lived in the west end, around the Iris/Navaho fork through three different houses, all within walking distance. Shortly after turning 18, I made my way to Alberta. Blame it on being a hot-headed youth with a chip on my shoulder.  

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

I didn’t really put any real focus into writing until grade 12. Prior to that, I’d dabbled a bit trying to write songs, with aspirations of being a rockstar, but I’m not particularly musically inclined. In grade 12, I took a creative writing class and my teacher, Ms. Riddell, was instrumental in encouraging me to write more and brought attention to my strengths. Had I been a better student overall, I may have gone on to continue to pursue writing in university, but I dropped out before that could transpire and never really had the chance to see what the writing community looked like, let alone join it. It really wouldn’t be a little over a decade later, after finding my way to Vancouver, that my passion for writing was rekindled.  

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?

Something I lament often about leaving Ottawa when I did was never getting to dip my toes into the writing community. Ultimately, things turned out okay, but I often wonder how different my approach to writing and my practice would be. I had a nearly 10 year hiatus from writing and I think that had I stayed it would be more likely that I wouldn’t have had such a significant rupture. Moving to Vancouver and going back to university got me back on track but the scene here is big and can be intimidating at times, especially as a writer who emerged later in life. I’ve always seen writing as a means to connect with folks and sometimes, being in such a large city/community, I wonder how much I’m connecting versus consuming. Ottawa has always felt cozier to me and sometimes I yearn for a more close-knit atmosphere.

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

When I first started getting back into writing, I’ll be honest, Ottawa didn’t really stick out as a “literary city”. Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, and even Edmonton & Winnipeg definitely have bigger profiles, but I think that actually works in Ottawa’s favor. The community seems more closely bonded and supportive and I think that’s allowed writers to lean more into the things they love about their craft, rather than worry about following trends in publishing. Having institutes like VERSe Fest, Arc Poetry Magazine, In/Words Magazine, and above/ground press really shows how vibrant and important the Ottawa writing community is to the country’s literary scene.

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?

My chapbook, dissections, is an exploration of how my chronic pain connects to my memories and so has a very strong relation to my time spent in Ottawa. A great number of the pieces contained within the book reference moments and memories from my time growing up in the city. I can’t really imagine how my work would look without having grown up in Ottawa. The library system in Ottawa was (and I imagine still is) great when I was a kid and it afforded me so many opportunities to read and learn about stories. Growing up in a city that has so much to offer in terms of arts and museums was also immensely influential. A lot of my work and process is inspired by archive keeping and museum curation and I don’t think I would approach writing in the same way if I’d lived elsewhere as a kid. 

Q: What are you working on now? 

I’m currently working on a sister project to dissections called Tapestry of an Ailing Body. It’s a visual pain journal that tracks my day-to-day levels and types of pain through weavings. It’s not dissimilar from a temperature blanket/scarf, just with chronic pain as the element being tracked. There are 6 completed pieces in the series at present. I’ve committed to continuing through the end of 2022, but since it’s been such a great way to connect with and consider my body and its ailments, it may very well turn into a lifelong project!