Six Questions interview #165 : Maria Saba

Winner of the PEN Canada Scholarship, Maria Saba is a writer, storyteller, and arts educator. Writing in both Persian and English, she has published three books of nonfiction, short stories, and personal essays. Her short story manuscript, “My First Friend,” was a semi-finalist for the Iowa Short Fiction Prize. The title story of the same collection was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2017 and won Scoundrel Time’s Editors’ Choice Award in 2018. Her novella, “The Secret of Names,” was long listed for the Disquiet Literary Prize in 2020. Maria is the recipient of grants in English literature from Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, Saskatchewan Arts Board, City of Ottawa, and Wallace Stegner Grant for the Arts. She has served on various arts funding and awards juries in literature, theatre, dance, arts organization, and arts education.

Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?
At first, I came to Ottawa from Winnipeg for my MSc program. Then I moved to Toronto for my PhD and back to Ottawa after my postdoc. In total, it would be about eighteen years!

Q: How did you first get involved in writing?
I have always been writing one way or another. My first publication, if you can call it that, was a letter I sent to a women’s magazine in Iran after a row with my mother. Being fifteen, and a particularly mindless one, I didn’t stop there but mailed it to my mother’s favorite magazine, which I wasn’t supposed to read (and did, cover to cover, every week.) and forgot about it. My mother might never have known about it if a nosy neighbor hadn’t shown up at our door with my letter in the magazine. I wasn’t very popular at home for a while, to put it mildly.

My teachers in Iran and later in Canada always urged me to write, but I never committed to it until I took a short creative writing workshop at a community center with local writer, Joanne Proulx. She liked my ideas for stories and encouraged me to write. I told her I couldn’t see myself writing 300 pages. “Write a short story then,” she said. And that set me out on the path to write fiction.

Q. How did you get involved with the writing community here?
I was very isolated until a wonderful local writer and theatre artist, Ann Cavlovic, very kindly connected me with two amazing local poets and writers, Frances Boyle and Deborah-Anne Tunney— two of the nicest, most supportive, most generous people I have ever met. This encounter has had a very positive effect on my writing and my sense of being part of community. These are crucial for me as a writer, who spends most of her time in her own head.

Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?
Ottawa has a great literary landscape with so many writers and poets and events and publications. I love events like Tree Reading Series, In Our Tongues, and many others where reading and workshops happen. I believe we need to join forces to bring Ottawa more onto the spotlight. Your blog is a good effort in that direction.

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 learned from my exchanges with writers and poets, and the city certainly has an effect on my writing. I love different places in Ottawa, where I can reflect. Walking in so many trails and driving in the country always invigorate and reset me. Writing/literary cafes would be a good idea!

Q: What are you working on now?
Three things. Possibly four. I switch from one to the other. I am revising my first novel, writing my second one, and revising my novella. The fourth project is a secret. For now.

Six Questions interview #164 : Mary-Lou Zeitoun

Mary-Lou Zeitoun is an award winning author (13 and Jamilah at the End of the World), editor and journalist.

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

I was born in Ottawa. My mother (Grimes and Daly folk) was a nurse of Irish decent with deep roots in Ottawa and Chelsea and my father was just your average Catholic Palestinian newcomer coming to Ottawa to study at St. Paul’s, build a family in a safe country and become a pillar of the community with his social justice work. He then basically imported half the population of Nazareth. I grew up with a very Mediterranean lifestyle; food centred (my grandmother taught me all the Arabic recipes) with huge family gatherings every two weeks it felt like. At 18, I left for Toronto and have generally been back and forth since with a few stints in Montreal and residencies around the world.

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

I’ve been writing plays since I was young, but fiction writing came relatively late, when I developed Myalgic encephalomyelitis (an auto-immune disorder to put it simply) in my thirties. I function pretty well, I can do sports for instance, but because ME requires careful rest and pacing, I was pretty well grounded from a 9-5 life. Before that I was generally doing arts admin and getting degrees. I decided to develop my skills as an arts journalist as a sort of bargain with my disability. What can you do if you have to lie around a lot?  Laura Hillenbrand author of “Seabiscuit” and “Unbroken” has ME and she was prolific. I started as a theatre critic, then a film critic, then a music journalist.

Although I’ve basically been reading a book a day since I was ten, I didn’t dare envision myself as a long form fiction writer. It seemed way too big a job to write a whole novel. So, I took a short story course at Ryerson with Cynthia Holz and that was the first chapter of “13.”  Under the mentorship of Michael Helm from The Humber School for Writers and then the brilliant Irish author Roddy Doyle and famed Canadian critic John Metcalf (who lives in Ottawa) at Porcupine’s Quill, I finished 13, about a fangirl running away from sexually abusive middle school teachers in Ottawa to New York City on the day John Lennon is shot. I got to use my music journalism background on that. The Globe and Now magazine cited it as one of the top ten of that year and it won a 2008 New England Book festival Award.

My next book Jamilah at the End of The World (Lorimer 2022), about a Palestinian Canadian teen with terrible eco-anxiety, starts in Toronto and ends in Ottawa at a climate change protest. “Jamilah” also addresses issues like refugees, newcomers, and the multigenerational immigrant experience with plenty of stories from her Palestinian grandmother and the Syrian refugee kids she babysits. (It’s been reviewed as “hilarious” so don’t be afraid it’s too didactic!) Ottawa has a vivid and developing newcomer community and I enjoy mentoring and editing the manuscripts of emerging writers here, especially older people who need a bit of encouragement and have always wanted to tell their story.

Ottawans are readers. The Ottawa International Writers’ Festival here is very strong, and I was privileged to be featured on their Writer’s Festival Radio podcast this year. Octopus Books, which often focuses on social justice issues, sponsored my launch last July, and Perfect Books, The Spaniel’s Tale and Black Squirrel books are all co-operatively invested in promoting writers and writing here. Even the Indigos make space for local author’s events. The CBC All in a Day book club with Alan Neal recently contacted me to throw my book in the ring and I look forward to becoming a part of that community (covid willing) as a guest or participant! The Small Press book fair is also a great boon to the community in Ottawa and is decades old. Thanks.

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

I came at writing fiction as basically an arts critic, mostly an indie music journalist, so I didn’t know the literary scene either growing up here and visiting after. But my parents took me to the NAC quite a bit when I was young. I remember seeing “Maggie and Pierre,” a one-hander by the late Linda Griffith, (who had also developed ME but she died of breast cancer).  I remember thinking “Oh you can just talk a book!” 

I was also lucky to be at Glebe Collegiate when Brian Doyle, award winning YA author of Angel Square and Up To Low including many others, was an English teacher and although I never took an English course from him, I did have a few roles in his plays.

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

In Toronto, I honestly miss hearing French and Arabic wafting around in the air. There’s a feeling of history in Ottawa with its rivers and hills and heritage buildings. That’s probably why there’s so much fantasy and science fiction coming out of Ottawa. Underneath the weird municipal politics (hello convoy) and poor infrastructure (hello LRT) Ottawa has the feel of a European City and Toronto feels to me more like a prairie town. My background is part townie, part immigrant and part diplomat, so inspiration here is uhm, rich? Fortunately, the indigenous presence is also more palpable to me here. It is encouraging to see writers like Melissa Blair, who is Anishinaabekwe of mixed ancestry, be featured on the January 2023 All in A Day Book Club with her fantasy book A Broken Blade, for instance.

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?

Ottawa was a place to run away from for my first character in 13 and Ottawa is where, in my second book, Jamilah landed. Whilst Toronto is a great city to publish and promote work, Ottawa is a wonderful gestational city for the arts. The poetry and visual arts scene here is also very strong.

Q: What are you working on now? 

“The Tin Woman” working title. A woman with a disability goes round the world looking for the safest place to live. It addresses themes of migration, disability, and poverty politics. I’ve secured a few grants for it including one from The City of Ottawa’s cultural funding program. Will the safest place be Ottawa? I don’t know. Through the lens of Covid we are all having to learn to live with being unsafe, especially those of us with invisible disabilities who are, essentially still on lockdown, and, after the convoy here, with its hordes of white supremacists running around unchecked assaulting thousands of unprotected residents, the prospect of dodging stabbers on a subway platform in Toronto doesn’t feel too bad sometimes. Yes, I think I’ll be writing about the convoy and the alt right in this book too.

 

Six Questions interview #163 : allison calvern

Ever since her birth in Bermuda, allison calvern has been growing up--in New Brunswick, Saskatchewan, Québec, British Columbia, Paris, the Black Forest of Germany, and now, in Ottawa, where she continues to make progress. She writes letters, poems, memoir, and unpublishable short stories. Although she has a vague affection for paragraphs, she feels the best writing hinges on beautiful sentences.

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

I first moved to Ottawa in 1991, following my husband at the time and his job. I worked from home, and took evening classes in creative writing at the University of Ottawa. Under Nadine McInnis and Rita Donovan, I learned how to use breath to measure the beauty of a sentence. I joined a class writing group; I began to attend poetry readings--TREE, Dusty Owl. I helped to run Sasquatch for a while.

In 1999 I moved to Fredericton with my youngest child in tow. From the University of New Brunswick, I took: an undergraduate degree in comparative literature; a masters degree in English; and a physics professor as a dear husband and healer of the heart. When he died in 2015, my bruised heart and I moved back to Ottawa, where four of my five children live.

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

As a little girl in Edmundston, I read the Telegraph Journal--the comics and Alden Nowlan. And so I knew writers existed, but I thought such an occupation required an anointing, a special designation by the powers that be. But, no; it turns out engagement is what does the trick. Ottawa's poets, short story writers, novelists, memoirists, creators of books, and book sellers--together create an excellent atmosphere for engagement with the written word.

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

I remember being so moved by poetry at readings in Ottawa, that I would go home and bury my pen in my sock drawer. I knew I would never write as beautifully as they, and what's the point of giving the world another unwanted poem? But even though I was mired in self-doubt (and still am), I felt the addictive pull. Perfection is over valued; just to read, and to write, is enough.

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

Ottawa has more--more writers, more reading series, more universities, more publishers, more festivals, than a small town, say. Within this 'more' is a critical mass of connections, of opportunities either to shine or to hide. Ottawa also has the sales and distribution boost of the twice-yearly Small Press Book Fair. These components are so valuable to a writer.

Still, I value the intimacy of the Fredericton writing scene: drinking beer in Ross Leckie's kitchen; meeting Antonine Maillet at Molly's Coffee House; catching the flare of insight that comes from hearing M. Travis Lane give an impromptu explanation of the long-form poem, while her beloved, blind companion, Davy, winds his furry way around our legs.

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?

Mostly I stand back and say, wow, to the love and talent that Ottawa writers apply to the art of writing. Then I do my own work.

Q: What are you working on now?

I am writing memoir, with a focus on Child Haven, Kaliyampoondi, a home for impoverished children and seniors in a rural village in Tamil Nadu, India. In 2017-2018, I spent six months wrapped up in that ancient, breathing culture, and I haven't been the same since.

Six Questions interview #162 : Lisa Alletson

Lisa Alletson grew up in South Africa and England, and now lives in Canada. Most of her writing is done on the Big Rideau Lake, near Perth. Her debut chapbook, Good Mother Lizard, won the Headlight Review 2022 poetry prize, and is on the 'Books of the Year’ (Lonely Crowd) list. Lisa’s writing is nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, and Best of the Net. Her words have been published most recently in New Ohio Review, Crab Creek Review, Pithead Chapel, Gone Lawn, Identity Theory, Bending Genres, Milk Candy Review, Typehouse Magazine, Emerge Journal, The Globe and Mail, among others. She’s on Twitter at @LotusTongue. You can read more of her published work
at www.lisaalletson.com.

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

Twenty-five years ago I started coming up to my husband’s family cottage on the shore of the Big Rideau Lake, near Perth. My father-in-law and his friend, both accountants raising young families in Ottawa, bought the island together fifty years ago. My husband took his first baby steps here, as did our daughter thirty years later. We were married in Portland and boated across our guests for the outdoor reception at the cottage. It was a high wind day in late August, and the guests in their fancy outfits, who came in from all over the world, were thoroughly soaked by the time they arrived. They found it nearly as amusing as we did.

Through oral storytelling we know the property­­–– an island with a causeway, was owned by a group of young New York Times journalists in the 1940s. They became legendary for their boys’ trips – drinking all day, running around naked, sliding down the water tower into the lake. That’s one theory about why the island is named Little Boy Camp.

Now, we spend a lot of time at the cottage in every season, although winter can be tricky to get in. It’s the place where I’m most inspired to write.

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

I grew up in apartheid South Africa, during a time when the governing National Party used censorship to control what the media published. I studied journalism at Rhodes University with the intention of becoming part of the journalistic community fighting apartheid. I loved writing and it seemed a fascinating and meaningful career. Our university was political. The ANC was a banned organization, and held illegal gatherings in our Great Hall. As a 17-year-old, being part of those gatherings and protests made for heady days. The government watched journalists and students closely. Books, poets, and a few rebel teachers taught me the reality of apartheid as opposed to the narrative we were fed through school.

I emigrated to Canada, finished university, got a job in corporate communications, and didn’t write creatively for many years. In 2019, visiting my father, I brought my 15-year old daughter, who has autism. Dad was in the last few months of Alzheimer’s. I was anxious about how it would go. They normally had a great relationship, but he had changed so much. I was wrong to worry. I wrote a non-fiction piece about their interaction that day, which was published in the Globe and Mail’s First Person column. After that piece ran, I felt encouraged to start writing again, and submitting my work for publication.

Because my writing got going around COVID, my community was a global, online one. Now, I’m longing to find writers I can spend time with in person. There’s a great writing and artist community in Perth, Portland and surrounding areas that I intend to explore next summer.

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

It shifted in many ways.

Writing in a diverse, global community through Twitter made me realize how insulated I was in both my writing style and reading choices.

The access and exposure to fresh literature, through journals and presses, is outstanding. Experienced writers and editors are typically friendly and helpful to newbies. I could spend every day reading flash fiction, CNF and poetry in literary journals, and never tire of it. Reading is how I progress my own writing.

The support and encouragement is phenomenal. I count online writers as some of my dearest friends, though I’ve only met a few in real life. They edit my writing. They celebrate prizes and publications.

Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What might the area provide, or allow? 

We are immersed in nature in this part of the province. It inspires me constantly.

I’ve heard great things about the artistic community in Perth, Smith’s Falls, Portland. With the world more open these days, I plan to get involved.

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

Staying up at the lake gives me the near-solitude I need to write. My first poems written here were about finding peace in a chaotic life. The stunning features of Eastern Ontario often creep into my writing as imagery; The Canadian Shield, the lakes, the Rideau Locks, the deer, the pines, the raccoons, even the ticks. The tornado that licked the forest on the far shoreline when I first came to the island. One of my poems features Archie’s Rock – a tiny island with two pines. We swim out to the rock and watch the loons. It’s also a resting place for long distance kayakers.

This island is rich with potential stories. Finding fossils with my children. The “Pale Mommy” ghost seen in the upper cabin at the island. The day the two mothers were convinced they had found gold in on the property and took it to Ottawa for testing.

The way my father-in-law, in his late-80s, seems to take strength from the land and trees and works relentlessly all day maintaining the property.

On one side of the island, near the Slingshot Tree, a large iron hook is buried in the rock. The construction barges that built the Rideau Canal in the 18^th century would dock there.

My oldest daughter, having autism, relishes being away from societal expectations. She loves being able to relax where people are not questioning her behaviour or reactions. I’ve written about her being in this more authentic state in nature, when she doesn’t feel like she needs to fit in.

Q: What are you working on now?

My first poetry chapbook was recently published by The Headlight Review in Atlanta. Now I’m working on flash fiction and non-fiction, as well as prose-poems. I’ve started a series of stories about growing up in South Africa. And I plan to write the stories of the lake in a series of flash CNF.