Q: How long were you in Ottawa, and what first brought you here? What took you away?
I was there for 4 academic years for my undergrad degree, after which I spent a few years in New Brunswick for reasons I still don't quite understand.
Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?
I didn't really get involved in any kind of community but did take my first tentative steps as a writer, publishing poetry in the Carleton Arts Review (I think it was called) and taking a short fiction course with Gerald Lynch at U of O which I still remember fondly.
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?
These were embryonic days for me as a writer! But what I realized at Carleton, after I flunked out of my first year journalism program, was that the kind of writing I wanted to do was not, in fact, journalism.
Q: What did you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What did Ottawa provide, or allow?
It was a pretty formative period actually because it was my first time living somewhere besides Cape Breton island, so mostly I learned that the rest of the world wasn't Cape Breton and that there were a whole lot of other ways to look at and experience the world besides the ones I grew up steeped in. Being at a big uni like Carleton with students from all over was a slap upside the head in a good way.
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?
I think my novel Mean Boy, even though it's set in a uni town that's very different from Ottawa, captures the experience I'm describing above--that coming of age feeling that there's a big wide world out there that your life, up until this point, has not really prepared you for.
Q: What are you working on now?
TV projects mostly, although also maybe a book of short stories.
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