Don LePan’s best known book is Animals: A Novel (2009), described by J.M. Coetzee as “a powerful piece of writing, and a disturbing call to conscience,” and by the Globe and Mail as “psychologically incisive, admirably disquieting”; “few Canadian novels have been as powerful,” concluded the University of Toronto Quarterly. His third novel, Lucy and Bonbon, was published by Guernica in 2022.
Born in
Washington, DC and raised in Ontario, LePan spent many years as a resident of
Calgary, and has lived for briefer periods in New Orleans, Louisiana; Lewes,
Sussex; and Murewa, Zimbabwe. Since 2009 his home has been Nanaimo, British
Columbia.
Q: How long have you lived in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?
I have lived for two periods in Ottawa, for a total of nine years. The first was from 1955 to 1959, when I was a small child. My father worked for External Affairs (as the Department of Foreign Affairs was then known); he was posted in the early 1950s to Washington (where I was born), but returned to Ottawa in ’55. My earliest memories are Ottawa memories—steam trains along the canal, horse-drawn milk carts on Monkland Avenue, the vast pile of logs beside the E.B. Eddy plant in Hull; it was all a long time ago.
At one point when I was a lonely five-year-old I went door-to-door on Monkland, asking at each house if any five-year-olds lived there. That same year I remember running away from kindergarten when my parents went off to Bermuda for a week’s holiday; it seemed a reasonable thing to do at the time.
I lived in Ottawa again when I went to Carleton between 1971 and 1975—and I have many fond memories from that period both of the Carleton English Department (Ian Cameron, Faith Guildenhuys, and Larry McDonald were three standouts among a group of first-rate professors), and of Ottawa generally. I’ve kept in touch over the years since; my mother lived in Ottawa until she died, and my brother lives there still. I was taken aback last winter to hear of the canal not being safe to skate on; my most memorable part-time job while I was a Carleton student was skate patrol on the canal.
In the early ’70s draft beer at the Grad’s Hotel or the Vendome was just 25 cents a glass. Those segregated bars (separate entrances and separate rooms for “Men” and for “Ladies and Escorts”) and those prices are long gone now, but I gather that Mike’s Place in the University Centre at Carleton is still going strong—hats off to them!
Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?
At Carleton I took a Creative Writing-Poetry course that Christopher Levinson taught; it left me with a deep (though no doubt unfair) suspicion of Creative Writing courses generally. I did publish two poems during my undergraduate years (in the literary magazine Quarry), and I wrote my first novel—an embarrassing attempt at a political adventure novel. Somewhere I have a kind rejection letter from Jack McClelland that advised me to keep on trying.
Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?
I never did really become involved with the Ottawa writing community, so this is one I can’t really answer. Indeed, I’ve never become involved in the writing community in any city I’ve lived in.
Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?
Sorry—I can’t answer this one either.
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?
For some reason I’ve never been tempted to set any of my work in the place I’m living in when I write. My first novel, Animals, is set in Alberta—but not in Calgary, the Alberta city I lived in at the time. My second novel, Rising Stories, is set entirely in Chicago—a city I love, but not one I have ever lived in. And my most recent novel, Lucy and Bonbon, is set in places where I lived long ago—Toronto and Calgary. I’m not aware of any city having changed the way I approach my work—with the possible exception of New Orleans, where I have lived twice, though each time only for a few months. New Orleans seeps into you and tells you that everything has changed, though I suspect it often lies. Ottawa, so far as I recall, keeps you at a discreet distance and makes you feel that things change very slowly.
At some point I may go back to a project I started a few years ago, which would be set at least in part in Ottawa; it explores the life that gay men lived in Ottawa in the 1950s; my father was one, the diplomat John Holmes (who I remember from my childhood as a warm and wonderful soul) was another. Rumor has it that Mike Pearson was another—though at this point that’s only rumor.
Q: What are you working on now?
A set of linked short stories entitled Leaving Pittsburgh.
Quite a few of the characters in fact stay in Pittsburgh; others have decided
to move—to New York, to Phoenix. The longest story (and by far the most
difficult to write) focuses on the 2018 synagogue shooting.
No comments:
Post a Comment