Six Questions interview #195 : Julie McArthur

Julie McArthur writes and works as a freelance editor in Toronto. She has over twenty short stories published in literary journals across North America and the UK including The Antigonish Review, Joyland, Necessary Fiction, PANK, Prairie Fire, and the fable anthology The Lion and the Aardvark (Stone Skin Press). Her short story collection Men and the Drink received three grants from the Ontario Arts Council. juliemcarthur.com

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

I was born and raised in Kanata, then a small suburb of Ottawa. Glen Cairn was a fantastic area to grow up in, with fields and farmlands abound.

At 16, my family moved to West Carleton (near Carp) and at 18, I moved to Toronto to study at the Ontario College of Art. After a year, I dropped out and moved back to Ottawa and lived in the Byward Market from 89-94 while working in restaurants and studying at college. I moved again to Toronto for a counselling and advocacy program, and lived there from 94-98, working as an early childhood educator while in school. I returned to Ottawa in 98 for a relationship that didn’t work out and then back to Toronto for a third time where I have since resided in the Parkdale neighbourhood.

I am back and forth between Ottawa and Toronto to this day, as my parents and brother still live there. I have now spent almost equal parts of my life in both cities, but I call Ottawa home.

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

I remember how thrilling it was as a child to learn how to print and read. I was a kid who was excited about parts-of-speech exercises and one who looked forward to spelling tests. My grade two teacher Mrs. Hobbs wrote on my report card, “In her stories Julie writes good sentences and expresses interesting ideas,” and I won second place for a Remembrance Day poem in grade three… so perhaps there was an inkling back then of things to come.

I think of myself as a late-blooming writer. I kept journals from a young age, wrote poetry and philosophies in sketch books as a teen, but visual arts was more a focus then. The idea of writing professionally or for an audience never crossed my mind. In my twenties, in Ottawa, I had a friend who owned a second-hand bookstore in Lowertown where I spent many a day and night, browsing books and hanging out with local musicians who jammed regularly in the back of the shop.

It wasn’t until I moved back to Toronto in 2000 that I began to think about writing stories. I had a friend from Ottawa who had published a couple of short stories, and another who had done poetry readings; they inspired me to think more seriously about writing and to sign up for a creative writing class. But after the teacher instructed students to write two pages of dialogue that would be presented in the second class, I immediately dropped out. I had social anxiety that could be debilitating.

Three years later I met Richard Scarsbrook, the right teacher at the right time, who became a mentor and friend; he encouraged me to submit a particular piece that I had workshopped in class to literary journals; it was my first publication. Ottawa author Matthew Firth published two of my early short stories in his journal Front&Centre, as well as my chapbook Men and the Drink through his micro press Black Bile Press. I am ever grateful to these and other early champions of my writing.

Publishing work, attending readings, and taking writing classes all helped connect me to writing communities in both Ottawa and Toronto.

In 2010, I founded F&G Writers, a writing workshop I ran out of my living room for the next eight years. I was inspired by the workshopping style of author Emily Schultz, who I had taken several classes with previously. F&G Writers was a small eclectic group; many writers were there from the group’s inception, with a few others dropping in and out over the years.

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

My thinking about writing didn’t change, but workshopping regularly with other writers made me fall in love with the revision process and led me back to school to study grammar and editing, which in turn led me to work as a freelance editor. I edit all kinds of writing—nonfiction, novels, online content—but my first love is short fiction, and I have had the pleasure of doing so for the Canadian literary journal Agnes and True since 2016.

I’ve always found it easier to connect one on one with writers, rather than try to be a part of the broader community. I have many writer friends working in different genres and styles and hearing about their projects gets me excited, whether that be plays, short stories, songwriting, ekphrastic prose poems, documentaries, or comedy writing. Although I feel like a hermit these days, I do stay connected… one writer at a time.

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, I wasn’t aware of the literary community or what was happening outside the small group of artists I knew. This was in part to being an introvert and a loner of sorts. At that time, I never imagined writing stories that would be published or editing other writers’ work.

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 my writing has been and continues to be inspired by my early years in Ottawa. Half of my dreams still take place there, any of my stories are set in fictional recreations of Glen Cairn or Lowertown (home when living in Ottawa as an adult). A keen memory and journals are often used as references.

In Ottawa, before writing stories, I was a home support worker for older adults and an ECE supply teacher; both jobs had me travelling back and forth from one end of the city to the other. The way that neighbourhoods and communities influence one another fascinates me, and those observations definitely found their way into my work.

Q: What are you working on now?

As a passionate advocate for older adults, I have spent the last few years writing many, many letters of advocacy. I can’t say this type of writing brings the same joy as writing short stories, but I do love the investigative and journalistic aspects that focus on facts and even the practice of restraint necessary in this kind of writing.

I would like to get back to short stories, write personal essays, and publish nonfiction articles related to advocacy. I am also mulling over facilitating workshops from home once again, for local writers and those who consider themselves late bloomers.