Six Questions interview #201 : Dominik Parisien

Dominik Parisien is a disabled, bisexual French Canadian. He is the author of the poetry collection Side Effects May Include Strangers (McGill-Queen’s University Press) and his memoir is forthcoming from Penguin Canada. His writing has appeared in literary journals such as Maisonneuve, The Fiddlehead, PRISM International, The Literary Review of Canada, and others. Anthologies he’s edited or co-edited have won the Hugo Award, Shirley Jackson Award, and the British Fantasy Award. Dominik is a former editor at Plenitude Magazine, and he currently teaches nonfiction writing with CAMH’s Collaborative Learning College. He grew up near Ottawa and now lives in Hamilton, ON.

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

I grew up just east of Ottawa, in Rockland, by the Ottawa River. I was frequently in the city, and I studied at the University of Ottawa for both my BA and my MA in English literature. So, I was in or near Ottawa for some twenty-three years. I left the region for Montreal, and then Toronto and its surroundings first for love, and then for additional studies. I now live in Hamilton, ON, though I visit the region often.

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

While some kids loved reading at an early age, I hated it. It was an absolute struggle, and none of it made sense to me. Fortunately, a teacher friend of the family realized I was reading wrong, and the school had me take lessons with a very patient assistant. After that, I became obsessed, which eventually led me to want to write my own pieces. I wasn’t involved in any kind of community though—it was a very personal thing. Even in university I barely engaged with the local journals until the last year of my BA, where I started attending readings, and became a reader for the Ottawa Arts Review. Once that sense of community took hold, I looked for it a little more actively. By the time of my MA I was an editorial assistant for Weird Tales in the US, and I co-edited a small Ottawa-based anthology of dark fiction with my friend and former uOttawa professor Sean Moreland. I still wasn’t all that involved with in-person events though, that mostly came in Toronto. So, Ottawa was mainly my introduction to the writing community, an important first step.

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?

Working for journals and magazines brought the biggest shift in my writing. It was both humbling and invigorating to see the kind of work that was out there (what made it to readers and what didn’t, and why). It helped give me a sense of the literary landscape. Readings did the same and added the value of performance to that work and the power of voice, how those connect or don’t with what’s on the page. All of it helped me think of the different aspects of writing, of community, and what my place in all that might be. It made me intimately aware of audience in a way that solitary reading and writing never had. Compared to a lot of writers, I didn’t have much interest in seeing my work published for the longest time. I was more focused on editorial pursuits. It was connecting with other members of the disability community in particular that helped me shift more towards writing.

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

For me, Ottawa was a gateway to the world of writing, and the communities we can belong to. What I see there is much like what I see in other major Canadian cities—groups of writers coming together, sharing their ideas, their words. Unlike Toronto, I did see a confluence of French and English writing, which was very welcome to me as a native French speaker (I saw something similar in Montreal). That is something I miss, having that mixing of languages at events, though I do see it happening in other languages in Toronto and elsewhere and it brings me joy.

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?

The anthology I co-edited with Sean Moreland, Postscripts to Darkness, focused on Ottawa writers, so that’s one project intimately tied to Ottawa. Otherwise, my anthologies have been pretty international, which I do connect to Ottawa, and other metropolises where I’ve lived. I grew up in a small white town, and spending time in Ottawa introduced me to people and cultures and hadn’t encountered before, which had a pivotal role in my artistic pursuits and the way I see the world.

Q: What are you working on now?

I’m in the late stages of my memoir on disability and magical thinking, which is forthcoming from Penguin Canada, probably in 2026. In terms of poetry, I’m working on a second collection, this one focused on prose poetry. The book will have an Ottawa-region connection, since it liberally mixes French and English, exactly the way friends and family speak back home.

 

Six Questions interview #200 : Marjorie Silverman

Marjorie Silverman is an emerging writer based in Ottawa-Gatineau, whose first poetry collection, (Un)spoken, was published in October 2023 with Now or Never Publishing.

A former psychotherapist, Marjorie is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Ottawa.

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

 

I was actually born in Ottawa, and lived here until I was eighteen. Then I moved to Montreal to go to McGill University and ended up staying there for another eighteen years until I was thirty-six. At that point, in 2013, I moved back to Ottawa for a job as a professor at the University of Ottawa and I’ve been here ever since.

 

I now consider myself to be living in the “Ottawa-Gatineau region”, because in 2020, at the very beginning of the pandemic, my partner and I moved to the Québec side, close to Cantley. We wanted to be closer to outdoor activities and to be in a quiet environment.

 

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

I’m a self-taught poet who never had any formal writing training. But I’ve always loved to write, and for many years I imagined that I would write a novel. Then, about six years ago, while going through a tumultuous time in my life, I wrote a poem. And that first poem just opened something in me. I fell in love with the minimalism of poetry, the idea that you can convey an emotion or an atmosphere without necessarily describing all the details of the story. After that, I began writing more, and experimenting with different styles, and gradually the idea of a full collection took shape.

When I first started writing poems, I happened to attend an academic conference at which there were many folks from the literary world. Serendipitously, I ended up meeting the wonderful poet and academic Tanis MacDonald, with whom I remained in contact and who generously accepted to write an endorsement for my recent collection. It was Tanis who led me to the brilliant and prolific Ottawa-based poet Sandra Ridley. I was extremely fortunate that Sandra agreed to mentor me. She gave me invaluable feedback on my collection, and guidance about the literary world of which I knew nothing about. She also suggested I get in touch with Amanda Earl, which led me to join the selection committee of Bywords.  

 

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

 

I think there are a lot of different ways of being part of a literary community. In a traditional sense, community is formed by attending events, launches, networking opportunities, etc. Being an introvert, as well as having a full-time academic career that consumes a lot of my time, this is a conception of community that doesn’t fully speak to me. Although I don’t attend a lot of events (in fact, when I launched my collection (Un)spoken, it was the first time I had done a public poetry reading!), I try to conceptualize community as expanding beyond the idea of being publicly visible. For example, being on the Bywords selection committee for the past few years has helped me to feel part of a literary community, as did publishing my book. I also feel connected to other writers simply by reading their work. I can certainly say that reading the work of many brilliant Ottawa writers has inspired me.

 

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

 

Way back in the late 1990s, in between my bachelor’s degree and my master’s degree, I came back to Ottawa for a few months and got a job at Octopus Books. The amazing Lisa Greaves (who’s still running Octopus!) was my boss, and this experience gave me a first exposure to the vibrancy of the Ottawa literary scene, even back then. And this vibrancy has continued. It’s fabulous to see independent stores like Octopus Books (now an Ottawa institution!) and the Spaniel’s Tale Bookstore (where I held my launch) working to promote local authors and hosting numerous events. And when I look at the event listings on the Bywords website, I’m always astounded to see the sheer number of poetry events for a relatively small city. We’re very lucky to live in a city in which there is a poetry infrastructure, like the Tree Reading series, Bywords, Chaudiere Books, ARC magazine, etc. I think we’re also lucky to live in a region that is also (at least partly) bilingual. I live and work partly in French, and promoting French is very important to me. In fact, I worked with a translator on a French-language version of (Un)spoken (an amazingly fun and creative process!) but ultimately it was the English-language version that was published.

 

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?

 

There are certainly a lot of Ottawa references in my work. In addition to Montreal and Paris (where I spent a lot of time between 2007 – 2017), Ottawa definitely contributes to the sense of place in my poems. For example, there is a poem in (Un)spoken called “Confessions at Billings Bridge Mall”, a place linked to certain childhood memories. There are also references to other Ottawa landmarks or streets. I like writing that is anchored in its environment; I think it offers an additional layer of interest, grounding, and understanding. In fact, in some of my previous academic research, I worked on the question of space and place and what places mean to people. Places are very much related to emotion and affect; they can be grounded in trauma just as they can be grounded in healing, or everything in between. This is very much the case in my poetry.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

I am currently working on a second collection, called Tentacles. Part poetic memoire and part victim-impact statement, Tentacles explores the long-term ramifications of trauma. It explores relational abuses of power, sexuality and sexual orientation, and daily survival strategies in the face of the heterosexist and rape-culture ideology that surrounds us.

 

Six Questions interview #199 : John Baglow

John Baglow lives and writes in Ottawa. He is the author of three books of poetry: Emergency Measures (Sono Nis Press, 1976), Journey Under Glass (Penumbra Press, 2004), and, this past fall, Murmuration: Marianne’s Book (McGill-Queen’s University Press). He has also published an analysis of the work of Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid (MQUP, 1988), and a short history of the Public Service Alliance of Canada (Ottawa Workers History Museum, 2016).

Baglow received his PhD (Glasgow) in 1973 for his work on MacDiarmid, and a second MA (in anthropology, from Carleton University) in 2010. He served on the Executive of the Public Service Alliance from 1988-2003, and since then has done a lot of odd jobs. He currently publishes semi-regular book reviews in the Literary Review of Canada, and continues to write poetry, which never comes easily.

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

My family moved to Ottawa from Montreal in 1965. I flunked out of McGill that year, and went to live with them. I`ve been here ever since, except for 1970-73, when I was doing graduate work in Scotland and England.

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

I first started writing poetry when I was 18, if I remember rightly. Awful stuff, but you have to start somewhere. I have to admit that to this day I was never a part of a “writing community” in Ottawa, although I know some of the players. For me, poetry has always been a solitary occupation. I find that, if I read other poets, my work shows undue influences for a while. If I were to trade drafts and receive “constructive criticism,” my work would cease to be entirely my own. I am my toughest critic, in any case. 

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

See above. I was invited to a poetry circle once. I guess that confirmed me in my preference for writing solitude.

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

Well, every city is different. Having little interaction with local writers, I can’t speak to what is happening here in those circles. I know and get on with some local poets, but not enough to be aware of trends and preoccupations.

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?

Well, sure. Being in this city, the seat of government, affects me in spite of myself. Mass protests against government policy (which I attend from time to time), my work in union leadership (PSAC), the assault of the so-called “Freedom Convoy,” etc., can’t help but shape themes and responses. But most of my work is fashioned in a deeply personal space.

Q: What are you working on now?

Another poetry manuscript, and, if I can force myself, making some headway on an oneiric novel.

I like to work by the manuscript. This head-on-wall sending of poems to magazines and receiving rejections six months later (but a sprinkling of acceptances, to be sure), is a mug’s game. I haven’t got a broad theme, yet, but my last book didn’t have one, so…