Six Questions interview #204 : Spencer Gordon

Spencer Gordon is the author of A Horse at the Window (House of Anansi Press, 2024), Cruise Missile Liberals (Nightwood Editions, 2017) and Cosmo (Coach House Books, 2012). More at www.spencer-gordon.com.

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

I lived in Ottawa for five years. I came and left for school, and for literature, in a way—the cause and solution to many of (my) life’s problems.

 

I came to live and study at the University of Ottawa’s Sandy Hill-area campus, where I was taking a bachelor’s degree in English literature and a minor in Philosophy. I chose Ottawa because it was far enough away from home to feel remote but not too distant that I couldn’t retreat if I lost my money or whatever. And I appreciated the site of Tabaret Hall in the snow, at night, lit up with Christmas lights—the campus was old and pretty compared to Carleton, which seemed like a military bunker on the moon, and as cold.

I left, after what seemed like a century, to go get a master’s degree at the University of Toronto, which offered me a chance to combine creative writing with academic studies—something Ottawa-region schools couldn’t do. Leaving Ottawa was very sad. There were many things left unsaid, many things just beginning, and many ghosts. But Toronto was the Big City: in my estimation, a glittering on-ramp to a career in academia and books, neither of which materialized.

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

I was writing my whole life, but only seriously through the last few years in high school. In my early years in Ottawa, I continued to write in dorm rooms, shared hovels, libraries, cafes and bars. I had scant few writer friends—a few friends from campus, mainly, though I did have the misfortune of living with notable poet and childhood friend, Andrew Faulkner, for a brief time.

My introduction to the ‘writing community’ in Ottawa was through diving, headlong, into publishing a magazine, with no real notion of what I was doing; specifically, by co-designing and funding The Puritan, which we distributed across the University of Ottawa and sold in various book and magazine shops across the city (such as Perfect Books) and quickly drove into monstrous debt. The Puritan was flooded with submissions from locally situated writers—the first 10 or 11 issues, for example, featured you (Dr. Robert McLennan), Amanda Earl, ‘Papa’ Steve Zytveld, Wes Smiderle, Nicholas Lea, Kate Heartfield, Stephen Brockwell, Matthew Firth, the late/great John Lavery, Cyril Dabydeen, Andrew Faulkner, Patricia McCarthy, Jeffrey Ross, Gerald Lynch, Michael Blouin, Pearl Pirie, Monty Reid, Sean Moreland, Marcus McCann, and on and on and on …

So while I was cutting my teeth (or wetting my beak, lol) as a writer, I was also editing and promoting and paying other writers for their work. This was a vital start because it made me think more like a professional, made me care about presentation and typography, layout and order, and the labour and love of editing, and it tied me into so many tight knots with others in the city. It also dispelled any stupid notions I might have had that editors knew what they were doing; it emboldened me to write and submit my own work to other publications, knowing that everyone was simply winging it.

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?

The small community of writers I found myself interacting with didn’t really affect my taste in literature, my style or my heroes. But it certainly cemented a ‘DIY’ attitude—one I carried forward into my graduate degree and early days in Toronto (where, for example, not only did we resurrect The Puritan as an online magazine, with actual Canada Council funding, but I co-founded a chapbook press and rapidly began to acquire, edit and publish the work of peers I’d met in my new home). If I hadn’t spent time in Ottawa, I wouldn’t have had this gumption (or audacity) to simply do shit myself.

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

I’ve lived in only two large cities for any considerable length of time, so I’m not a good judge of what Ottawa does differently than other places around the world. For example, I currently live in Bowmanville, Ontario, a city of 45,000, which does not have a bookstore, let alone a literary community. Even the local library is suspicious of writers—for them to hold an event or do any promotion of your work, you have to prove you’re a real writer with a real set of books; you have to download and fill out forms and submit actual copies of your books to their bureaucratic molemen before they’ll believe you. (Not that it matters. No one would come to any literary event held in Bowmanville.)

I can compare Ottawa to Toronto, if you’d like, based on my five years in Ottawa and frequent returns and my 12 years living in Toronto. Ottawa has a very small but fiercely personal and passionate group of people sewing and photocopying books together, listening to each other whispering into microphones in dark rooms, selling their wares in gymnasiums and community centres. It has an outsized number of small magazines and reading series: a number that ebbs and flows, swells and diminishes depending on who’s there, and on the life-death cycle of any literary endeavour. It has, towering over all this passionate doing by the crafty nerds, some rather glitzy events shrouded in glass and 19^th century masonry: the Governor General’s Literary Awards at Rideau Hall, the Ottawa International Writers Festival.

I think if you live in Ottawa and you want to write and publish and support the people around you, you’re bound to get to know everyone else doing that same activity, and sure enough, you will make some friends and a score of awkward acquaintances. I’m being glib, but I’m talking about a genuine intimacy and warmth. This is essentially what Ottawa provides. If you’re willing to help out, participate, then you’ll likely find a kind of community to match your ambition.

Toronto has the publishers and the money and the masses, but the people are fragmented. It’s a place you can still find anonymity, new audiences, even strangers at literary events. Toronto-based writers and editors have loftier ambitions, by and large. They have more national and international affiliations and goals, bigger hoop dreams. The spring and fall launch parties—even from small presses with tiny bank accounts—can be enormous and rollicking affairs, and very drunk. This is a highly personal take, but Toronto is much more ironic and cynical and, as a byproduct, a lot funnier than Ottawa, which can seem preciously sincere and cozy in comparison.

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?

In many ways, yes. In Cosmo (Coach House Books, 2012), there’s a short story about the 1999 OC Transpo tragedy involving Pierre Lebrun. Another character (in another story) lives as a student in Ottawa, or so we see from his cringey LiveJournal entries. There’s a lot of the city—Rideau Hall, Parliament Hill, the cold jaws of power—in my poems in Cruise Missile Liberals (Nightwood Editions, 2017). And my new book, A Horse at the Window (House of Anansi, 2024) contains a piece called “In the 2000s” that talks extensively about an imaginary student/writer/creative person’s time in Ottawa in the mid-2000s. I suppose the city will get resurrected in future works—I have an emotional hangover about the place that will never lift.

The Puritan (now Ex-Puritan) owes its entire publishing history and legacy to Ottawa’s community of writers, its generous early supporters and the businesses and institutions that helped fund it. You wouldn’t know by looking at it, now, but that’s the truth.

Q: What are you working on now?

I am in the midst of a small, localized tour I set up for my third book, A Horse at the Window (House of Anansi, 2024), for which I will return to Ottawa at least twice—on Saturday, May 25 for the Plan 99 Reading Series at the Manx (with writers Matthew Tierney and Susan K. Atkinson and hosted by David O’Meara), and on Thursday, July 25 for a launch at Perfect Books with writer Jess Taylor.

In terms of work, and assuming you mean writing work, which is not really work at all, I’m trying to imagine what book four is going to look like. For now, I haven’t given up hope on a manuscript I began, believe it or not, all the way back in 2011, which has changed so many times as to now be unrecognizable from those early pages. The basic idea is fiction: a book composed of three novellas, or stories that are too long to be short and too slim to be novels of their own. One day, I may be smart enough to write a novel.