Six Questions interview #207 : Jillian Clasky

Jillian Clasky is a poet and fiction writer from Toronto. Her work has appeared in journals such as PRISM international, Room, and flo., and she was shortlisted for the 2023 CBC Poetry Prize. She recently graduated from the University of Ottawa, where she cofounded and served as editor-in-chief of Common House Magazine.

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

I lived in Ottawa for four years. I moved there in 2020 for university and left this past spring after graduating. I’m now back in Toronto, where I grew up, to start my MA in creative writing at U of T.

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

My answer to the first part of that question is the clichéd “I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember, I love books,” etc. As for the second part: I was not really part of any writing community until 2022, when I joined a few other English and creative writing students who were trying to start a new uOttawa-based literary magazine. We ended up creating Common House Magazine, and we put out three issues between 2022 and 2024, each featuring Ottawa writers alongside other Canadian and international writers. Most of the original editors have graduated, but the team that’s taking over already seems way more organized and functional than we ever were!

Through Common House’s open mics and launch parties, I got to know writers in the broader community for the first time and felt comfortable and welcome right away. I’d also met some students in my creative writing classes who were much more thoroughly embedded in the Ottawa writing community than I’d ever been, and they encouraged me to start attending events like 241 and the small press book fair and submitting to Ottawa-focused journals like Bywords and flo. This was early 2023, I think, when I finally felt enough of a sense of belonging and familiarity in Ottawa to participate fully; I’d arrived at the peak of the pandemic, so it took probably more time than is typical for me to adjust and became acquainted with the city.

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?

Being in a community of writers has given me permission to test things out. It’s made me realize that there’s space for experimentation and play, that the pieces I’m reading and even publishing can continue to transform. Part of that comes from seeing everyone else actively testing out their ideas and changing their minds, which inspires me to do the same. But also, when I’m completely isolated, when the only eyes on a poem in progress are mine, I often get a sense that what I’m working on is this precious object that I have to silo and perfect, to shape into an impenetrable, unified whole. I don’t think that’s a totally wrongheaded approach to poetry—it stems, I believe, from the kinds of literary criticism that my background in English has exposed me to (which is another kind of work that I absolutely love doing and think is vital, by the way!)—but I do think it’s an approach that doesn’t fully work for me when I’m writing a poem. Or, at least, I have to keep it in tension with the more flexible and curious approach, the appreciation of iteration and process that being in community has given me.

I’ve been back in Toronto for only a few months, and I haven’t yet made an effort to get to know the literary community here. I start grad school in a couple weeks, though, and I have no idea what will happen or how my thinking might shift once I’m in a master’s program with a small creative writing cohort. It’s a much more structured and institutionalized way of forming community than I’m used to—in undergrad, there were so many creative writing students passing briefly through each other’s lives via semester-long courses, and the writing community at uOttawa was so entwined with the broader Ottawa community anyways, so everything felt very fluid and open. I’ll just have to wait and see what changes I notice and how I adapt!

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

Ottawa—as most people reading this blog probably know—has an incredibly rich and vibrant poetry community, which is something I wish I’d learned about and gotten involved with sooner! And the poetry community is so open and welcoming; I did only around four or five readings while living in Ottawa, and I was slightly terrified at first, but everyone made me feel so comfortable and supported that by the last reading I wasn’t scared at all. It’s kind of the perfect-sized city, I think, to strike that balance where there are enough people to have a really active poetry scene but not so many that it becomes overwhelming and unapproachable or fractured and cliquey.

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?

Ottawa has figured in the occasional poem I’ve written, though not many I’ve published yet. I had a poem in Bywords earlier this year that dealt somewhat obliquely with Ottawa—it was a reflection on being in a city in winter, on how the cold and sparsity can make that space feel sort of dreamlike and suspended in time, and I think there must’ve been pieces of both Toronto and Ottawa in there. I’m also in the process of refining a sequence of poems I wrote during my frequent walks along the Rideau Canal last fall—it was a stressful time, so I was walking a lot to calm myself down, and the poems started to emerge from an interplay between abstract thought spirals that were operating on many different scales at once and concerted attempts to pay really close attention to my immediate environment.

I’m curious to see how Ottawa’s influence might continue to resonate in my writing now that I’m back in Toronto. I spent only four years there, but those years were formative for me in so many ways—personally, intellectually, creatively. I was 18 when I moved to Ottawa; I was barely a person! I don’t think I can separate all of the things I learned during my time in Ottawa from Ottawa itself as a geographical and social space. I guess that’s probably a shared experience for many recent graduates who moved away for the first time to go to university and are now returning home.

Q: What are you working on now?

I’m in the very early stages of work on two book-length projects in different genres, one of which will hopefully become my master’s thesis. Both have been coalescing slowly over the past couple of years and will probably take many, many more before they’re in any kind of presentable state, so don’t look out for them until maybe 2035. In the meantime, I’m always working on new poems!