Alyssa Gonzalez is an author, public speaker, science writer, and biology Ph.D. She is the author of Nonmonogamy and Neurodiversity, a short nonfiction book published by Thornapple Press, but thinks of herself primarily as a fiction writer for the moment. Her fiction uses speculative elements to explore social isolation, autism, gender, trauma, and the relationships between all of these things. Alyssa blogs at The Perfumed Void (the-orbit.net/alyssa), where she puts her recipes, urbanist rants, and essays about her experiences as an autistic ex-Catholic Hispanic transgender immigrant to Canada. She lives in Ottawa, Canada with a menagerie of pets.
How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?
I came to Ottawa for graduate school. The University of Ottawa has a Comparative Physiology Group in its biology department that presented an opportunity to me to both get the heck out of my previous country and study biology. Once I got here, it felt like migrating into a utopian future, and I never left. It’s been 15 years of getting used to this awful thing people call “winter” and the idea of going anywhere else keeps fading into make-believe.
How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?
I’ve been writing since I first learned to hold a pencil. Stories grabbed me from a very young age and, lurking in my old papers and files, I can still sometimes find things I wrote in elementary school, let alone the years between. In high school I got work into the creative writing club’s annual magazine, during my undergraduate I was an author on a scientific paper, and I formally published my first fiction as a graduate student here in Ottawa.
To be honest, I’m not used to thinking of writing as a community endeavour. Most of the people I know who are also writers aren’t local, and my attempts to get more connected to other local writers haven’t gotten far or yielded much. Requests for opinions on a work in progress have an unpleasant habit of turning into sequences of nagging emails from me and apologetic emails from them, and I have better uses for my time. Becoming a member of the Writers’ Union of Canada (TWUC) has made me a lot more visible than I once was, which is definitely helping connect me with other writers. I’ve gotten some interesting opportunities that way, things I might not have known about or done without being connected, and I hope I can make some solid friends this way.
How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?
Writer friends have occasionally been useful as sounding boards and beta readers, but they’ve been especially useful for leads on new venues, calls for submissions, events in which I can participate, and that sort of thing. Being a TWUC member also gets me their newsletter, webinars, and other instructional resources I can use to keep honing my craft. Lately, as I’m getting more connected to other active local writers, I’m finding that it’s a way to stay current on what else is getting published lately, within the limits of my ability to make time for reading, as well.
What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?
Ottawa hasn’t felt any more suited to my life as a writer than anywhere else I’ve spent much time. Ottawa has brought me the satisfaction of living in a city that feels like it’s the “right size” for me and growing with me, and a place where nature is often shockingly close. I’ve been frustrated with how hostile to a car-free existence this place can be, as someone who will not become a motorist until she has exhausted all other options, but it feels like home and it’d take a lot for me to decide to be somewhere else. I like living in a city full of museums and whose ethnic food selection is better than it gets credit for, and I have friends here that I’d have trouble keeping if I ever left. I got into the home-ownership game here just in time and, if all goes well, I am going nowhere.
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?
Both answers are definitely “yes,” in the way that nothing is fixed and growth is eternal, yet I can name no specific thing that doesn’t feel like growth I could have experienced anywhere else.
What are you working on now?
Survival. I’m between jobs and it’s a feeling I detest. Progress toward my desired future has been stolen from me and until I find a new way forward, finding that way is my topmost priority.
I’m also refining some short fiction, waiting on news about a nonfiction essay, and hazily planning a fantasy novel, while I hope for the time and peace required for creative effort. I will find it yet.
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