Tazi Rodrigues (she/her) is a writer and aquatic biologist. A second/third-generation-settler from Treaty 1 territory, she lives in Ottawa on the unceded land of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation. She placed second in the 2023 Kloppenburg Hybrid Grain Contest for her essay on learning Portuguese and listening to fish, and won the 2024 Diana Brebner Prize for her poem on looking for bees. Other writing has appeared in The Fiddlehead, CV2, and Canthius. She is currently writing about ecological sound, caring for the worms and foster cats who live with her, and counting bugs at her neighbourhood pollinator garden.
Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?
I moved to Ottawa just over a year ago, in September 2023, when my partner took a job here and I was lucky enough to be able to take my work with me. It’s been almost a decade since I’ve lived anywhere for more than two years at once, so I’m looking forward to hopefully staying in Ottawa for a little longer.
Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?
I’ve been writing forever, and first got involved in writing community in general when I stumbled into a spoken word open mic at the Winnipeg International Writers’ Festival as a fourteen-year-old. Chimwemwe Undi, currently Winnipeg’s poet laureate and then a friendly fellow high school student (or possibly recent graduate), encouraged me to attend the regular series of youth poetry slams. This both introduced me to a broader group of teens thinking about writing – along with mentors – and narrowed my focus to poetry just in time for the last busy years of high school and then post-secondary education, when I didn’t have enough focus to spare for longer, non-academic prose.
So far, I have been too shy to be much involved in the writing community in Ottawa, though for a few months this past winter I was challenging myself to attend at least one literary event a month and speak to at least one person there – thanks to all who helped to fulfil my self-requirement, and hopefully I’ll get less shy as time goes on.
Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?
When I started thinking about this question, I didn’t think that the Ottawa community had shifted my thinking about writing yet, but then I realised that it had before I moved here. One of the first times I visited the city was for YouthCanSlam in 2014, when I was part of the Voices, Ink. Winnipeg team. Every time I walk past the University of Ottawa some ghost of myself from that week appears. Similarly to joining the slam community in Winnipeg, YouthCanSlam was another broadening into a wider world of poets and poetics that helped me realise what was going on across the country and also that I could find belonging in it. I also remember being really impressed by the Ottawa scene specifically.
I moved here from Kingston, which has more porous boundaries with Ottawa than one might expect from two supposedly distinct municipalities, and as I was settling in there in 2021 I attended some virtual iterations of the Tree Reading Series. Once someone sent me a Zoom message there to ask for a link to more of my work – which didn’t exist – and that small comment was also a good push to think of myself more as a writer who people may actively want to read. In Kingston, I also became more attuned to the Ottawa poetry community through Novel Idea readings and social media proximity, which helped me warm to the idea of moving here.
Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?
This interview series, for one! Building on the idea of observing Ottawa’s poetry community from Kingston, I think that this city has a really visible writing community, through this blog and Arc’s many engagements and others. I haven’t made it to more than one event at VERSeFest yet, but there are so many festivals that I’m eager to explore. In Winnipeg – at least, as a teenager in Winnipeg ten years ago – the creative community flows across disciplines because there are so many artists in not that big a city, and it seems like this is likely also the case here. I’ve lived in places that are too small to foster much of a writing community, or that have kind of a secluded one, as well as places that are too sprawling to navigate, so I’m excited to be back in a city that has a writing community that’s both big enough and small enough to find.
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?
I’ve been involved with the Frank Street Bee and Butterfly Garden since moving here, and suddenly I’ve been writing a lot more about soil and bugs. (This is, of course, in stark contrast to the water/fish themes I’ve circled for longer.) Also, I wouldn’t be surprised if Ottawa has the highest number of vermicomposters per capita, which has spurred a five-poem (so far) series about worms – a poem about the Frank Street worms is in the summer issue of yolk. Before I lived in Ottawa, I had heard the classic ideas around it being a government-doughnut city, but I’ve been able to really immerse myself in Centretown and find a lot of engaging community that’s not strictly tied to creative writing, but definitely not separate either.
Q: What are you working on now?
I’m
polishing a full-length manuscript that revolves around ideas of sound and
ecology (and, inevitably, coming-of-age), for which I’m grateful to have
received support from the Canada Council for the Arts this past year. In my
regular work, I use sound as a means of locating and studying fish, which has
brought up a lot of questions that are outside of my scope as a biologist – so
it’s spilling into this collection, which I’m hoping to see take shape as a
submittable manuscript in the coming months.
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