Shaw reads next on Tuesday, August 19 at 6:30 pm as part of a Pride Poetry Reading alongside Kimberly Quiogue Andrews and Sanita Fejzic at the Great Canadian Theatre Company, 2nd Floor Mezzanine, 1233 Wellington Street West, Ottawa. Hosted by Ben Ladouceur and introduced by Ottawa EN-language Poet Laureate David O'Meara. Free event.
Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?
A: My husband and I moved to Ottawa from London, ON, in 2018, shortly after I had finished graduate school. I moved here for work, but over the past few years we’ve really fallen in love with the city: the arts and heritage, the access to green space, lakes, and rivers, and the queer community events and sports teams. The city has provided us with a very full life.
Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?
A: I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember. It started with writing contests through the Legion or the local newspaper (which published my first article, on my mom’s job at Tim Horton’s, when I was 9!) and over the years I’ve dabbled in a lot of genres, from fiction and poetry to journalism and playwriting. Eventually I seemed to settle on poetry and essays. When I first moved to Ottawa, I worked with Arc Poetry Magazine for a time and met some of the people in the city’s poetry community. I took a step back from writing for a few years but I’m enjoying getting to know more local writers as I attend some of the events in the city.
Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?
A: When I was writing my PhD thesis at Western, I was part of a great community of fellow poets with whom I could share and workshop new poems. It was kind of an idyllic moment—to have that much time to write, read, and think. I don’t have the same schedule or network in Ottawa but it’s forced me to weave writing into the weft of daily life, picking up threads when I find a few minutes. I think the poems I’m writing now have become more open and less insular as a result, if that makes sense.
Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?
A: I see Ottawa as a city of convergence: two rivers, two official languages (and many more), Indigenous and colonial histories, diverse neighbourhoods, urban and parkland spaces. There’s the cliché that Ottawa is “boring,” a staid government town, but I think that’s an opportunity for writers and other artists to reveal the city’s other and undersides.
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?
A: Some of the poems I’ve written since moving to Ottawa respond to the city directly. I have a poem in my current manuscript about the arboretum, for example, and another about the city’s many Hallmark holiday movie productions. I also like the contrast between the perception of the city as very beige and bureaucratic, and the more vibrant queer life I’ve come to know bubbling alongside that. I think that tension has worked its way into my more recent poems.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Aside from
the occasional poem, essay, or book review, I took several years off from
writing regularly. I’m trying to think of that time less as a drought than a
period of “content farming.” But I’m happy to say the poems have been coming
along more regularly and I’m working towards finishing my second poetry
manuscript.
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